An auction, eight stories and a tease in today’s Scroll.
(1) Attention collectors! Somebody’s flipping Ray Bradbury’s original caricature from the Brown Derby Restaurant today on eBay. Jack Lane’s portrait once hung on the wall at the famed Hollywood & Vine tourist trap with hundreds more of the artist’s sketches of Hollywood stars.
Ray Bradbury by Jack Lane. Once displayed at the Brown Derby.
(2) The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis will hold three special events next month celebrate Ray Bradbury’s 95th birthday, which is on August 22.
From Aug. 3 to 28, the center will present a free exhibit, “Miracles of Rare Device: Treasures of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies,” in the Cultural Arts Gallery on the first floor of the IUPUI Campus Center…. The exhibit will feature art, artifacts, books and rare magazines from Bradbury’s own collection, gifted to the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI in 2013 by the Bradbury Estate and by Donn Albright, Bradbury’s close friend and bibliographer.
Two related public events will coincide with the exhibition’s run.
On August 19, Jonathan R. Eller, Chancellor’s Professor of English and director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies will deliver the Second Annual Ray Bradbury Memorial Lecture in the Riley Meeting Room at Indianapolis Public Library’s Central Library.
The lecture, “Ray Bradbury’s October Country,” reveals the timeless creativity and somewhat controversial publishing history of one of Bradbury’s most popular story collections on the 60th anniversary of its original publication.
On August 27, the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies will host a reception followed by another Eller lecture, on the collection’s amazing journey from California to IUPUI and the importance of Bradbury’s legacy in the 21st century. Both the lecture and reception are free and open to the public.
(3) James Artimus Owen is offering for sale his illustrations for Diana Pavlac Glyer’s forthcoming book about the Inklings, Bandersnatch, and has posted the images on Facebook. [Note: Despite being set to “Public”, the material can only be viewed if you have a Facebook account.]
Each illustration is drawn on 11″ x 14″ Bristol board, and includes an appearance by the Bandersnatch somewhere in the picture. Prices are as listed, ranging from $450 to $750, although I am willing to entertain offers from people I like. First request, first choice. Message me to reserve your favorite and to arrange payment and shipping.
(4) Everybody knows Sharknado 3 airs today on SyFy. But it came as a surprise for me to read that George R.R. Martin plans to show the movie at his Jean Cocteau Theatre in August.
“Check it out,” writes Martin. “Next year’s Hugo favorite, for sure.”
William Reichard says in honor of that crack, the movie should be renamed, “Snarknado 3.”
(5) SF Signal’s latest Mind Meld proposes this interesting premise —
A recent Guardian article about Tokyo awarding Japanese Citzenship to Godzilla got me to wondering: If you could pick a genre fictional character, from any media, and offer them honorary citizenship and residence in your city, county, state, country, who would it be, and why?
Responses from — Kelly Robson, Jenny Goloboy, Galen Dara, Anne Leonard, Patrick Tomlinson, Julie Czerneda, Alyx Dellamonica, Django Wexler, Jesse Willis, Diana Pharoah Francis, Mikaela Lind, Rhonda Eudaly, Gillian Philip, Ardi Alspach, and Laura Anne Gilman.
(6) Interested in stories read aloud? Open Culture has found another seam of the motherlode, 88 hours of free audio fiction original aired on Wisconsin public radio.
Listen to enough episodes of Mind Webs, and you may get hooked on the voice and reading style of its host Michael Hanson, a fixture on Wisconsin public radio for something like forty years. Back in 2001, just after wrapping up his career in that sector, Hanson wrote in to the New York Times lamenting the state of public radio, especially its program directors turned into “sycophantic bean counters” and a “pronounced dumbing down of program content.” Mind Webs, which kept on going from the 70s through the 90s, came from a time before all that, and now its smart storytelling has come available for all of us to enjoy.
The playlist above will let you stream all of the stories — roughly 88 hours worth — from start to finish. Or you can access the audio at Archive.org here.
(7) Of course they knew those comic books were stolen! The Verge has the goods on the great Texas comic book heist.
