Personally, I think of Rowling as the literary equivalent to a summer popcorn movie: great fun, very entertaining and I love her work... But I wouldn't call her a "great" writer.

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I found the thread too late to vote, but the nominations were quite interesting. I didn't expect that it would take until halfway through the thread to have Pratchett mentioned.

I am in fear that I may have to hand in my geek card at some point; from the top ten, I haven'T heard of one author, and I have only read a complete book by three of them...

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I'm daft; I mostly commented because I wanted to say that I didn't even consider JKR although I enjoyed her books. A top three going along the line of 1.Tolkien, 2. GRRM, 3. JK Rowling would be.. kinda wrong.

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Indeed. Who was the one author you hadn't heard of?

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I like to consider myself fairly well-read in the genre, but I've not read 4 of the top 10 (Mielville, Hobb, Wolfe and Bakker). Out of the remainder I think I only voted for GRRM although I like four of the other five I've read (can't stand Donaldson).

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I'm suprised Tolkien is up there. The anti crowd is vocal. Missed the thread or would have given a point to Gemmell, obviously ;)

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He needed it. Four points was not a cool result :-(

However, he was in good company. That's all Alan Moore, Tim Powers and George Orwell got, and more than Stephen King, Michael Moorcock or Iain Banks.

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Yes, this board is quite selective in some ways. Not necessarily in a good way.
Fen and Zollo would have voted him too, so that's 3 extra points or more.
Alos, while I love Abercrombie to bits, one book is not enough to make a judgement on a whole career, obviously.

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Well, three ;-) But I know what you mean. At least Bakker has had a good five years to be talked about and discussed, and it's obvious he's going to be an author worth discussing for a long time to come, but Joe's a lot newer. Both him and Scott Lynch I think got 'flavour of the month' votes in that they are quite big at the moment but may not last the course unless they maintain a consistent high quality for some books to come. Interesting to see if they'd both be around so high on a poll done say five years from now.

The SFX board is also doing a similar poll at the moment and a cursory glance at their forum shows that Gemmell should rank a lot higher.

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I think there's probably some bias there due to Abercrombie posting so much on the boards, so people on Westeros are more likely than typical fantasy fans to have read the books.

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I didn't pay attention to the Tolkien threads when they were last making the rounds, but vocal fortunately does not mean numerous.

Besides, aren't most the complaints about what a lousy writer he is, versus what he accomplished as a whole? Bitching ceaselessly about Tom Bombadil is such a small part of the overall, it isn't worth listening to.

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The thing about this type of poll is that it is completely irrelevant how many people might hate the author (several of the other top-10 authors have a lot of people who dislike them, such as Donaldson or Erikson), it only matters how many people like them - it doesn't matter if the people who wouldn't list them as the best author hate them or merely think they are average.

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I am also surprised that Bakker recieved so many votes. I always thought Ran's Board had a huge number of people that hated him. Tolkien is kind of surprising as well, as there are many in the 'anti' crowd. I suppose they are simply very vocal.

I do think that Abercrombie benefited from being a recent big hit. Same with Bakker. It was also nice to see Gaiman, Vance, Borges, Zelazny, LeGuin, Kay, and Simmons to get such high praise.

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The people that dislike Bakker do so quite vehemently, probably because his books come across as being excessively sexist and focus a lot on the gory details of rape. It's work designed to provoke a reaction, so it shouldn't be a surprise that it provokes a strong negative one from time to time.

Plus there's the whole "Kelhuss is a Mary Sue douchebag" thing, which is enough to get every fanboi into the mix. I think there are a lot of fans of Bakker's (myself included) who are vocal about the negative aspects of his book but still feel he's a great writer.

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Am I the only person on the board who neither loves nor hates Bakker? I've read the first book, I'll read more when I get around to it...but that's about it. I just don't feel passionately about it, lol.

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Not a bad pick, but weirdly biased for fantasy (6 are fantasy only, the rest write both fantasy and sf) and lacks in a few much better writers. Very male biaised, which is not surprising on the board. Where's Ursula Leguin, for one?

I do like Abercrombie's books a lot, but he doesn't fit with authors like Wolfe or Martin. Erikson probably desn't either. I have a bias against Herbert, but he's a classic. Hobb's definitly not the best writer out there but she does have a significant work out there with a very rich and renewed imagination every time. Bakker's on the limit, he's very skilled and ambitious but is a bit too new to the genre to make it easy to say he deserves to be there.

... I'm talking too much for something polled randomly which I didn't even take part in. (Like I could name only 10 writers as best of the SFF genre!)

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LeGuin was just bubbling under at thirteenth place. I think the gender bias isn't really anything to do with the board but more the gender bias in SF and Fantasy writing: male writers in the genre outnumber the female ones considerably (as a consultation of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy shows). That said, McCaffrey, Octavia Butler, Lois McMaster Bujold, Connie Willis, Catherine Valente, Margaret Attwood, Celia Friedman, Michelle West, Amanda Ashley, Julian May, Patricia McKillip and Margaret Weis all did get nods.

Oddly, no Tanith Lee, JV Jones, Jacqueline Carey or KJ Parker, all popular female authors who come up reasonably frequently on the board. Rowling's absence I already noted. Susanna Clarke actually also made the list but slightly messed-up counting on my part meant I missed her. I'm less surprised to see no mentionn of Nancy Kress, who I don't think anyone other than me has ever brought up on the board. Beggars in Spain is a very good book.

