August 1st, 2008
by
Naamenblog
I apologize for the delay in getting the results up but I’ve been very busy the last couple of weeks.
We started with 105 nominees and after numerous votes I am here to present your Top 24! It was going to be you’re Top 20 here but due to a tie we have a Top 24 instead. Some might argue that some of the works are not that obscure but then we get into the problem of defining obscurity as it applies to many different folks, and there are quite a few works on the list that I consider quite obscure.
The second poll should be up on Monday and there will be a post that goes up when that happens but for now here they are in no particular order:
TOP 24
The Garden of Iden by: Kage Baker
Stranger At The Wedding by: Barbara Hambly
The Healer’s War by: Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
A Door Into Ocean by: Joan Slonczewski
Solitaire by: Kelley Eskridge
God Stalk by: P.C. Hodgell
The Privilege of the Sword by: Ellen Kushner
Zahrah the Windseeker by: Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
Bone Dance by: Emma Bull
The Orphan’s Tales – In The Night Garden by: Catherynne M. Valente
The Sparrow by: Mary Doria Russell
Polar City Blues by: Katherine Kerr
Smoke and Shadows (Smoke and Shadows series) by: Tanya Huff
The Fox Woman by: Kij Johnson
Swordspoint by: Ellen Kushner
The Shadow Speaker by: Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
Solstice by: Ulises Silva
Magic’s Pawn (The Last Herald Mage Trilogy)by: Mercedes Lackey
Midnight Robber by: Nalo Hopkinson
Blood Price (Blood Books series) by: Tanya Huff
Fire Logic by: Laurie J. Marks
Sheepfarmer’s Daughter (The Deed of Paksenarrion) by: Elizabeth Moon
Herland by: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Fool’s War by: Sarah Zettel
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Naamenblog at
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Final Round of Voting! – Top Ten Obscure(?) Works
Filed under Books & Literature, lists, polls | Comments (29)
Awesome.
It’s great to see the covers of all of these. Most of them have intriguing cover pictures.
Ack – someday I hope they un-whitewash that Fire Logic cover.
Very few of these are anything close to obscure. I still don’t get this.
Though, I am really pleased to find Katharine Kerr’s Polar City Blues on this list. Yet, it wasn’t published by a small, no-name press either.
How do you figure writers like Tanya Huff etc. are obscure and unknown? When their books are all on the shelves of all the chains still in operation?
Love, C.
I mean, honestly, and mean this with all due respect, I cannot figure out where you are coming from with this list. It seems a meaningless exercise from over here.
What am I missing?
Love, C.
Sadly, I don’t see that I can honestly participate in the second round of voting.
I think Herland is probably the only work I could vote for as both “obscure” and “people should read it!”
Most of the rest I haven’t read: of those I have, if I could, I’d vote against Fire Logic and The Last Herald Mage – the first is badly written, and the latter is trash – and is also, like every other book on this list that I have read, not exactly “obscure”.
J. Andrews-
Thanks!
Katie-
Couldn’t agree more.
Constance-
It’s actually not about where I’m coming from. All of these books were nominated by FemSF blog readers and voted on by those same readers so if you do have some issues with the books on there I’m not the one to blame. No one said obscure means coming from a no-name press or not being in stores but that’s your personal definition of obscure and that’s fine. For me personally over half of the books on this list are ones I’ve never heard of so they’re obscure to me.
and mean this with all due respect
I find that often those who use this line know that what they are saying is actually very disrespectful and rude. But maybe that’s not the case here and you didn’t mean to devalue all the hard work I put into all this, for arguments sake let’s say this is the case. The point is to have a Top Ten list out there that isn’t completely straight white male writers and characters. If you’re unhappy with what was nominated or what got a lot of votes I encourage you to go ahead and come up with your own personal list with more stringent guidelines. I simply allowed people to nominate things if they themselves considered it obscure and that was enough for me.
Yonmei-
I’m sorry you feel that way but I understand.
As I said in the above comment to Constance over half the books on the list are ones I’ve never heard of and so I consider them obscure. Are all of these super obscure? No and I noticed that when I saw how the readers were nominating and voting but I didn’t want to say “Well, I don’t consider this obscure because it’s not obscure to me.” That wasn’t the kind of list I wanted to come up with.