Whoever was after the Sub-Mariners and All Star Comics at the Heritage Auction wasn’t a collector. Their bids were too erratic, they didn’t know the market, and chances were, they weren’t terribly smart. It was also clear that they had a lot of money on their hands — too much money, maybe — and they were eager to spend it. Through months of interviews and hundreds of pages of public documents, The Verge reconstructed what they were seeing: a multi-million-dollar embezzlement scheme that would ensnare a crooked lawyer, a multinational corporation, and some of the most sought-out comics in the world….
$40,000 split between nine checks. The investigator said he was going through a nasty divorce, and was worried his ex-wife might raise trouble over any checks for more than $10,000.
But what about that foxing? When the buyers took their comics home, they noticed something strange: the All Star #3 that had sold in February had the same imperfections. In fact, it was the same book. But that book was slabbed — it had a barcode and provenance, sold to a private buyer who wouldn’t have deslabbed it without a reason. Had they bought stolen property?
It was worse. They had bought stolen evidence. The book had come direct from Chiofalo’s storage unit, smuggled out under the nose of the Harris County DA — and according to prosecutors, Blevins and Deutsch worked together to smuggle them out. More than $150,000 in comics had disappeared from the storage unit, and Blevins had spent the summer selling them at comics conventions across the country. The books were deslabbed to throw investigators off the trail, but even without the barcode, the cover gave it away. Collectors search for flawless comics, but it’s the imperfections that give them an identity, and this imperfection placed Blevins at the scene of a crime.
(8) Did Tolkien visit the Bouzincourt caves while on Army service during the Battle of the Somme?
In 1916, a 24-year-old British soldier named J.R.R. Tolkien went off to fight in World War I. He was stationed near the village of Bouzincourt, took part in the nearby Battle of the Somme and writes about the area in his diaries.
Jeff Gusky, an explorer and photographer who maintains a site called “The Hidden World of World War I,” believes Tolkien may have visited Bouzincourt’s caves, places where hundreds of soldiers took refuge during the Somme — and that some of his impressions ended up in “The Lord of the Rings.”
“I feel that this is the place,” Gusky said. “It’s so raw and unchanged from a hundred years ago.”
Tolkien scholar John Garth isn’t so sure.
“On the Somme, he certainly spent time in deep trench dugouts, and he would have been aware of the subterranean world of the army tunnelers — all of which would, I believe, have given his descriptions of Moria and other Middle-earth underworlds some of their vitality,” Garth, the author of “Tolkien and the Great War,” wrote in an email….
Regardless of whether Tolkien knew of the caves, there’s no question that the author’s experience at the Somme influenced “The Lord of the Rings.”
“The Dead marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme,” he wrote in a letter, according to a story on the Green Books portion of TheOneRing.net.
(9) “Stick a fork in the pup’s Tor boycott because their hushpuppy is done” says Jason Sanford.
Earlier this month I tracked the sales of a sample of ten book titles published by Tor Books. My desire was to see if the puppies’ boycott of Tor was having any effect on the publisher’s sales.
You can see the titles I tracked, and how I tracked the sales, in my original post or by looking at the endnote below.
But the flaw in my analysis was that I could only present two weeks of sales data since the boycott began on June 19. As a result, some people rightly said it was too early to tell if the boycott was failing or succeeding.
After examining two additional weeks of sales data it appears my initial analysis was correct. This new data shows that for the five weeks prior to the boycott starting on June 19, the weekly sales average for these Tor titles was 1652 books sold per week. For those same Tor titles, their weekly average sales for the last four weeks of the boycott has been 1679 books sold per week.
So on average, Tor’s sales for these titles are up slightly since the boycott started.
(10) Vox Day’s “Hugo Recommendations: Best Professional Artist” post is up. Don’t try and kid me, you know you want to read it.
[Thanks for these stories goes out to Dave Doering, Michael J. Walsh, William Reichard, Jim Meadows and John King Tarpinian as the Beaver.]
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Kyra:
> “I think I agree that fantasy would need to be in two brackets, kid and adult”
It’s probably a good idea, but decisions would need to be made regarding a number of borderline cases (Watership Down? Earthsea? The Last Unicorn?)
