attempting:Lucidity

When Orson Scott Card was asked: “What is your advice to the aspiring SF or fantasy novelist?” he replied:

Don’t even think about writing sf or fantasy unless you’ve read every story in: The Hugo Winners, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Dangerous Visions and Again Dangerous Visions.

These stories are the root of the field. If you don’t know them, you will try to reinvent the wheel; and since the readers do know them, it will kill your work. Besides, you can’t learn the tools of the trade without being familiar with how they’ve been used and developed. Science fiction is more demanding than literary fiction, and is harder to do well; the reward is that science fiction and fantasy allow you to tell any story that can be told in li-fi, and far more that can’t.

I don’t have specific aspirations to be a writer, but this seems like good advice for the sci-fi reader as well. So, instead of wandering blindly through the mass of sci-fi, i decided to read those works recognized by the writers and readers of sci-fi as the greats. And because i’m very bad at remembering book titles, i put together a chart to keep track of things. The chart gradually grew into something more, either exhaustive or monstrous— depending on your perspective.

I’ve included the Anthologies O.S. Card recommended, the Hugo Award winners and nominees, The Nebula Award Winners, and most of the Locus Award Winners. A total of 1100+ novels, short stories and intermediate length works. For convenience the chart tallies up your progress in the various award categories. It also displays how much of the content in each category you’ve read, weighing longer works more heavily than short stories. Finally there are brief non-spoiling summaries of some of the works i’ve read.

I don’t know how many people are rabid enough about sci-fi to use this, but here it is:
A excel chart of award winning sci-fi

My current, life-long total:
38% of the Hugo Winners
15% of the Total in this chart.

[UPDATE]
I’ve updated the chart. There were several errors, and one big mistake, the weights for “novellas” and “novelettes” were reversed. I.e. reading novelettes gave you twice the credit that novellas did with only about half as many words to read. It works like this: the longer the word, “novel, novella, novelette” the fewer words it has.

I’ve also added some links in the chart, and a column that distinguishes between sci-fi and fantasy. However these are currently blank for most.

Many of the better remembered radio shows, such as The Shadow or Buck Rogers are a bit too pulpy and predictable for my taste. I prefer programs with a strong story, some suprizes, and a more literary style of writing. Excluding programs that were short-lived or hard to find, here are some of my favorites. Continue reading ‘Some Recommended OTR Programs’