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eruthrosSo I was being grumpy about that NPR list of the top 100 science fiction and fantasy novels and how boring it was, and then I started wondering what that kind of list would look like if a bunch of fannish people made it instead and if the definition of scifi and fantasy were looser.
And then I decided to do it, more or less on the same model as the NPR list, because why not? At the very least it would mean getting a bunch of interesting recs.
So the general model is:
1) Nomination period: anyone can nominate ten speculative fiction works (in any media).
2) Long list: made up of all the nominations where anyone can vote for their favorites. (Probably divided by media and/or language because the poll might be too big otherwise.) NPR used some NPR folks or an algorithm or something and then a panel of "experts" at this point to narrow things down, but nobody's an expert on all speculative fiction. (And also either the unknown NPR folks or the experts did this.)
3) Short list: a poll of the top two hundred-some things from the long list.
4) Compile the numbers from (3) to make the final list of the top 100.
And this is going to be the nomination post! For nominating things you love. They don't have to be the things that you think of as the absolute objectively best speculative fiction - nominate your favorites or the things you love most or the things you think are best or the things that influenced you the most or however else you define your top ten speculative fiction works.
What counts as speculative fiction?
Anything called "scifi" or "fantasy" or "horror" or "paranormal" or "supernatural" or "magical realism." Anything with vampires or werewolves or zombies or bodyswap or time travel or space travel or aliens or other planets or apocalypses or talking animals or magic swords or angels or demons or fairies or faeries or mystical creatures or other dimensions or futuristic tech or superpowers or wizards or witches or ghosts or blasters or talking trees or sapient rocks or teleportation or elves or A.I. or giant robots or alternate history or about a million other speculative fiction tropes. If you think it's speculative fiction, it's speculative fiction, regardless of what the original creators call it or where it's usually shelved. Young adult and children's speculative fiction counts, too.
The nomination rules:
You can nominate up to ten speculative fiction things from any media. So you could nominate a live action tv show, cartoon, anime, book, book series, short story, album, song, comic series, graphic novel, manga/manhwa/manhua, movie, fanfic, fanart, fanvid, amv, music video, video game, rpg, webcomic, picture, episode of a tv show, etc.
The things you nominate don't have to be English-language sources - any language is okay.
The things you nominate can be things that were on the NPR list - there were many great books on that list!
You can comment using a dreamwidth account, using openID, or anonymously, but if you comment anonymously please include a name/username/pseudonym somewhere in your comment.
Everything anyone nominates will end up on the long list, regardless of how many times it's nominated, so you don't have to worry about making sure enough people nominate it. (But since people can change their nominations later, if you really really want to see it on the poll, you might want to nominate it yourself.)
To nominate your ten things:
Comment here telling me what you'd like to nominate, and what medium it is so I don't have to google it. If you'd like, you can comment on your nominations and recommend them to passerby, or link to them if they're available anywhere online. (And you can comment to other people's nominations if you want to find out more/rejoice at finding someone else who also loves X.)
If you change your mind, reply to your own comment with your updated list.
Nominations will be open for a week, conveniently closing after both my current freelance project and my femslash 11 story are due.
Example nomination:
Book Series:
1. Terry Pratchett - Discworld series
Music:
2. Janelle Monae - Metropolis/The ArchAndroid
TV show:
3. Avatar: The Last Airbender
4. Babylon 5
5. Code Geass
Book:
6. Rosemary Kirstein - The Outskirter's Secret
Fanfic:
7. Your Cowboy Days Are Over by M.
Feel free to signal-boost! More nominations = more interesting polls.
ETA: Here's a browsable spreadsheet listing all of the nominations as of 8/19. Many, many things have been nominated!
ETA2: Oh what the hell, some people have asked for it and why not! You can have +5 additional nominations as long as they're for less-represented speculative fiction media: music (songs, albums, filk, music videos), fanworks (fanfic, fanvids, fanfilms, fanart), theater (plays, musicals), poetry, games (video, rpg, card, board), short films, art (paintings, fanart, digital art), or any medium that's not currently represented on the spreadsheet at all.
ETA3: Nominations are now closed.
