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An Aficionado’s Guide to the top 100 Fantasy Books of All Time: VOTE & Final Nomination List
Chelsea--please email me a copy of your story asap. I feel I will just die if I don't read it immediately--I just loooove Half-Elves!
It was deemed science fiction....
Carol wrote: "Traci wrote: "Come down from the clocktower Ala. Twilight is on the list. Lol."Wait, are you saying Ala is a hunchback?"
Sanctuary!!
Voted! I don't care what makes Fantasy Aficionados top 100 list (okay, maybe I do a little), I'm just happy to have a list filled with books I haven't read yet! :-)
MrsJ you are appreciated, as is everyone who helped out.
I was just about to vote and I realised...The Wheel of Time didn't even make it? Tell me this is an error!! *sobs*
Carol wrote: "Chelsea--please email me a copy of your story asap. I feel I will just die if I don't read it immediately--I just loooove Half-Elves!"He's a half-elf-half-human-half-drow-half-dragon. Also he's a warrior, a sailor, a bard, a sorcerer and an award-winning gymnast. It's the gymnast bit that I feel really propels my story in to legendary territory.
oh wait, I just looked through the forum and realised some books were taken out cause they were just so damn good! lol I'm happy! :P
Chelsea wrote: "He's a half-elf-half-human-half-drow-half-dragon. Also he's a warrior, a sailor, a bard, a sorcerer and an award-winning gymnast. It's the gymnast bit that I feel really propels my story in to legendary territory. ..."But is he an alchemist and does he have a part-time ho girlfriend who plays music/makes herbal remedies? Now that would be legendary.
Carol wrote: "But is he an alchemist and does he have a part-time ho girlfriend who plays music/makes herbal remedies? Now that would be legendary. "His girlfriend was orphaned in an orc attack and was raised by a family of gnomes. Garden gnomes. How's that?
Chelsea wrote: "Carol wrote: "Traci wrote: "Come down from the clocktower Ala. Twilight is on the list. Lol."Wait, are you saying Ala is a hunchback?"
Sanctuary!!"
Nope. It's a term used for disgruntled gunmen. A famous mass shooter made a stand in a Texas clocktower. I guess I could have more easily written, Put down the gun. Bad joke. Forget it. :)
Tee hee hee! I love when FA gets playfully silly :)
Thanks, MrsJ. You Rock!
Laurel wrote: "Tee hee hee! I love when FA gets playfully silly :)"Me, too! :D
Lady Danielle "The Book Huntress" wrote: "Thanks, MrsJ. You Rock!"I couldn't agree more!
OMG. Lord of the Rings didn't make it? How did that happen?
Read above :P !
Tee-hee. I was lazy. I had 3 pages to read and it's 10PM. I thought somebody would give me a quick answer.
Oh, they were so good they were taken out. Geesh! What kind of a bizarre world is this? Mediocre is good? You can't be too good or too bad? The middle of the bell curve rules?
They were taken out because they are automatically on the final list.
Oh. Thank you. Yes, I have not read all the pages. Now, I don't have to. Merciful Ala.
/bonk. Chill out, woman! We're picking the most middling books :)
Aloha wrote: "Oh. Thank you. Yes, I have not read all the pages. Now, I don't have to. Merciful Ala."
Bow when you say that.
*haughty*
Bow when you say that.
*haughty*
It's because Lord of the Rings is science-fiction.
MrsJoseph wrote: "*This poll is for the 2nd round. Books were removed from the previous nomination list for 1 of 3 reasons:1. The book had enough votes to be placed on the Final List for top 100.
2. The book rece..."
Aaaahhh... should have read that more carefully. Sorry.
MrsJoseph wrote: "You know. I'm feeling a little pissed off and unappreciated right now. Thanks, M.R. You've been a big help.
I'll get back to yall later."
MrsJoseph, as much as it's a pain, these people need to be ignored. You'll get an ulcer otherwise.
I, for one, think you are doing a hell of a job. We don't always agree but we are always polite and I do try to read all the posts before commenting!
This is my favorite fantasy forums (even though I don't comment much) and it's mostly because you do a good job running it and there are mostly a fantastic group of people here.
Good job.
I second that, great job! I'm excited to see how it all turns out!
Let me spread out my rug and bow to you 5 times a day, oh merciful Ala. Now, I'm offending some Moslems. I offend everybody equally, Christians, Moslems, Buddhists, atheists. It's a good thing I don't write books. Otherwise, they all would put me on their hit list.Ala wrote: "Aloha wrote: "Oh. Thank you. Yes, I have not read all the pages. Now, I don't have to. Merciful Ala."
Bow when you say that.
*haughty*"
It's good to know that the upper end of the bell curve automatically gets a free pass. Elitism rules!Carol wrote: "/bonk. Chill out, woman! We're picking the most middling books :)"
Great job, Mrs. J! I get confused looking at the lists. I can't imagine trying to organize them all.
Okay, so I know that I'm a lurker. It takes a bit more for me to jump in and yap about the topic of the moment. Obviously a higher barrier to entry exists before my thoughts demand to be expressed for the public.But seriously - how hard is it to either read the e-mails or at least THE POSTS THAT CAME BEFORE - before throwing a fit and ticking off the person actually doing all the work?
