# Fantasy, SF or Horror?



## Fried Egg (Sep 3, 2009)

Ok, I know this is a bit silly but I'm a bit bored at the mement. 

Which genres do you read? You may select more than one option.

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Personally, I like all three although I don't tend to go for straight horror. I like my horror to have supernatural, cosmic or SF elements to it.


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## Rosemary (Sep 3, 2009)

I went through a short stage of reading Horror, some Science Fiction but really and truly Fantasy is by far the best read for me!


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## Talysia (Sep 3, 2009)

Primarily fantasy for me, too, although I've been known to read SF from time to time.  I hardly ever read horror, though.


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## Rodders (Sep 3, 2009)

No, for me it's Science Fiction first then Horror. For some reason, i've never been able to get into fantasy. That said, i haven't read any horror for a while either.


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## Urien (Sep 3, 2009)

Of course there can be strong elements of horror in both Science Fiction and Fantasy. Tim Lebbon's Dusk is a very horror influenced fantasy... Science Fiction has its Aliens and buggles that'll suck your eyes right out of your head as soon as look at you. Perdido Street Station had steam punk SF, Fantasy and horror layered like a lasagne of speculative fiction, and jolly tasty it is too. (I claim the prize for p*ss poor simile of the month.)


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## thepaladin (Sep 3, 2009)

Horror is of course a sub-genre of fantasy. My wife was big into it and I have read a lot of it to share books she liked. There are some that seem to cross over, she liked Koontz for example (as do I in some cases) and liked the Douglas Preston/Lincoln Child Pendergast books (also books I can read without much trouble). She also liked some of King's work, Barkers, James Herbert and a few others I just don't care for (though I got through some of the books to share with her)  

(I will just put this here as a word of explaination. I must now use the past tense. I was off the sight for some months recently. My wife has been bed-bound for almost 2 years and I have been her primary care giver. Due to a series of strokes she was hospitalized about 3 months ago, spending the last month in ICU. She passed away the first of August this year. Thus my absence and why I haven't been spending as much time on the sight as I was. As time pases I hope to be able to handle more.)

There is some good horror out there and some fantasy that verges on horror but doesn't quite get the title. For myself I like Lovecraft.


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## The Ace (Sep 3, 2009)

I never got much satisfaction from horror.  Love the others, though.


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## chongjasmine (Sep 4, 2009)

I like fantasy. I am mainly reading on fantasy.


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## Connavar (Sep 4, 2009)

I prefer SF first then horror, fantasy as my third.

I might have read more fantasy than horror but a good horror is better than a good fantasy to my taste.

Horror wise i read alot of older works, i have a trouble getting to know modern horror.


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## Tansy (Sep 4, 2009)

Sorry to hear of your loss Paladin

I read mainly fantasy and horror with a bit of sci fi thrown into the mix occasionally


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## j d worthington (Sep 4, 2009)

My condolences, Paladin -- and I will say that that sort of sharing was a wonderful way to be supportive of someone you love.

Well, I suppose if I had to choose between them, I'd probably come down on the "horror" side -- but only just. And even then, I'd have to qualify it strongly, as I'm not much of a fan of what Lovecraft called "the mundanely gruesome". I like my terror tales to have a hint, at least, of the incursion of something otherworldly, something which expands rather than contracts, the emotional reaction to the world and the imaginative possibilties out there.

More and more, I've come to agree with several recent scholars of the field that "the weird tale" is a better description than either "horror" or "terror", as many of the same emotions are aroused by very disparate types of tales, often from the same writer. Machen, for instance, with his "straight" horror of "The Great God Pan", the mingling of terror and awe, mystery, and wonder of "The White People", and the decidedly non-frightening but nonetheless weird tale of the numinous, "A Fragment of Life". (Or Blackwood, with "The Wendigo", "The Willows", and "The Man Who Played Upon the Leaf".)

Of course, this is where "Fantasy" and "Horror" meet, and it is this sort of writer whose work I mostly enjoy -- the ones who can truly give that feeling of a violation of the laws of nature as we understand them, whether to stir emotions of fear, wonder, or awe.....

But, to be honest, I'm an afficionado of all three, and my choice might change from day to day....


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## Fried Egg (Sep 4, 2009)

Actually, now I think about it, it is where the genres meet that I find most interesting these days. When exploring and probing these bounderies, authors probably feel most liberated. As the reader, you least know what to expect. And let's face it, that's what we read this sort of thing for isn't it? We want to be suprised, awe struck and confounded.