And then I decided to do it, more or less on the same model as the NPR list, because why not? At the very least it would mean getting a bunch of interesting recs.
So the general model is:
1) Nomination period: anyone can nominate ten speculative fiction works (in any media).
2) Long list: made up of all the nominations where anyone can vote for their favorites. (Probably divided by media and/or language because the poll might be too big otherwise.) NPR used some NPR folks or an algorithm or something and then a panel of "experts" at this point to narrow things down, but nobody's an expert on all speculative fiction. (And also either the unknown NPR folks or the experts did this.)
3) Short list: a poll of the top two hundred-some things from the long list.
4) Compile the numbers from (3) to make the final list of the top 100.
And this is going to be the nomination post! For nominating things you love. They don't have to be the things that you think of as the absolute objectively best speculative fiction - nominate your favorites or the things you love most or the things you think are best or the things that influenced you the most or however else you define your top ten speculative fiction works.
What counts as speculative fiction?
Anything called "scifi" or "fantasy" or "horror" or "paranormal" or "supernatural" or "magical realism." Anything with vampires or werewolves or zombies or bodyswap or time travel or space travel or aliens or other planets or apocalypses or talking animals or magic swords or angels or demons or fairies or faeries or mystical creatures or other dimensions or futuristic tech or superpowers or wizards or witches or ghosts or blasters or talking trees or sapient rocks or teleportation or elves or A.I. or giant robots or alternate history or about a million other speculative fiction tropes. If you think it's speculative fiction, it's speculative fiction, regardless of what the original creators call it or where it's usually shelved. Young adult and children's speculative fiction counts, too.
The nomination rules:
You can nominate up to ten speculative fiction things from any media. So you could nominate a live action tv show, cartoon, anime, book, book series, short story, album, song, comic series, graphic novel, manga/manhwa/manhua, movie, fanfic, fanart, fanvid, amv, music video, video game, rpg, webcomic, picture, episode of a tv show, etc.
The things you nominate don't have to be English-language sources - any language is okay.
The things you nominate can be things that were on the NPR list - there were many great books on that list!
You can comment using a dreamwidth account, using openID, or anonymously, but if you comment anonymously please include a name/username/pseudonym somewhere in your comment.
Everything anyone nominates will end up on the long list, regardless of how many times it's nominated, so you don't have to worry about making sure enough people nominate it. (But since people can change their nominations later, if you really really want to see it on the poll, you might want to nominate it yourself.)
To nominate your ten things:
Comment here telling me what you'd like to nominate, and what medium it is so I don't have to google it. If you'd like, you can comment on your nominations and recommend them to passerby, or link to them if they're available anywhere online. (And you can comment to other people's nominations if you want to find out more/rejoice at finding someone else who also loves X.)
If you change your mind, reply to your own comment with your updated list.
Nominations will be open for a week, conveniently closing after both my current freelance project and my femslash 11 story are due.
Example nomination:
Book Series:
1. Terry Pratchett - Discworld series
Music:
2. Janelle Monae - Metropolis/The ArchAndroid
TV show:
3. Avatar: The Last Airbender
4. Babylon 5
5. Code Geass
Book:
6. Rosemary Kirstein - The Outskirter's Secret
Fanfic:
7. Your Cowboy Days Are Over by M.
Feel free to signal-boost! More nominations = more interesting polls.
ETA: Here's a browsable spreadsheet listing all of the nominations as of 8/19. Many, many things have been nominated!
ETA2: Oh what the hell, some people have asked for it and why not! You can have +5 additional nominations as long as they're for less-represented speculative fiction media: music (songs, albums, filk, music videos), fanworks (fanfic, fanvids, fanfilms, fanart), theater (plays, musicals), poetry, games (video, rpg, card, board), short films, art (paintings, fanart, digital art), or any medium that's not currently represented on the spreadsheet at all.