Thank you for doing such a wonderful job, Mrs. J! I have thoroughly enjoyed these threads.
Stephanie, you don't know me well enough to know when I'm joking. You've made assumptions that obviously show you barely know me at all. Ms. J. knows that I'm a cannibal with kuru disease.
*hugs MrsJ*You are doing a wonderful job, MrsJ. I can't imagine all the hard work you and your helpers put into organizing these lists and just wanted you to know that your efforts are truly appreciated (despite the few that think otherwise).
Chelsea wrote: "I have also read every fantasy book ever, and I want to know why my story, The Chronicles of the Legend of Ramrod Half-Elved of Gweynnevehryynne Castle, Lord Protector of the Arcane Runes of Dreadstorm of Mirrorbasin Lake of Sacred Dale of Sir Blade Demonbane, He Who Slew FireStorm the Dragon, hasn't been included."LOL, Chelsea, I would definitely vote for this one just for the title! :P
Who? Who? Let me bring out my cleaver and disembowel them!
Aloha wrote: "Who? Who? Let me bring out my cleaver and disembowel them!"You go, cannibal girl! :D
I ran a similar (well, fantasy + scifi, since I don't like artificial distinctions) poll last year, elsewhere. The most striking thing to me: people nominated about 600 books, but probably half the things on your nomination list were never mentioned on mine... goes to show, I suppose, the breadth of the genre, and the diversity of fans.The other point I would make is that elections mostly tell us about how the electoral system chosen works - only secondarily do they tell us anything about the electorate, and only at the third level do they tell us anything about the things being elected. Your system seems simple, but I do wonder about how much it really tells us. You seem to be using a modified LV (limited vote - a generalisation of the single non-transferrable vote, SNTV), which raises massive issues regarding vote-splitting (cf the problems of Japanese democracy). Vote splitting is a problem in many systems, but in LV/SNTV it can totally dominate the results: the results can end up telling you more about how the 'parties' (in this case on one level authors and on another level subgenres) are structured than about actual popularity. The wikipedia article on LV explains: assuming one party get 54% of the vote and another gets 46%, in a constituency with three seats the 'winning' party can end up getting three, two, one, or zero seats. Which isn't very fair.
To show what that means for this poll, let's take an extreme case. The electorate is divided into Scientologists and Everyone Else; there are 10 scientologists, and 200 other people. The ten scientologists vote for a total of 50 books, with pairs of scientologists each voting for the same set of 10 books (ie, A and B vote for set 1, C and D vote for set 2, and so on). So you get 50 books, each with two votes. Meanwhile, the 200 people each vote for 10 different books, so you've got 2000 books with one vote (which can be reduced to 50 by run-off). So although the scientologists were outnumbered 20:1, they end up getting 50 books onto the list of 100.
Of course, with run-offs, and with more realistic distribution of tastes, this effect is reduced, but it's still a massive distortion of the popular preferences. On a smaller scale, people tend not to want to nominate 10 books by the same author, so authors like Wolfe suffer badly from vote-splitting, while authors who only wrote one book can an artifical advantage. And the effects of vote-splitting are particularly concerning in this sort of 'quality poll', because the people best able to judge quality (ie those who have read more books) are almost by definition more likely to spread their votes, while those who have read only ten books will concentrate theres on those ten. Which are often the same ten. So the system effectively gives you more voting power the less you know about the subject, and penalises those who know what they are talking about. You'll also have the problem that the books selected will tend to be those that are acceptable to everyone rather than loved by anyone: that is, there's an inherent bias in such voting systems toward mediocrity.
I attempted to address some of these problems with a double simultaneous vote (DSV) where votes for books counted as votes for authors, with 'seats' allocated per author and then distributed on the basis of book votes in a banded apportionment system, subject to a tiered quota, coupled with a tiered positional system to decrease the trend toward mediocrity. The idea was to produce a comprehensive, rather than consensual, list, while remaining fair. An alternative interesting route would have been a transferrable voting system of some kind, and I think a positional system along the lines of a modified borda count would be fascinating, as would some system based on more tiers of simultaneous votes, perhaps deduced from the patterning of the results by an analysis of correlations, but I was working under constraints at the time.
Anyway, that's more than you wanted to know. Sorry, i'm an electoral systems geek. However, I'll leave you with two basic rules of elections:
1. All electoral systems suck, but in different ways.
2. There is no best electoral system - different systems produce different results.
From these we can deduce: the person who designs the election rigs the election. You cannot avoid rigging the election - there is no such thing as the correct, or the fair, result (all results are unfair, in different ways). The election designer should therefore work out what they want the results to look like, and then rig the election to match their prejudices - because that's what every election designer HAS to do, whether they want to or not. It's best to know which bias you're rigging your system to produce!