My immediate vote for those exact would go “adult, kid, adult”, because that’s how they were initially marketed afaik. (and I’m the one who talked about reading Watership Down at 9). And I also feel that while all 3 are accessible to kids, the first and last have a greater number of mature themes that benefit much more from being read (or reread) as an adult.
> “… the adult one should probably limit itself to books marketed as fantasy or at minimum as romances by the old definition (Book length prose works of fancy).”
Hmm … currently books like A Christmas Carol, Animal Farm, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Orlando, Beloved, The Master and Margerita, Gormenghast, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court are on my vague longlist … should those be removed as being books with fantastic elements, rather than “fantasy” per se? And again that would leave borderline cases — it’s harder to argue for the removal of, say, One Hundred Years of Solitude or Nights at the Circus.
I think pretty much every book you list there qualifies as a “Romance” (old definition), except Animal Farm. So if you use that, you’re good to go. But I also like Doctor Science and her family’s suggestion of Frankenstein’s year as a useful approximate cut-off instead. That covers most of your queries handily and doesn’t require the same concerns about definitions.
rrede:There was also the hilarious time when several students protested that of course Tolkien’s work had to be fantasy, completely made up, because there were dragons, castles, and knights. She got this funny look on her face and pointed out that in fact the people who lived in and around castles did in fact believe that dragons existed — and yeah, knights sort of an historical fact.
Knights in Tolkien? I don’t recall any knights in Middle Earth. or anything that fits the strictest definition of a castle, though there were fortifications aplenty. Do I have to reread?
Kyra: I wasn’t being clear (sorry, jet lagged and allergies). Tolkien’s work is certainly fantasy (and Tolkien was very aware of science fiction as well–he and CS Lewis both liked the sff they knew better than the literary stuff)–my complaint is retroactively applying the genre term to Shakespeare, Milton, etc. etc. etc earlier works.
But it’s useful to highlight that Tolkien’s work was not only fantasy (and it’s also true a lot of people when it was published saw it as an alternate made-up world and did not catch all the medieval allusions–it took a lot of years of scholarship by medievalists to point it out–because so much of “English” as taught in the schools started with Shakespeare to avoid the language problem). (There are multiple genre elements in Tolkien’s work–including Victorian novels–my colleague’s lecture is meant to add layers, not restrict the work to a single term–and also to complicate the history of the term “fantasy”).
But I tend to resist using the same meaning of “fantasy” as applied to 20th and 21st century works to anything from the 1700s or before.
Lenora Rose: Knights in Tolkien? I don’t recall any knights in Middle Earth. or anything that fits the strictest definition of a castle, though there were fortifications aplenty. Do I have to reread?
Depends on how one defines castle and knights — our students (who were being a bit sloppy since this was the first class of the semester) had Gondor and Boromor and etc. categorized as “castles and knights” — dragons, of course is from TH, and they hadn’t read the SILMARILLION (that would soon be remedied, and sent several of them into shellshock).
That sort of proved her point about how contemporary ideas of “fantasy” (the neo-medievalist texts which became so popular in the wake of Tolkien) affect people’s “reading” of Tolkien’s work.
short p.s. it might be more accurate to say that many of the intellectuals/critics who were generating reviews, etc. at the time Tolkien published LOTR were not very well equipped to read/handle it (the commentary on TH which was “children’s novel” was done by entirely different periodicals and reviewers–librarians, teachers, children’s lit experts–with entirely different criteria).
Doctor science:
2. It’s been suggested that the Fantasy bracket not include works published before 1818, when Frankenstein was published, to make the SF & Fantasy competitions roughly comparable.
As I said to Kyra, I like this as a reasonable cut-off but also a fairly good way to dodge most of the debate over definition, since I suspect the worst definitional issues are mostly pre-1800.
3. On the other hand, Shakespeare certainly wrote Fantasy: The Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream. So maybe the start point should be 1500.
This, otoh, I disagree with firmly. If short story collections are apples vs. oranges, a play meant to be performed and viewed is chucking a tomato into the comparison (complete with even more discussion of whether it qualifies under the broader definition).
5. Sprog the Younger, who took a course on Fairy Tales last semester, argued that the Brothers Grimm and other fairy tale compilations should not qualify, but all agreed that Hans Christian Andersen definitely should.