ETA3: Nominations are now closed.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-21 04:49 pm (UTC)1. Carol Emshwiller - Carmen Dog
I think this is the first thing I read that was explicitly called "feminist science fiction"; I read a lot of her short stories, later, which I found interesting without quite liking. There's something a little Philip K. Dick or Jorge Luis Borges about her, in the sense that her stories are frequently very open to interpretation or skepticism: are they aliens who are frightened away by cats? Are they aliens at all? Are they driven off? Are they still here? Who knows. And so I find reading a bunch of her short stories in a collection a bit like reading a bunch of Philip K. Dick all in a row: the first one is interesting, but by the fifth I'm doubting the existence of the table in front of me. Anyway! Carmen Dog is a novel about transformation: women are turning into animals, and animals are turning into women, and it's specifically about Pooch, an Irish setter, who is becoming a woman, and who idealizes Carmen. I found it just completely baffling and weird and kind of amazing when I was twelve (though I think I'd probably find a lot of gender essentialism in it now). (And I just found googling it that it's apparently part of what inspired the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. Huh.)
2. Carol Emshwiller - The Start of the End of it All (short story collection)
See above!
3. Emma Bull - Bone Dance
This was the first post-apocalyptic novel I read, so it stuck with me; I loved Sparrow and I loved the worldbuilding and I loved the secondary characters and I loved that Sparrow did remixing and mashup in the post-apocalypse (not that I would've known to call it remix then). It's somewhat dated, and Emma Bull has said things about it that make me :/, but it's hard for me to stop loving it, because it's one of my earliest scifi experiences, and it's the reason I still love apocalypses.
4. Laura Esquivel - Like Water for Chocolate / Como agua para chocolate
Because magical realism is amazing! Nobody I knew was into scifi when I was a kid, but my parents loved magical realism, and so I found my speculative fiction in Borges and Esquivel and Marquez and Carpentier. And Tita's magical cooking is amazing.
5. Yellow Submarine - movie
This was one of my favorite movies for years.
6. The Dead Zone - tv
What I love about the Dead Zone as a series is how much it does with a single concept: Johnny Smith sees the future or past when he touches people. That's it! They just keep coming up with new and clever ways to play with his new abilities, so that he gets multiple visions for a month when he gets a blood transfusion, or gets a confusing expanding series of visions when he tries to have sex, or gets visions of himself as a killer.
7. greensilver - Ooh La La (Dead Zone)
Greensilver does such a great job of illustrating the concept of the Dead Zone and zooming Johnny in and out of vision after vision; it's basically a vid about his touch-ESP and about the way he's jumping from moment to moment and seeing himself as different people all the time. I saw this vid before I saw the show, and it's what convinced me to give it a try.
8. aycheb/hazel k. - Scarlet Ribbons (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
This is lovely and a bit sad and a bit creepy, because it's all about slayerhood on Buffy, and what it means to be a slayer, and what slayers were made for, and what they do with that.
9. futuransky - The Future Stops Here (fanvid) (Children of Men, V for Vendetta, 28 Days Later)
I really, really love this vid: I have a thing for dystopias (as you could maybe guess), and futuransky takes three dystopic/apocalyptic films and threads them together to talk about the state power in dystopias, and the ways in which that power is particularly targeted at oppressed people - these are things that need to be repressed to make a beautiful future happen! - and the ways people try to escape from that power. I love it to pieces. (Note: this vid contains explicit images of violence, sexual violence, state-sanctioned violence, death, dead bodies.)
+5
1. crickets - O Death (Book of Eli)
Great use of visuals, great combination of music and voiceover, great post-apocalypse. I loved the vid, and tried to watch the movie, but actually I enjoyed the vid more.
2. bironic - Afraid of Americans (Watchmen)
I'm not actually much of a Watchmen fan, but I still love this vid to pieces. It really draws out the scary power of the superheroes, the creepiness of the canon, and "God is an American." Yes.
3. Martha - Lovely/Tatters (SG-1, The Sentinel, Angel: The Series)
Martha does so much seriously creepy fanfic - she's great at suspense and at melding some Lovecraft in there really seamlessly - so it was hard for me to pick a series. But I keep coming back to "Lovely" and its sequel "Tatters," which are both really great at turning canon events into something slowly horrifying.
4. The Longest Journey - Ragnar Tørnquist and Didrik Tollefsen, designers (video game)
I played this game for ages.
(Maybe two more to come! But I'm running out the door right now.)
no subject
Date: 2011-08-21 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-22 01:20 am (UTC)