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## thepaladin (Sep 4, 2009)

Back in the early '80s I read a nonfiction book by Stephen King called Danse Macabre. It's probably the book by him I enjoyed most. Anyway one part of the book discusses what he refers to as the three levels of horror story.

First there is terror. he uses the example of the mysterious door at the top of the stair. before the door is opened there is terror. This is what he said he strives for. To never have to open the door. Once the door is open no matter what is beyond it, no matter what it is, no matter how awful...it might always have been worse. What's in your mind is always worse.


Next there is horror. That's when the door is opened and you get to see the "horror" beyond.


Last is revulsion, or as he also calls it, the gross out. 

He says he tries for Terror.....will also use horror...but isn't too proud to go for the gross out if all else fails.


Personally I think he goes for the gross out far too often. ​


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## Tansy (Sep 4, 2009)

he always goes for the gross out?? but often he falls short lol


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## j d worthington (Sep 5, 2009)

There have always been discussions of these differences, and my personal favorites would have to be Edmund Burke's *A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful*, Anna Laetitia Barbauld's "On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror", Ann Radcliffe's "On the Supernatural in Poetry", and Devendra P. Varma's *The Gothic Flame*, from which I take the following excerpts:



> The chords of terror which had tremulously shuddered beneath Mrs. Radcliffe's gentle fingers were now smitten with a new vehemence. The intense school of the Schauer- Romantiks improvised furious and violent themes in the orchestra of horror.... The contrast between the work and personalities of Mrs. Radcliffe and ' Monk' Lewis serves to illustrate the two distinct streams of the Gothic novel: the former representing the Craft of Terror, the latter and his followers comprising the chambers of Horror....
> 
> The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse. Professor McKillop, quoting from Mrs. Radcliffe, said that " obscurity [in Terror] . . . leaves the imagination to act on a few hints that truth reveals to it, . . . obscurity leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate". Burke held that "To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary", and added that, ". . . darkness, being originally an idea of terror, was chosen as a fit scene for such terrible representations ". Burke did not distinguish between the subtle gradations of Terror and Horror; he related only Terror to Beauty, and probably did not conceive of the beauty of the Horrid, the grotesque power of something ghastly, too vividly imprinted on the mind and sense.
> Terror thus creates an intangible atmosphere of spiritual psychic dread, a certain superstitious shudder at the other world. Horror resorts to a cruder presentation of the macabre: by an exact portrayal of the physically horrible and revolting, against a far more terrible background of spiritual gloom and despair. Horror appeals to sheer dread and repulsion, by brooding upon the gloomy and the sinister, and lacerates the nerves by establishing actual cutaneous contact with the supernatural...


 
(The above was taken from this site: Terror and Horror )

Of course, one of my favorite short quotes on the subject is from Mrs. Radcliffe: "'They must be men of very cold imaginations [...] with whom certainty is more terrible than surmise. Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them'."

What I look for in a weird tale (and frequently find also in the best fantasy -- at least, of a serious rather than humorous, nature), is something alone those lines. Which is why I tend to enjoy more of the older writers than the new (though there are some of the more recent writers who do indeed walk that tightrope very, very well, including such as Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell, T. E. D. Klein, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and the like)....


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## thepaladin (Sep 5, 2009)

The very quote you use points to the fact that the reading public seems to have destroyed their imaginative pallet (so to speak). The terror passages in many older horror, or terror, or to use your term (and I love it as [consciously or not] it harkens back to the old magizene ) Wierd fiction tales..were almost poetic. People today don't seem to have the mental "chops" to appriecate that. 

On the whole TV and frightening tales have been (in my openion) a falure (though some of the old radio programs were great at it. They forced use of the imagination.) But... one of the better writers (and thinkers) in the field, Rod Serling on the creation of his second TV series _Night Gallery _(an abysmal program) when he was interviewed (I saw this interview and remember it) said that he had hoped the program would be more of a "cerebral exercise" than it turned out to be.  

People seem to need scenes of flying blood, splattering mucus, broken limbs. Good tales of terror are becoming fewer and farther between.... Big Macs over prime rib so to speak.

Just a sign of the times I suppose.


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## j d worthington (Sep 5, 2009)

My use of the term "weird tale" for such is hardly original with me; it has been increasingly used by some scholars of the field for the last 20-30 years, and even Lovecraft tended to use the phrase a fair amount (though his definition of the weird was a good deal more literal and restrictive than is the case with general usage even among knowledgeable commentators). I've come to use the phrase more often than "horror", "terror", "ghost story", etc., because it covers a good many more _types_ of tale which nevertheless often have many things in common.