I’m inclined to agree. More modern attempts to collect myths and folklore are treated as closer to anthropology than fiction, but Andersen wrote original material for the most part (His Wild Swans has blatant precursors but it’s nigh the only one).
6. Having separate competitions for Adult and Sub-Adult Fantasy has the advantage that more than one Pratchett can be nominated.
oh dear, yes. don’t make me pick between NIght Watch and Nation or Tiffany Aching.
7. We might want to declare an Adult winner, a Sub-Adult winner, and then have a three-way competition with LOTR to get the overall winner. Basically, LOTR is getting a bye until the final round.
And this? is genius. It’s one way to escape the Juggernaut, anyhow. (And I would probably vote against LotR depending on the other winners, and I like Tolkien.)
The Picture of Dorian Grey is probably what today would be called Magical Realism. There is nothing fantastical about it apart from the painting. Also given it is just Wilde’s take on the Faust myth I think precludes it. Still a great piece of writing though.
I think I’d make a distinction now of fables/satire versus fantasy – as in a fable may have fantastic elements but the reader is supposed to see that they are placeholders for people/society i.e. the level of suspension of disbelief is intended to be minimal. So I’d not include Animal Farm as fantasy as Orwell is not intending for people to take his society of farm animals seriously but instead see the mapping to Marixsm, capitalism and the USSR (unlike 1984 in which you are expected to see Airstrip One as real society when immersed in the story). Mind you that puts Narnia in a difficult position…
@ Soon Lee 4:14pm – I see what you did there. Guess I’m one of you?
In this crowd, I think I’d bet on it being more a case of almost all of us being one of us. Although there are plenty of figuratively shame-faced admissions of not having read everything else, no matter how central to the canon, so I suppose there must be a few people who haven’t read, possibly even bounced off of, Douglas Adams. Poor blighters. Also lucky bastards if they’re in the haven’t read category rather than the bounced off of one.
I flounced up from Douglas Adams myself. I did eventually see the movie which was okay.
Jim Henley: I flounced up from Douglas Adams myself. I did eventually see the movie which was okay.
I found Douglas Adams to be what I call “Tryhard Humor” — i.e., it’s very contrived humor which is amusing for a little bit, but then just gets eye-rollingly old and tiresome very fast. And I never cease to be amazed at how many people just rave about the HH2G books.
Which is why I’ve been afraid to try Pratchett. Based on everything I’ve read, I’m very worried that my reaction to his work might be the same.
@Will: I can’t reasonably recommend Locke. Despite sharing a name with Locke Lamora and Locke & Key, it’s really just about the least exciting film I’ve watched in 4-5 years. Possibly the only film I’ve seen relatively recently that was actually more boring to watch was Tree of Life.
JJ: Pratchett started off with a lot of tryhard humor (a term I like very much), but grew way, way past it. There’s a reason people often recommend starting with his books six or eight or ten volumes in, and part of it is that evolution.
As for knights in Tolkien: the Minas Tirith troops and the Prince of Dol Amroth are knights by any sensible definition. 🙂
Bruce:
I’ve been told that I should start with Night Watch or Guards! Guards!
Camestros Felapton:
Even worse for me. Many are authors I haven’t even heard of and to my horror, I see many of them winning. These are the authors that were hardly translated, never could be found in libraries, nor in the homes of my father or my friends. Just total UNKNOWNS.
My amazon basket grew a lot larger in this latest competition…
re: Tolkien and fantasy
Wouldn’t it make more sense to say that he was intentionally writing the books in the style of myths and legends and not as genre fantasy? That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t fantasy, though.
@JJ,
“Guards! Guards!” would be my pick. “Nightwatch” features the same core characters (colloquially the City Watch sub-series) but is a few books later on, so not an ideal starting point.
For Pratchett’s Discworld, the stand-alones are also good entry points: “Pyramids” & “Small Gods” are particularly good.
@Lenora Rose – Weren’t there knights from Dol Amroth?
Not certain about the castle, but you could argue that Helm’s Deep was one.
Fantasy and genre fantasy are not the same thing. Genre fantasy is a subset.
A work can be fantasy but not marketed as fantasy, not labeled and packaged that way. That said, LOTR was published in a world that had seen Conan and Kull, the King of Elfland’s Daughter, the Wizard of Oz, the Light Princess, the Sword in the Stone and the Incomplete Enchanter.