Hmm. Tempted to do an uberpoll which would both allow more nominees (10 rather than 5) and would extend across multiple forums. However that would be a LOT of work and I'm not sure if I'm prepared to do it. To stop the moaning about people missing it, I'd also want to do it over a fair amount of time, say 4-6 months. I need to wait until my masochistic side kicks in properly ;-)

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Was Guy Gavriel Kay even given any votes?

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I think he was in the top 20 somewhere.

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I think the gender bias isn't really anything to do with the board but more the gender bias in SF and Fantasy writing
Well, let's say the board is (despite a relatively mixed demographics) one of the place that reflects gender bias in SFF. I know other places that don't (sadly, most are predominently female ones).

That said, McCaffrey, Octavia Butler, Lois McMaster Bujold, Connie Willis, Catherine Valente, Margaret Attwood, Celia Friedman, Michelle West, Amanda Ashley, Julian May, Patricia McKillip and Margaret Weis all did get nods.*
Yeah, of those I'd say Bujold, Willis, Friedman and McKillip definitly deserve a nod (I don't know Butler well, and never heard of Valente or read May). McCaffrey or Weis are just not that good XD
I'd say Tanith Lee is too inconsistent as a writer : she wrote some amazing things, but she also wrote a big bunch of crappy books (same reason I wouldn't have named Resnick either - the father, Laura's written a few good fantasy too).
I do adore KJ Parker but I need to read more books by her before I can her a very best writer - in terms of style, she might be a bit too narrow. I like it, but it makes sound every characters a bit the same.
Jacqueline Carey's an interesting writer, but she still needs to grow as such (and probably to write other things than Kushiel's series if commercial consideration don't force her)
Clarke's written, what, one novel and some short stories? Too early by far!
I don't know Nancy Kress. I'm surprise you don't mention Kushner though, she's an excellent writer, very masterful despite not having written a lot of novels.
Then there's the SF writers missing like Ian Banks, Ian McDondald, Greg Egan, Neil Stephenson, etc.

If you used something to code the poll more easily it would be simpler, would count some things automatically, such tools might exist somewhere on the internet. There's LJ polls too, although they're not exactly very sophisticated.

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If do the Uberpoll, I'll definitely look into alternative options for counting. It took over an hour just to count 85 votes!

Banks, McDonald, Egan and Stephenson all got a small number of votes, in Banks' case very small.

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Yes, I can imagine. I've had experience with these things once :)


very small for Banks? These people don't know what's good!

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You like Banks too? Awesome :-)

I need to read more of his stuff. I've read Excession, Consider Phlebas, Look to Windward and The Wasp Factory, and have The Bridge on the bookshelf (well...in a box at the moment). I've seen the TV version of The Crow Road which was great (exploding grandmothers FTW), but I definitely need to check out more from him.

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I rate Use of Weapon as one of the best SF book out there, so that weights a lot in Banks' favour in my mind. I've read Consider Phlebas, Look to Winward, Excession, Player of Games and a couple of his more mainstream books as well. I definitly need to read more... I have piles of books waiting for me at my father's library (typically a writer whose books I offer for my father for birthday and such to then read 'em ^^)

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Cunning! I approve of this method. I usually buy books for my friends/family for birthdays and then sneakily read them before wrapping them up. However, I feel bad about it afterwards ;-)

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LOL well as long as they don't get messed up by the reading no reason to feel guilty (I'm very careless with books, myself, folding corners to mark pages and such... :))

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QFT. So next time we meet up we can discuss Banks as well as BSG and the merits or lack thereof of the Dragonlance movie? Cool.

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Yeah, you'd think we be both SFF geeks!

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I think Banks is very inconsistent. Use of Weapons, definitely his best SF IMHO. But I'd be less enthusiastic about a lot of the others he wrote with the 'M' in.

On the other hand, The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road and Walking on Glass were all brilliant and M-less.

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If there's one thing we learned from the poll, it's that having an initial R in your name immediately confers greatness. I recommend you immediately change your name to "PeadaR. R.R.R. O'Guilin." for the next book, and you'd immediately come first place next year, unless Scott changes his name to R.R.R.R.R.R. Scott Bakker.

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Damn that R.R. Bakkerrr fellow! He steals my thunder every time!

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Well, his other books I read weren't as good as Use of Weapons, but they were still fairly high quality IMO. I make note of the books you rec, my TBR pile keeps getting higher...

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Mine too. If I could just stay off the internet for a few weeks, I'd knock it down in no time.

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Yeah, that always seems to be the big "if"... :D

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I've come up with a scheme whereby I volunteer for a dangerous experiment into standardised breathing. Basically, I just need to get a scientific institution to fund me where I breath oxygen for 24 hours a day and during that time I perform strenuous tasks including reading, playing computer games and watching DVDs. Although it is a challenging, gruelling experiment, I would be prepared to make the sacrifice. Sadly, getting funding has proven elusive so far ;-)

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I'll fund you! What an exciting experiment! The Scientific community would be bananas to turn you down!

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I think that the main point we can take out of these results is that m00bs has a lot of alts.

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Almost certainly.

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Bit surprised not to see Richard Morgan on that list.

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He was about halfway down the full list (which is posted on the board). I was more surprised at Guy Gavriel Kay (just) missing out on the Top Ten.

There are simply far too many good authors out there. When you see the list of all of those names plus possibly dozens more that are left off, you realise how well off the genre actually is :-)

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If you need a poll set up, I've a paid account and can do one in the future. All needs doing is link to it on the board then. AND think of every author under the sun.

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