By the way, paladin -- have you ever read any of the above, and are you at all interested in works which examine or analyze this sort of thing? If so, you may be interested in looking up copies of three books by S. T. Joshi: *The Weird Tale* (which covers Machen, Blackwood, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, Lord Dunsany, and HPL), *The Evolution of the Weird Tale*, which is comprised of essay-reviews of works by writers in the field from various periods, and *The Modern Weird Tale*, which focuses on writers from the mid-to-late twentieth century. I don't always agree with Joshi's conclusions (sometimes I disagree quite strongly), but they are very good books on the subject, often challenging, always thought-provoking, and provide some very useful, if brief, primary bibliographies for several of the writers along the way...


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## Connavar (Sep 5, 2009)

I like the term weird too, I like reading the more cerebral tales that makes your imagination do the scary work.

Thats why horror wise I'm stuck on reading classic,older writers of supernatural horror,weird stories.


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## thepaladin (Sep 5, 2009)

I'm familiar with the woks of many of the authors listed but not the works listed I'll go on a web search after I post this. Are familiar with the old pulp mag. Wierd Tales? There has been an attempt to revive it, but I haven't seen any of it...not been willing to order and the only book store that carries it here orders about 2 copies and I never catch them. I've read some of the H.P. Lovecraft mag. but it usually fails to live up "to the writer whom they named it after"....grammer is dead...participles die if you leave them dangling...

Thanks for the recommandations, I've gotten away from the "wierd tale" genre in the last few years as it's so lean...mostly just the literary version of the "slasher film". And I hate slasher (or dead teenager) films.


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## j d worthington (Sep 6, 2009)

Oh, I'm very aware of the old _Weird Tales_ pulp -- at one time I had about 50 issues of the original, spanning from around 1926 to 1952. (Sadly, as with a lot of the rarer things in my collection, I had to part with them under very trying circumstances.)

There have actually been at least three or four attempts to revive it, as I recall. One in the 1970s(?); again as a paperback magazine from Zebra in the early 1980s (edited by Lin Carter, if you can believe it!), again in the late 1980s or 1990s (I don't recall just when this run began); and then the current set, issued by Wildside Press. I only have one issue of the latest incarnation, which has a lengthy novella of Elric by Michael Moorcock; and I have a small handful of the earlier issues from the 1980s/1990s. Some good things, definitely, but it seldom has quite the same "magic" as the original. But then, the original largely lost that magic by the 1940s, as well....

I also have several anthologies which are selections from the magazine, often quite good, and often quite broadly representative of the entire run. (There's also one titled *Rivals of Weird Tales*, which has some stories from that magazine, as well as from various competitors from the 1930s through the 1950s.)

You may also be interested in knowing that Ash-Tree Press is bringing out the complete fiction of Henry S. Whitehead, a member of the "Lovecraft Circle" who is often overlooked these days, and one of the best craftsmen when it came to tales based on the folklore and beliefs of the West Indies. So far, only volume one has seen print, but I hope the others do manage to make it, as well:

Passing of a God

There's also a set supposed to be coming out from Midnight House of the best weird fiction of Robert S. Hichens (author of that particularly chilling tale, "How Love Came to Professor Guildea"), but only the first volume (*The Return of the Soul*) has seen print so far....

Connavar: There are a few writers out there, at least, whose work you'd likely find of interest. I named some of them above, but looks like there may be a few others to add to the list now and again....

Speaking of oddities in the fantasy realm, though... who here has read Charles G. Finney's *The Circus of Dr. Lao*, and if you woudn't define that as fantasy... what would you call it?


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## manephelien (Sep 6, 2009)

Fantasy and science-fiction about equally, very rarely horror.


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## thepaladin (Sep 6, 2009)

I've read Hitchen's story and some of Whitehead to.... I have "sort-of" gotten away from "horror" (as it's more often known now) or wierd lit. in the last few years (decades). As much as I don't want to take anything away from him and admitt he's a talented writer S. King and the authors who have been ushered in of late left me cold. It's possinle to write a book well, but appeal to one audience over another. that may be what is happening. Tom Tryon was really ahead of King (Harvest Home, The Other etc.) but his books while well written left me dissatisfied. I suppose the very negativity engendered in those tales is thing some readers are looking for though.

I have a few collections but they are mostly older Poe to Lovecraft (Lovecraft of course has engendered an entire mythos and school of writing...some members of which aren't....well a plus...but they try.)