While the publishing category of fantasy may not have been big enough to merit its own bookcases yet, readers knew what it was, whether they called it weird tales, fanciful tales or some other term.
But THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY (later F&SF) started up in 1949, and it wasn’t a neologism at the time.
@rrede “my colleague’s lecture is meant to add layers, not restrict the work to a single term–and also to complicate the history of the term “fantasy””
Ah, so you have already thought about my point and incorporated it and any implications.
Ahem. Okay. 🙂 Dont mind me.
Judging by the ad for the 1938 US edition of The Hobbit, its market was readers who appreciated Alice In Wonderland and The Wind In the Willows.
@JJ
Best entry point for Discworld, IMO, will be “Small Gods” or “Guards, Guards”
SG is standalone, and doesn’t need much prior knowledge to make sense of it. However, it is probably the best Discworld book ever written, so everyhting else may seem to a be a step down
G,G is set at the beginning of one of the Discworld sub-genres, and there’s a failry logical set of books that cou can read to get a feel for Pratchett subsequently – ie G,G, then Men at Arms, then Feet of Clay, then Jingo; and by then you’ll get a good feel for Pterry’s writing.
Night Watch is a terrible place to start – you wont be sufficiently invested in the characters.
1) Just as modern science fiction probably technically started with Voltaire, in addition to tales for children I’d recommend acknowledging the role of adult Sturm und Drang and maybe beginning with Goethe even though Faust was a play (people still read it!);
2) People dissing Douglas Adams should be careful, since under Kyra’s rules, in the final round, there is time to organize a bloc vote for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
I never really got on with the Hitch-Hiker books; for me, the true originals are the radio episodes, and the novels are an adaptation that doesn’t quite pull it off. And the movie is, well, a movie adaptation, a condensed version of the original with second-rate visuals.
Returning to a sub-thread of an earlier post, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is best appreciated as a radio play in twelve parts, because that’s what it is. The adaptation that comes closest is the BBC TV series, which only covered the first series and chickened out of trying to depict the chamelioid shape-shifting aliens.
(Note: in the spirit of there being no prequels to Star Wars, there are only two radio series of Hitch-Hiker’s.)
re: “Knights and castles” in Tolkien:
What many think of when talking about “knights and castles” is heavily connected to how feudalism worked in medieval Europe. And LotR doesn’t quite have that – the kingdoms of LotR seem to be closer to absolute monarchies or nation states than feudal societies.
LotR have “knights” in the sense of heavy cavalry, but they seem to be part of a somewhat unified national army and not the kind of low-nobility lord that medieval knights usually were. There are “castles” in the sense of fortifications, but they seem to be royal castles and not the holdings of more independent lords.
Gondor clearly has feudal obligations – the muster at Minas Tirith is by fief, pretty much, and that’s a classic oath of fealty Pippin takes. It’s just that inevitably the course of the story leads us away from that. The characters are trying not to get bogged down in the routine workings of functional societies, and after all, aren’t needed there. There’s a whole sweep of land out west along the mountains and then back along the coast and the great bay full of settlements we learn anything of only via the muster or the passage of the guys who went through the Paths of the Dead.
> “But I tend to resist using the same meaning of ‘fantasy’ as applied to 20th and 21st century works to anything from the 1700s or before.”
Ah, well in that case I agree completely. 🙂
(E.g., is Gulliver’s Travels a fantasy novel? It’s clearly intended to be taken as fiction, but when you realize that The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was probably still considered to be a plausible account at the time …)
You people are all too eloquent and interesting, dammit. (Please don’t stop!)
rrede et al on if Tolkien was fantasy: I’m more and more convinced Tolkien is best read as Anglo-Saxon fanfic. Philological fanfic.
And I agree Tolkien should be left of the bracket, or at least LOTR. I couldn’t vote against it, and it’s not that I think it’s the best, it’s that I have been reading it, and around it for 29 (!) years now, so that I can’t separate it out from myself to judge it on merit. Which is best, novel x or your rib?, like that.