Also if we’re talking about obscure to a mainstream SF/F audience I think a lot of these fit the bill very well.
Maybe we can do another poll later with more stringent guidelines as to what is allowed to be nominated but it’s too late to do that for this poll.
Naamen, I don’t want to decry the work you put in – setting up two polls on Surveymonkey (one of them twice) is a lot of effort and I appreciate that.
But, honestly: I can’t vote for most of these books because I have neither read nor heard of them (which I suppose says something about their obscurity!).
I don’t think that The Sparrow (which has a heterosexual male protagonist) or Stranger at the Wedding (which is a heterosexual romance) qualify as “obscure” by anyone’s reckoning. That’s a value judgement but a separate one from my feeling that Fire Logic and The Last Herald Mage ought not to be included on grounds of quality.
What it comes down to, I suppose, is that I think that a list of “10 obscure books” that is decided by majority vote, is likely to eliminate books that are genuinely obscure, because so few people have read them, and include books that aren’t particularly obscure, because so many people have read them/like them.
Really, I think – given the results – majority vote by open poll was the wrong way to decide a list like this.
I’ve read about a quarter of the works on this list. I’ve heard of a few more, mostly from the Tiptree Awards, I think.
Even of the ones I _have_ read, many of those were from deliberately seeking out m/m or f/f books. I feel if you have to go looking for a specific type of character/book to read that goes beyond browsing a defined subgenre on Amazon, the books you’re going to find are going to be obscure. To you.
If after the final titles are selected, we want to test the obscurity of them by polling a random sampling of sf/f readers, I think that would be a fun and potentially enlightening exercise.
I think the least obscure on here is The Last Herald-Mage, but I accept I could very well be wrong.
You know what you could do to be truer to the ‘obscure’ moniker is to skim off the five with the most votes. Five off the top, five off the bottom, which if there are ties again will leave you with roughly 10 titles.
Some interesting choices here. I like Barbara Hambly, Tanya Huff and Elizabeth Moon but I would have chosen the latter’s Remnant Population over The Deed of Paksenarrion.
I really love that you took the time to put in the cover photos! It gave me chills to see how beautiful they were all together!
Yes indeed! The cover photos are a great add-on. The first two rounds, nomination and voting, I missed out on because there was a swamping amount of stuff. This round I can at least see what’s up. Makes it much clearer.
I think there is something inherently contradictory about voting for obscurity, since the more votes it gets the more widely read it is! The ones that get the least votes should be the most obscure.
That being said, ML is very popular and TH’s blood series is being made into a TV show, so I would not think they are obscure at all.
[...] Top 24 Obscure Works – Second Round of Voting Starts Monday at Feminist SF – The Blog! List of books to add to the tbr maybe? (tags: tbr books fantasy scifi sff) [...]
This is an interesting list. Plus I really liked seeing ALL these covers. What’s interesting is that my old old copy of A Door Into Ocean has a different illo. It’s the paperback reprint of what I think must have been a hardcover original. I guess the image here is the hc; the paperback I have is a more abstract landscape + space style image, sans female.
[...] Now in case you missed it: The Top 24 with Cover photos [...]
pk:
Tanya Huff’s Blood series was made into a TV show. It had two seasons and has been canceled. While the TV show does have a female protagonist, one who’s going blind to boot, the show is lacking the bisexuality of the main male character. So, in a sense, the books are obscure to the TV viewers. As they’ll see something in them they didn’t in the show.
[...] 10 Obscure Feminist SF/F” poll is in it’s final round. See the covers for nominees here.* Vote [...]
Is that true, that Henry is straight in the tv series? What a travesty.
Yep. They had to take Tony out because Huff wanted to retain the right to sell the Smoke books separately, but they didn’t show Henry with any other male lovers, whereas he frequently had female lovers (other than Vicki) onscreen. Oh, and once and for all: the TV series only had ONE season. It was just split in two for broadcast in the US.
I wouldn’t call the Last Herald Mage trash … maybe I’m showing my age, but when I was young it was the first book I ever encountered with a gay protagonist, and that meant a lot to me at the time. I found it in a used book store in Maine and it definitely registered on me (I must have been 10 or so). I’d question its status as obscure, but not as a positive contribution to the canon.