Every now and then I try a new writer....of the past few decades my favorute might be Stroub's  Ghost Story. Had some good early moments and a nice (somewhat) original villian(ess?) 

Of more recent vintage The Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill started out pretty well...but went somewhat down hill i suppose. 

I like some of Koontz but it's of a totally different school. I'll probably look up some of the volumes you mention and keep looking for other anthologies. I've got a friend who own's a used book store sort of on the look out most of the time.

Are you familliar with Chamber's The King in Yellow ? A couple of good stories in an otherwise disappointing volume...still the 2 are worth a look.


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## j d worthington (Sep 7, 2009)

thepaladin said:


> Are you familliar with Chamber's The King in Yellow ? A couple of good stories in an otherwise disappointing volume...still the 2 are worth a look.


 
Indeed. It's been a while since I read the collection as a whole, but it (as with all of Chambers' weird work) _is_ uneven. Still, even those which may disappoint on first reading -- at least those in the first half of the volume or so -- tend to grow in power with later readings. You may be interested in looking up Robert Price's comments on that collection in the anthology *The Hastur Cycle*, from Chaosium Books. There are also some quite interesting sproutings from that connection, such as Karl Edward Wagner's "The River of Night's Dreaming", in that anthology, as well.

I quite like Tom Tryon's two weird novels, but I've not read anything else by the man. (Joshi, incidentally, has some very interesting comments on them in his book.) I find King to seldom be to my taste, but now and again he has done something which is really quite good; but then, I've read so little of his work over the last decade or so, that I'm not really qualified to comment much on that one. Straub's *Ghost Story*... again, uneven, but when it's good, it's excellent.

However, as I've mentioned (numerous times) elsewhere on the boards, the last few years I've been reading (along with other things) the entire list of things mentioned by HPL in his "Supernatural Horror in Literature"... along with, frequently, ancillary items by a lot of the writers mentioned; so that has largely kept me reading older material, a lot of which I hadn't ever read before, such as the heavy dose of Maupassant I finished recently. Only about a tenth of the short stories he wrote were weird, and of those, only a handful actually border on or cross over into the supernatural, but there's some powerful work there.

As for fantasy... I must admit that I'm wary of long series, or multi-volume epics, as too often I find the emphasis _is_ on the tinsel of world-building and less on substance -- that is, presenting the writer's _Weltenschauung_ or a distillation of their experience of life, something which at least honestly, to the best of the writer's ability, attempts to get to the meat of the human experience (even if in symbolic or metaphorical form). Don't get me wrong; when dealing with an alien milieu, world-building _is_ important, but when it overshadows the things which make for genuine literature in favor of the surface stuff, I find such things too thin for my taste, generally speaking. So there, too, I tend to prefer several of the older writers. Though they are sometimes less polished, or their worlds are rougher around the edges, there seems to be more genuine thought to what they're saying (even when, as with Tolkien, I frequently disagree with their views), and it is that which to which I am more attracted....


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## thepaladin (Sep 7, 2009)

I love "good" epic fantasy...it tends to some what rare...but when you find it it's worth it. While he is also "uneven" to use your word I tend to like some of Michael Mooecock's works. A lot of his multi-volume works simple fall in the same universe without necessarily being tied together (of course a lot are...)


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## j d worthington (Sep 7, 2009)

thepaladin said:


> I love "good" epic fantasy...it tends to some what rare...but when you find it it's worth it. While he is also "uneven" to use your word I tend to like some of Michael Mooecock's works. A lot of his multi-volume works simple fall in the same universe without necessarily being tied together (of course a lot are...)


 
Well, I think Moorcock tends to escape some of that by seldom having written multi-volume series _which were planned that way from the beginning_. Instead, he does these things tale by tale (or at most a brief arc of books more intimately tied together, such as the recent trilogy featuring Elric, or the Pyat books, etc.), usually addressing exactly the sorts of things I was talking about earlier. As a result, the technical points or minutiae don't always agree but, as Moorcock himself has stated, he is much less concerned with that sort of pedantry than with what the tale itself has to say. He does iron out major inconsistencies in most cases (though there are deliberate exceptions which seem representative of the sometimes chaotic nature of his multiverse), but the smaller details, no -- unless they play some important role in the nuances of the thing.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, this reminds me a great deal of the sort of thing that Balzac did, yet the overarching structure and vision of Balzac's _Comédie humaine_really does reduce such things to insignificance... as does that of Moorcock's work.