Kyra, your Grumpy Retelling of Harkness is exactly perfect (as far as I can tell, having not come near finishing), except you neglected to mention the astounding vampire yoga.
Oneiros said:
And I can’t reasonably not recommend it. I mean, not if you’re up for splodey-loud visual action, sure. But for acting, and story, and amazing amounts of things happening while you’re watching one guy in his car, hell yes. Also, it’s a perfect opposite-pairing with Fury Road, what with all the talking and sitting Tom Hardy does. Bonus: at no point is his face partially covered.
Mind you, I think Swimming to Cambodia is a gripping movie, so adjust your action gauge accordingly.
YES exactly! Now obviously we don’t know what happens to his Welsh accent between the two movies but clearly the concrete pour goes very badly wrong and leads to the apocalypse.
Seriously though I thought Locke was very gripping. The tension as this man tries to keep his world together in the wake of some very bad decisions and yet is trying to find a way to be a good man – letting everybody down as he tries not to let anybody down.
I think the riders of Rohan are effectively knights in a more dark-agey way rather than the medieval age of chivalry way. High status mounted troops who directly serve a lord.
The entry point for Discworld I generally recommend is Monstrous Regiment. It’s almost entirely standalone, but does introduce the reader to some recurring characters on the sidelines, and is solidly amongst what I consider to be Pratchett’s best output, which would be the range from The Truth through Going Postal. (“Night Watch” was, I think, his crowning achievement, though only by a slim margin.)
In general absolutely agreed on the huge evolution of Discworld books. It started with punning, floundered a bit through situational humor, suffered through the flyover volumes, and then got really good as he discovered, and perfected, “the joys of plot”.
I’ve had a lot of success with “Wyrd Sisters” as a Discworld intro, because so much of it riffs on Hamlet or MacBeth, which people already know.
Thanks to all of you who have offered Discworld suggestions; I’ve made a note of them. I will be traveling before Worldcon, though, so definitely won’t get to them until after that.
But I have to say, seeing this does not make me optimistic.
@JJ:
Twinsies!
Honestly, I was about done with HH2G right at the beginning with the “Digital watches, amirite?!” bit. I jounced above the book very quickly.
One possible list of books for a fantasy ballot, with no Tolkien (held in reserve as a Final Boss Fight), no specifically non-adult (so lacking some obvious names whose best fantasy stuff was for young readers, like Le Guin, Dahl, Rowling, Hans Christian Anderson, and so on), allowing novellas, allowing short stories that make a coherent volume (so Fritz Leiber’s sword and sorcery stuff is allowed), but not a disconnected collection (so, for example, not Kelly Link’s books). Series tentatively allowed for the moment, but will likely eventually get cut down to a single representative book.
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, H. P. Lovecraft (there may be a better choice to make for Lovecraft, here)
The Chronicles of Amber, Roger Zelazny
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R. Donaldson
The City Watch Sequence, Terry Pratchett
Conan the Barbarian Series, Robert E. Howard
The Dark Tower Series, Stephen King
Declare, Tim Powers
Dracula, Bram Stoker
The Dying Earth Sequence, Jack Vance
The Elric Saga, Michael Moorcock
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Stories, Fritz Leiber
The Jirel of Joiry Stories, C. L. Moore
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Susana Clarke
The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Lord Dunsany
The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lud-In-The-Mist, Hope Mirrlees
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe (there might be a better choice to make for Poe, here)
The Once and Future King, T. H. White
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Phantastes, George MacDonald
The Princess Bride, William Goldman
Riddle of Stars, Patricia McKillip
A Song of Fire and Ice, George R. R. Martin
Sunshine, Robin McKinley
Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Windrose Chronicles, Barbara Hambly
The Witch World Books, Andre Norton
Things I don’t like about it at this point —
It seems really tilted towards white, male, and American, as did the final sci-fi list, frankly.
I’m not totally happy about leaving off Angela Carter or Mikhail Bulgakov. I’d also put on Lois McMaster Bujold, China Mieville, Cat Valente, Lev Grossman, and John Ajvide Lindqvist, but if we keep to the “nothing after 2000” rule, they’re out (and some authors, like George R. R. Martin and Terry Pratchett, only qualify on some of the books in their listed series.)
