eruthros

Using the general principle I mentioned in the long list poll, I've combined some works into single line items on this list - wherever a book and the series containing it both made the cut, I picked the version that included more works (e.g. The Hainish Cycle rather than Four Ways to Forgiveness and The Dispossessed as two separate items), and whenever there were two works where one was based on the other and they contained the same characters I combined those (e.g. Firefly and Serenity, The Never-Ending Story book and film). If you see instances where I combined things and shouldn't have, or didn't combine things and should have, please let me know in comments. Ditto if you see any typoes, misattributed works, etc. They'll be turned into a ranked-choice poll in a bit.

( Here's the short list as it stands now )

I don't know everything on this list, obviously, but just glancing at it here are some impressions I got:

1) There seem to be a lot more things created by women on this short list than the NPR one, probably partly because of the inclusion of YA and children's lit and partly because of the segment of fandom nominating/taking the poll.

2) There are some more creators of color than on the NPR short list, partly due to the fact that there's some anime and manga on the list, and partly due to the fact that hello, Samuel Delany totally belongs here.

3) There's a lot of what's often dismissed as "low culture" - like, looking at the movies, there are a lot of "classics" (Blade Runner, Alien, etc) but there are also things like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Labyrinth and Spaceballs.

Nominations resulted in about a thousand different works, which should all be listed in this long list poll. The top 250(ish) works from this list will turn into another short list poll in just over a week.

The poll is split into ten questions, each with 99 or 100 works; you can choose up to ten works in each poll question. (Splitting the list into separate questions is not entirely fair - what if all your favorite things end up in the same one? - but there are too many things for a single question, and this isn't exactly a scientific polling system already, so.)

This isn't intended to make an objective list of the "best" works - your top works could mean your favorites, the things that influenced you the most, the things you think are the most interesting, the things you think have the coolest speculative fiction elements, the works you think are best, or however else you'd like to define your top works.

If you'd like to comment explaining why you love a work, or why people might want to check it out, or why you like parts of a work but don't like other parts or find them problematic, or link to people talking about a work, please do! Just don't comment solely to talk about why a work (or its fans) suck.

Some notes on the poll: Sometimes both a book series and a single book from that series are nominated, or both a manga and the anime based on it, or a book and the film based on it, or other sorts of part-whole problems. You can vote for any or all of the formats, depending on which parts you like best - so you could vote for both The Left Hand of Darkness and The Hainish Cycle if they're both in your top ten, or for just The Left Hand of Darkness if the book is in your top ten but the series as a whole doesn't make it (or vice versa). If multiple parts of the same thing make it to the short list, I will probably combine them there - so here it's Akira (movie) and Akira (manga), and it would be Akira (movie, manga) if it made it to the short list.

Works are (generally) alphabetized by their original title, though I'm certain to have mixed this up sometimes. If you see typos or works attributed to the wrong author or anything like that, please comment so I can fix it in the spreadsheet.

You can change your vote as many times as you want for any reason. DW accounts and OpenID accounts from other sites (google, lj, ij, yahoo, etc) can vote in the poll.

The poll will stay open for one week - it'll close next Thursday at noon(ish) EST.

The list is also available as a googledoc of the long list, if you'd prefer to look it over in that format before voting.

( seriously epic poll under the cut )

ETA: There are a couple of things that are on the list twice because of typos (they weren't caught by the formula that removed duplicates or by me on my first pass) - so far I see The Left Hand of Darkness and the Legend of the Galactic Heroes tv/ova. I'll add the votes for both lines up manually. *facepalm*

The URL for We Are All Connected by kiki_miserychic is broken but can be fixed by adding .html.

The URL for Data's Dream goes to the fanlore page; here's a streaming link for Data's Dream.

Villains by Necessity is by Eve Forward, not Diana Wynne Jones.

Unfortunately, you can't edit polls, so the errors will stick around through this iteration. Sorry!

A couple people asked if they could have more nominations for less-represented media in the original nominations post, and I asked the rlist, who said sure, why not, so here's an official(?) notice about it:

You can have +5 additional nominations as long as they're for media that weren't nominated very frequently: music (songs, albums, filk, music videos, opera), fanworks (fanfic, fanvids, fanfilms, fanart), theater (plays, musicals, opera), 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 or that has <20 nominations.

Here's the link to the nominations post again; you can reply to your original comment or post a new comment, whichever you find easier.

/end rlist spam, goes back to watching and listening to the things people have nominated

So 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? )

( The nomination rules )

( To nominate your ten things )

( Example nomination )

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.