The "controversial SF books" poll

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1264685]

And yes, I'm sure I've missed a load out - feel free to mention in the comments :->

Comments

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

No option for 'never heard of'

I have never heard of any of these, except Harry Potter!

Probably just not the poll for me :-(

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

yeh I didn't vote in the "never heard ofs".

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

Ditto.

[red-phil.livejournal.com]

ah, I voted 'Haven't read - but could be tempted to' to the ones I hadn't heard of or didn't know much about.
If someone gave me one and said they thought I'd like it then I'd give it a go.

The option I wanted was 'I started reading and gave up in disgust 1/2 a book into the series'

[soon_lee]

Also missing is the option of "started the series but never finished" which would have been my choices for Harry Potter (got stalled at book 4) and Wheel of Time (stalled at book five when I realised that a)nothing happened and b) this was originally meant to be a 5-6 book series. I could see the writing on the wall, and it stretched on forever)

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Me too on the WoT -- really enjoyed the first one, quite liked the second one, observed part way through the third one that I appeared to be reading the same book over and over. Concluded that life was Too Short.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Here's my defence of Pern (which is a series and not a trilogy anyway -- the third book was a long time appearing and is only loosely tied in to the first two, which are quite closely linked).
SF is low on real women. It's high on feisty heroines (TM) with all the reality of 'Career Girl Barbie'. But Lessa is real. She says no, she fights back, she contradicts the big boys AND SHE IS RIGHT. She wins without the 'feisty' grandstanding. Yes, the books aren't perfect, yes there is that 'rape narrative' argument, but the fact is that Lessa is a better character for 14 year old girl to meet than all the wish-fulfilment Barbie-Sues out there.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

I bounced off Thomas Covenant when I tried to read it about twenty years ago (early-mid teens) and intend to give it another go at some point.

Dragonlance I read when I was about thirteen and really enjoyed, and intend to have another go at sometime - with the awareness that I may well find it unreadable. I read the second trilogy at some point, too - the one which focuses on the only really interesting character in the first series, and seem to recall enjoying that one too.

Julian May's Pliocene Exile books (and the other novels set in the same universe) I really liked, and have read all of them two or three times each.

The original Pern trilogy (as well as the three Harper Hall ones) I reread (for the first time in about twenty years) a couple of weeks ago - I had a bad cold and needed to read something light - and I have to say I did rather enjoy them.

Shannara I've never read, and probably should at some point just to see whether it's as derivative as people say, but it's not high on my list of priorities.

We've got a few of the Gor books in our society library and I leafed through a copy of one of them a while back, while cataloguing everything, to see if they were as odd as people say. The random page I opened it on had a scene where a female character was begging (someone who I assumed was) the hero to enslave her. Rather disconcerting, and not a little bit distasteful, I thought. I don't expect to give it another go unless someone whose judgment I trust can give me a good reason to.

I intend to read The Wheel of Time at some stage, but I've sort of been waiting until they've all been written.

I've read the first five Harry Potter books. I know this, because there are copies on my bookshelves with creased spines. But I couldn't tell you in any detail what happens in any of them. There's something about a flying car in one of them, plus loads of kids wombling around in the cellars of a ramshackle old castle, defeating a rather two-dimensional Dark Lord, I think. I have vague plans to read the remaining two books, more for a sense of closure than anything else, but I see Diana Wynne Jones has recently written a new book so I don't see Harry Potter reaching the front of the queue any time soon.

I reread The Belgariad a couple of months ago, for the first time in about fifteen years - I was curious to see if I enjoyed it as much as I did when I was twelve. I still found it fairly entertaining, but something vaguely irritated me this time round that I'd not really noticed before: the central character is the long-lost heir to a great kingdom, destined to save the world by killing an evil god, has almost unlimited magical powers and is probably immortal into the bargain. And everyone, almost without exception, from the lowliest farm-worker right up to kings, princes and several millennia-old immortal sorcerers, not to mention his eventual wife, treats him like he's an incompetent, stupid child. I sort of expected him, at some point, to turn round and say "Look, for the love of all that's Tolkien-derived, give it a bloody rest! I've done everything you wanted me to do, and I did it pretty damned well, even if I do say so myself - I killed the evil god you wanted me to kill, and I saved the world. Will you please, for once, stop being so fucking patronising all the time!"

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

The Belgariad was clearly written cynically for gold -- I think the frontispiece explains that the author was 'exploring certain features of the genre' -- ie that you could make money for old rope. It is, I think, the only series I've ever read where there's a map at the front, and by the time you get to the end you have visited every single location on the map exactly once.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

The second quintet (the Malloreon) has to introduce an entire new continent full of exotic new places, and by the end of it they've visited every single one of them.

I do have a certain amount of respect for David Eddings, actually. He's made (presumably) millions of dollars by writing essentially the same story about half a dozen times, and doing so in such a way that people keep buying it. I remember a bit in the Malloreon where one of the characters says something like "have you noticed that a lot of the same things are happening to us this time round as well?" and one of the aforementioned immortal sorcerers says something about the cyclic nature of history and explains that this is the latest in a long line of battles between good and evil that have been going on since the creation of the universe. But this one's the decider. Oh yes. Even as a relatively naïve 14-year-old I thought "Ah yes, I see what he's done here..."

Fair play to him, though - and to JK Rowling, for that matter. They've hit on a formula that works and have very successfully milked it for all they can get. I've derived at least some enjoyment from reading their work over the years, even though they're not exactly the height of SF or fantasy literature.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

My impression when I read them long ago is that Eddings was implying that it helps teenagers grow up if you're nasty to them.