[eg, in my case I wanted a list that a) reflected the opinions of everybody, b) wasn't too difficult to produce, either for me or for the voters, and c) would give a list of books we might love, rather than books we wouldn't mind. So it was rigged toward minority opinions rather than the views of the majority (so that there were fewer people excluded), and toward strong opinions rather than weak opinions (so that the books weren't just mediocre and unobjectionable). In other words, toward being comprehensive rather than consensual. A transferrable voting system might focus more on consensus, while a modified borda count would be more elitest.
------
OK, you're all asleep now. Sorry. The point is: electoral systems matter. The choice of system is to a large extent a choice of results.
I didn't know one question of mine would open such a shitstorm. Relax, ya'll.The embarrassing thing (to me) is that I DID read the emails and the previous posts. I just still didn't understand the method.
Therefore I asked a question. Mea culpa.
Oh, I thought Stephanie was talking to me. But I am here and willing to take all the blame. Any problems, blame me. I love the punishment. Kinky.
Wow! Electoral systems are complex things, huh :-)
Snoozerider wrote: "Wow! Electoral systems are complex things, huh :-)"Oh, you have no idea!
By the way, Mrs J, please don't take what I wrote as criticism or taking you for granted. Believe me, having run one of these things myself in the past, I of all people would never denigrate the mind-numbingly boring effort that has to be put in to make them work! Well done!
Carol wrote: "Read above :P !"Where. I see not reason to vote without LOTR on the list. I'd be lying.
Kernos wrote: "Carol wrote: "Read above :P !"Where. I see not reason to vote without LOTR on the list. I'd be lying."
You didn't see the part about the top 5 books being removed from this second poll as they were voted for so much that they were already selected for the final 100 and now we were just voting for the other 95? I'm pretty sure that LOTR is in those that already made the list.
Wastrel wrote: "...OK, you're all asleep now. Sorry. The point is: electoral systems matter. The choice of system is to a large extent a choice of results. "Not at all. I found it most interesting. I presume those behind the politicians know all about this.
But I disagree. SF and F are distinct. I know the difference to 5 nines.
I'd say "the geeky academics who politicians ignore know all about this". Occasionally politicians talk to them, but very rarely.Unfortunately, electoral systems are kind of taunting. Theoretically, they're the easiest way to effect the political system. You can't change the political parties overnight, you can't change what people think overnight, you can't change how politicians act overnight, but you can change the electoral system, and that then has knock-on effects that shape everything else. It's basically the point where if we don't like what's going on in a country we can reach down with the hand of god and make changes.
Unfortunately, in practice, we can't. Almost by definition, the electoral system has favoured whoever has managed to win power - so the people who CAN change the system almost by definition don't want to. Couple that with the fact that politicians are ignorant, and with the fact that electorates are INCREDIBLY conservative when it comes to electoral reform, and you end up in a world where serious electoral reform is extremely rare: and when it does happen, the chosen system is more based on fashion and on being able to show that it works in other places than on the merits of the system. The few exceptions are usually in cases of external control: eg the Americans gave the Japanese a system they thought would lead to weak and moderate parties (moderate yes, weak no - they didn't really think it through), and the English have put in place a system in Northern Ireland that is meant to lead both to consensus and to minority representation (so far so good).
But, I guess we're a bit off topic now!
Kernos wrote: "Wastrel wrote: "...OK, you're all asleep now. Sorry. The point is: electoral systems matter. The choice of system is to a large extent a choice of results. "Not at all. I found it most interestin..."
On the other point: I think there are SO many cases where I can't tell whether something is SF or fantasy, or where many people disagree, that I don't think it's meaningful to make a hard-and-fast distinction.
Examples:
- The Book of the New Sun
- Ash: A Secret History
- Shadowrun
- Pern
- Spelljammer
- most of the stories in Black Juice
- most of Borges
- The Prestige
- The Stars My Destination
And Lord Valentine's Castle is also both sci and fantasy, i have read it and i think it leans more on the scifi side since it is on another planet.It is already on the poll for the second round, so too late to discuss it's eligibility.
Voted again. Even on the culled list there's lots of stuff I haven't read yet. Need to read more!I was a bit surprised to find The Twilight Saga on there (I missed it in the first list apparently), considering the whole discussion that was had to exclude the whole Paranormal Romance subgenre.
I don't care overly much because a) it has every right to be on the list i.m.o. and b) I haven't voted on it (nor would I have voted on any other PR book that might've had gotten on the list.)
Anyway, I like lists and especially lists I get a say on, so I'm really glad this group is having this vote. So thanks to the people organizing it and doing all the hard work. :)
Mach wrote: "And Lord Valentine's Castle is also both sci and fantasy, i have read it and i think it leans more on the scifi side since it is on another planet.It is already on the poll for the second round, so..."
It's both, so it's fantasy. No reason to exclude anything because it's also something else besides fantasy. That's as far as any discussion on the topic needs to go i.m.o.
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I have also read every fantasy book ever, and I want to know why my story, The Chronicles of the Legend of Ramrod Half-Elved of Gweynnevehryynne Castle, Lord Protector of the Arcane Runes of Dreadstorm of Mirrorbasin Lake of Sacred Dale of Sir Blade Demonbane, He Who Slew FireStorm the Dragon, hasn't been included.