Isn’t the Book of the New Sun really science fiction and not fantasy?
Also, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was published after 2000, wasn’t it?
> “Isn’t the Book of the New Sun really science fiction and not fantasy?”
I’ve most often seen it listed as “science fantasy”, and am tentatively allowing that, although that could change. Andre Norton is often put in the same category, and sometimes Jack Vance. Honestly, I might put The Chronicles of Amber in that category, too.
> “Also, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was published after 2000, wasn’t it?”
So it was. I would probably replace it with Nights At The Circus.
Kyra, I’ve got a distracting day but may have some more fantasy suggestions later.
Sunshine is from 2004. However, Deerskin is 1994 and would be my obvious pick for McKinley.
Hm. The Hero and the Crown might be the one with the widest appeal, though.
(Although either way I’m grumpy about losing one of the only modern-day/secondary world books on the list. She couldn’t have written Sunshine just five years earlier? Grumble grumble …)
If Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy hasn’t been mentioned yet as a worthy addition to the list, I gladly will. They are:
The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, and The Last Enchantment.
The Hero and the Crown is also arguably for a younger audience (I got it via Scholastic!), where Deerskin is inarguably adult.
There’s also 0 urban fantasy on your list. Maybe War for the oaks or something Charles de Lint? Most of the subgenre was entertainment, not excellence, but it was largely influential, even on the modern vampire-laced stuff, and I think that Bull and deLint had moments of excellence.
oh, wait. I know exactly which urban fantasy was a huge influence for me, and feels like a better fit for a “Best of” rather than a “my favourites” list.
Pamela Dean – Tam Lin
@Susana S.P.:
I’m sorry, I just had to quote that for the sheer beauty and conciseness that is the term ‘philological fanfic’ as a descriptor for Tolkien.
I must share this. At least amongst the percentage of my friends who would actually understand what that meant.
OK, let’s see.
Emma Bull: The War For the Oaks. Basically the original urban fantasy. (Yeah, there’s precedents back to Our Lady of Darkness, but Bull is the one others imitated and/or got inspired by.)
For Lovecraft, I’d put “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” ahead of “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”. Or the Dreamlands stories as a whole, since you’ve got several other whole series there.
Mercedes Lackey should be on the list, though I’m not sure which series to pick. But she needs to be there.
For Hambly, I’d pick the Time of the Dark over Windrose, personally, even though the craft is in some ways better in the latter.
Isabel Allende is a good candidate for the list, probably with The House of the Spirits.
Lois McMaster Bujold is another worthy. Paladin of Souls, perhaps?
I can make an argument, I think, for Jacqueline Carey and Kushiel’s Dart. But before that I’d make the argument for Tanith Lee who definitely belongs.
For Mercedes Lackey I’d say The Last Herald Mage.
I’d love to wave a flag for Steven Brust, but this is such auspicious company and much of his work is post 2000. If Bull gets in can I sneak Brust in via Freedom and Necessity?
Freedom and Necessity is on my desert island pile (and it’s ’97 apparently, so squeaks in) though if I wanted to represent Brust best I’d go with the Phoenix Guards (or the Khaavren Romances as a whole, and since the 2 excellent ones of that series are also from the 90s…)
Also, for Emma Bull, War for the oaks is an influential early book of a particular subgenre, where Freedom and Necessity is never really duplicated by anyone. I’m not sure how much influence plays a role in excellence, but it’s been cited as a reason for voting throughout the SF brackets.
One could argue that Freedom & Necessity and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell are in the same sub-genre, but I don’t know if anyone’s asked Clarke if Brust and Bull were an influence on her work.
I think Tanith Lee needs to be on, and is probably best represented by the Tales from the Flat Earth books in a a fantasy bracket. I’m thinking about Anne Rice (hugely influential, but not necessarily well liked by the fantasy genre crowd) and Meredith Ann Pierce (who may, sadly, be too obscure.)
Speaking of too obscure, for books that should come off, the last bracket taught me that important + no one has read them = they lose hard early. Which means Phantastes and Lud-In-The-Mist may need to come off, however much they deserve to be on …
And I’ve been aware of the huge lack in Urban Fantasy. Emma Bull is a good possibility, as is de Lint, will try to think of others as well.