[rahaeli.livejournal.com]

You need an option for "so bad they're almost good, or at least entertainingly bad to read". I wouldn't say I liked Mission Earth at the time I read it, but I kept reading them for the sheer delight of just how bad they were! There is a special level of bad that's not just plain old bad, but bad-but-omg-so-much-fun, where the badness is so bad that you have to just keep reading to see how bad they are. (And it's not a degree of badness, either; there are very few things that could ever possibly reach that state, and it's gotta be some factor other than objective quality or lack thereof.)

[pisica.livejournal.com]

Definitely would have liked a 'started but gave up' option.

Missing: any series by Piers Anthony. :)

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

You took the words out of my mouth; the Xanth series is the very definition of kak.

[makyo.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine lent me a few of them when I was about twelve, and I remember mostly enjoying them at the time - although the puns did get very wearing very quickly. A few years ago I thought "maybe I should read one or two more at some point", hunted down a list of the books in the series, and the title of one of the later ones rapidly answered that question for me, in a very definite negative.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

What do you mean by the 'original Pern trilogy'? The Harper Hall trilogy (-song, -singer, -drums) was published between -quest and The White Dragon?

For what it's worth, -flight is good, and deserved the Nebula, -quest is fun, but TWD was the beginning of the downward slide.

[zz]

not heard of some of these, others i've seen in bookshops and either thought they were too thick or a series i'd have to read all of, and i've already got a dozen books that have been sitting under my bedside table for in a few cases years waiting for me to read them.

gor - if i want bdsm porn, there's the internet.
wheel of time - god no. even owen found it a slog, and he has an eng lit degree.
harry potter - they're all going to be made into films, so why read the books?

[andrewducker]

Because the books have a lot more in them than the films, what with having more space?

[headinclouds.livejournal.com]

All the ones I haven't read, I hadn't heard of either, so I've answered c ould be tempted to, cos I know nothing about them. That said, I do have an unfortunate tendency to want to read things that everyone tells me are dreadful, because I'm a bit perverse like that.

Also surprised you never mentioned the Mallorean - and I have a whole ready-prepared rant about that one, which can be conveniently unleashed at any moment. ;)

[andrewducker]

I wasn't including sequel series - it's hard enough knowing if the Belgariad is worth reading, let alone the Belgariad-photocopy...

[headinclouds.livejournal.com]

No, it's really not hard, I promise you. :p

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I wanted the Pliocene exile to be about surviving among the dinosaurs rather than about dealing with elf-like tyranny.

"Weir Search" was actually good. The rest of Pern didn't do anything for me.

I didn't finish the first Shannara book, but when someone told me the ending, it was so inventively stupid that thinking about it could cheer me up for months.

The first two and a half or so Gor books had some decent imitation Burroughs. I still like the idea of riding on giant falcons(?), but it's a shame it got mixed in with the B&D.

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

TC - hate the writing, love the world. I just put my fingers in my ears and go lalala can't hear you when he starts with the clenching.

I read the Belgariad at about 11 with bad chicken pox and I think it's perfect low involvement stuff for when you are sick, even if he doesn't appear to have a clue how male and female interaction works. The Mallorean was more tedious. I have never bothered with his other series after a quick investigation revealed they were the same book. The raspberry goes to Redemption of Athalus which he clearly wrote in his sleep.

I love Julian May - I like the Saga of the Exiles but actually prefer the prequels (in the character's lives if not in time).

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Embarrassingly, I rather liked the Gor books when I was a dumb teen. I appear tho to have a high meh factor,The only books there I actually liked were Pern (see La Marquise above for comments) and the Belgariad which I still think is rather good. Unlike the Mallorean which is shit.

[sterlingspider.livejournal.com]

The Thomas Covenant stuff is SOOOO much better the second time around when you can go "bitch moan whine *flip flip flip*, ahh, here's the plot again!".

It's important to read it all the first time as it gives you all the necessary tone of the character, but after once through it really isn't necessary, he's angsty, we know he's angsty, we move on.

[opusfluke.livejournal.com]

Got a bookmark of an article somewhere arguing that "Number of the Beast" was actually a rough guide on how to do plot arcs and point-of-view in a novel while referring to examples in literature. Still say no-one can do time-travelling incest epics like Michael Moorcock. Or sword-swinging-sorcerer-princes like him either (though in the Shannara series I liked Walker Boh and Cogline ven though they weren't part of the first three. The Mallorean hacked me off: Maragor should have been the place that no longer insisted! Not some feckin' sunken island! As for Pern I just scored som of the Harper Hall stuff in a charity shop and went "Ah ha! If only someone had told me it was set on an alien world and there were nice ideas about technological decline and loss I'd have read this years ago!" And would have got a few more of the gaggs in David Brin's "The Practice Effect" as well (same bloke who wrote Kil'n People" for those ravening masses who read my copy).

[opusfluke.livejournal.com]

Note to self: look up from keyboard and remove ciggy from gob occasionally to avoid glaring typographic errors.

[andrewducker]

http://www.heinleinsociety.org/rah/numberbeast.html
and
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/rec.arts.sf.written/browse_thread/thread/6983ad326d457fcc/d2f41caa74f5a248#d2f41caa74f5a248

[moniqueleigh]

Thank you for those! I've always loved Number of the Beast & could never quite articulate why. This nails it!