Tanya Huff and ML both are quite best-selling, so I’d feel a bit silly if they made it to the top of an “Obscure” list. Can we think of renaming it Underestimated or something more accurate? Because I’ve enjoyed the exercise so far.
I’m hoping for a win from Kushner, I think everyone needs to read her.
dave: maybe I’m showing my age, but when I was young it was the first book I ever encountered with a gay protagonist
The first book I ever encountered with a gay protagonist was The Mask of Apollo, by Mary Renault, when I was 14. The first SF novel I ever encountered with a gay protagonist was either Thendara House or Chrome, both when I was 17-18 (I read the Free Amazon Darkover novels a stage before I started reading all the rest). The first fantasy novel I ever encountered with a gay protagonist was The Door Into Fire, by Diane Duane, which I received Christmas 1984.
I think I first encountered the Herald Mage novels in the early 1990s – the first one was published in 1989, I note – and they struck me as being tiresomely stereotypical: as if Mercedes Lackey was caught in a timewarp and thought it would be terribly advanced to have an omg actual hero who was whisper it actually gay.
When I read The Heritage of Hastur, I guess now it was written (1975) by Marion Zimmer Bradley in the sure knowledge that some people would condemn her for writing a novel in which the young protagonist falls in love with, and forms a lasting bond with, another young man. But neither Danilo nor Regis react as if they knew this – they react according to the terms of their own culture, which accepts homosexuality very much in the Classical Greek mode, as a normal part of men’s lives which is separate from marriage.
I’m kind of sorry The Last Herald Mage was the first book you encountered with a gay protagonist: when I was a teenage queer SF fan, we had Diane Duane and Marion Zimmer Bradley to be our firsts…
…which is kind of the point of an obscure book list, yes? Are Duane and Bradley really forgotten writers now?
Update: I’m hoping for a win from Kushner, I think everyone needs to read her.
I’m voting for the Kushner book even though it’s one of hers I haven’t read, because yes. (I’m not voting for my full allotment, because, well – I think it would be appallingly silly if Mercedes Lackey were to get onto the list – but Ellen Kushner is excellent in so many ways.)
@Yonmei: …. don’t be sorry on my account. Its sweet that you think that the early 90s were so lovely that omg being gay was so easy for young people. :)
I think that young people have more and more resources available every year, and in large part to the efforts of those that had less and fought to create those resources, but its important not minimize the microcosmic conflict of coming out to your family. Its one of those conflicts that some weather better than others, but the worst examples can be pretty ugly.
Its funny I didn’t read the MZB books then though, my dad definitely had them on the shelf…
Sorry the reason for my sermon in the middle there was that I felt ML did a more than fair job of presenting that conflict, capturing the young forbidden love, getting into some of the family issues … not to say there weren’t trite elements, but still. I just cringe from hearing it called “trash.”
dave, I doubt if being young and LGBT has ever been easy – whether it was in the 1980s like me, or the 1990s like you, or a teenager today.
But yeah: I do find it sad that – where you were – despite the range and age of queer SF then available, the only novel you could find in which you saw your own sexual orientation reflected was a piece of trite trash in which the hero gets not one but two 1950s gay relationships. When there were novels already written, by name authors like Diane Duane, in which gay protagonists got to fall in love and not have the choice of dying tragically or having their lover go evil and die tragically – the 1950s resolution to two out of three of the Herald Mage novels, thank you Mercedes Lackey – then I do find it sad that this was all that was available to you.
I’m glad, at least, you had that: better to exist as a tragic hero who is allowed to be beautiful, celibate, and die, than to be invisible. But dammit: The Door Into Fire (1979) or The Heritage of Hastur (1975) or Dreamsnake (1978) were all better. And not, evidently, allowed to be available to you.
Quick clarification: Magic’s Pawn was just the first book I encountered, not the last. I totally feel you on the differences in terms of characterization of gay protagonists (its the difference between Will & Grace and the Wire, for instance). I guess I just think that ML has so consistently portrayed gay characters as having multiple dimensions, among them loving LTR, that I’m not as bothered by it. Maybe that’s complacency, but I want to own up to it either way.
(thanks for the conversation, I’ve enjoyed it)
[...] that the final round of voting in the Feminist SF Top Ten Obscure Works Poll ends tomorrow night! Here’s the post with the covers of the Top 24 books and here is the post with the link to the poll. Go [...]