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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Poll: The BEST Speculative Fiction Novel

Is The Handmaid's Tale the best speculative fiction novel?  It is if you don't vote!  The first several spots on our poll are still anybody's guess.  

As we move into the last week of November, we're running out of time to vote and is still anyone's guess how this poll might go. Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is ahead, but only by a tiny margin. And even if she does win, second place is basically a four way tie. Come vote and play kingmaker to your favorites!

The poll itself is on the left hand side of your screen.  It's the lowest"widget" down that side. Everyone gets 3 (three) votes. 

The poll will close at midnight on Dec 1st (unless I fall asleep, which is highly likely given recent circumstances and the chances a baby will be in the house by then, in which case I will close it the next morning and post results soon after.


Also--for those of you who have read this far--nominations for the next poll will be this Tuesday, BEFORE this poll is done, so start to think now about authors. We've done a lot of work-specific polls, but I'd like to give a shout out to authors.  And on the recommendation of wonderful peeps, I will probably be separating future polls of the very popular sub-genres (fantasy and science fiction) into "classic" and "contemporary" categories.  So for our next poll please think about which science fiction authors who wrote the main body of their works PRIOR to 1970 you would consider the best.  1970 lets us incorporate New Wave science fiction, and has the added benefit that nothing younger than me be considered "classic."

I also have a question for you, but you'd have to write in to answer. I get the feeling there's a lot of overlap here with geeks and geek culture and that polls in other genres will probably not get much response until/unless I have a LOT more readers, but how many of you would be interested in polls like "Best Western" or "Best Romance" or "Best Literary Fiction"?

4 comments:

  1. best whatever you want- I like your polls because they let me see books that others think are great and I can find new reading material. Keep 'em comin' my friend.

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  2. I've read a bunch of Louis L'Amour westerns because we had them in the house when I was growing up, and it was better to read those than not read (also, they were pretty good, as I recall). But I was more a fan of mysteries back in those days and always tried to sneak the new Ed McBain mysteries up to my room after dad read them because Mom was such a SLOOOOW reader. Ugh. It would take her a week to finish a book.

    I read a romance novel once. I immediately bought a five gallon jug of Brain Bleach.

    Is "Literary Fiction" all that stuff teachers make you read in school? I could go for that, because a lot of it was good stuff. (But there's no reason to make me read Grapes of Wrath five times in my academic journey. Seriously? Once or twice would have been fine. Or here's a novel [tee hee] idea... maybe something else by Steinbeck! Though I suppose it was my own fault for majoring in English.)

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    1. Most of what you read in school was actually probably genre of some kind or another in the strictest sense, but lit snobs don't like to think of it that way. Literary fiction has its own tropes and conventions, but Steinbeck would certainly be a good example.

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