An exception (at least, to some degree) to this whole caution about "world-building", would be Tolkien, who did put an enormous amount of thought into such details; but, again, the whole project was informed more by the subtext of his philosophical views than the fascination with creating a fictional reality in ponderous detail for its own sake.


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## thepaladin (Sep 7, 2009)

Well, in his way Tolkien does stand sort of outside all that. He constructed his tale (and all it's attendant works) in a single "piece". To him it was (TLoL) one work.

I used to read old antholagies of horror..usually found somewhere on the musty back shelves of some small library or used book shop (mostly librasies however or I'd still have more of them). They have almost all vanashied now. I can remember some wonderful stories that I can't track down anymore. Some of those stories, if you tried to give a synopsis would sound "horribly" rolleyes: okay in this instence it's sort of a pun...but it's the best word, really) predictable. But, the writers managed to creat wonderful atmospheric stories. I remember one I believe was titled "Where Angles Fear to Tread", an unfortunate title as it's been used a hundred times for everything from other stories to movies, music, novels, etc.... It concerns a couple spending a night in a room where (of course) everyone who ever slept there was dead in the morning. Thye of course predictably find in the morning their bodies are hanging by rope and they are apparently dead.... sounds likea million other stories. But the story followed them through the night and was very well done, stayed with me as have a lot of others. 

And not a splatt of blood against a wall in the entire story....

Or "The Yellow Wall Paper" (yellow is apparently good use because it can imply sickness etc. you see it a lot.)

You mention Balzac. Going back much farther we find esoteric and strang stories. Wierd tales are some of the earliest stories we have. When the night was dark, and the only light was a fire, they probably came pretty naturally.


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## j d worthington (Sep 7, 2009)

Yellow served in a lot of symbolic ways around the close of the nineteenth century -- recall the periodical, The Yellow Book, which published the art of Aubrey Beardsley and pieces by Oscar Wilde, etc. It stood for (among other things): decadence; chinoiserie (or a far-eastern influence in general); the jaded or "jaundiced" views of things such as Romanticism, chivalry, bombast, idealism, etc., current at the time, and so forth -- as well as illness and death.

Incidentally, on the subject of old tales, you might be interested in taking a look at the following:

http://www.horrormasters.com/Collections/SS_Col_Collison-Morley.htm

I will warn you, though, you'll want to mute the sound, as the musical selection can be a bit annoying....

On the subject of such old anthologies -- yes, I've got a fair number of those, many gathering things from the old pulps, as well as a lot which take their selections from the entire history of the weird tale. Two of my personal favorites remain a couple of books I picked up as a child -- part of the old Whitman children's line, both edited by Stephen P. Sutton: *Tales to Tremble By*, and *More Tales to Tremble By*. You couldn't ask for a better selection to give someone an introduction to the potential of the classic weird tale:

*Tales to Tremble By*:

The Hand, by Guy de Maupassant
The Middle Toe of the Right Foot, by Ambrose Bierce
No. 1 Branch Line, The Signalman, by Charles Dickens
Adventure of the German Student, by Washington Irving
The Sutor of Selkirk (Anonymous)
The Upper Berth, by F. Marion Crawford
The Judge's House, by Bram Stoker

*More Tales to Tremble By*:

The Red Lodge, by H. Russell Wakefield
Sredni Vashtar, by Saki
Thurnley Abbey, by Perceval Landon
"God Grante That She Lye Stille", by Lady Cynthia Asquith
The Voice in the Night, by William Hope Hodgson
The Extra Passenger, by August Derleth
Casting the Runes, by M. R. James
The Book, by Margaret Irwin

As if reading Poe at age 6 wasn't enough to get me hooked....


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## Lioness (Sep 7, 2009)

I'm primarily a fantasy reader. I will read pretty much anything fantasy.


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## thepaladin (Sep 8, 2009)

I love fantasy to...but I didn't have access to a lot of books till i was around 13 so I would search out the books in the back or on the bottom shelves of school libraries.

I didn't find Poe till I was near 12. Our country school put me in one of their first advanced reading programs and the teacher intoduced us to Shakespere and also Poe.


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## Constantine Opal (Sep 8, 2009)

Sci-fi moreso than fantasy, although I do read both. Sci-fi just has more an air of possibility about it... Fantasy always has a medieval air to it but sci-fi is so varied, it's just amazing. The Rama series in particular by ACC was spellbinding... but by the same token, so was the Philip Pullman trilogy which is pure fantasy... er... can I just sit on the fence?


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## Fried Egg (Sep 8, 2009)

Constantine Opal said:


> Sci-fi moreso than fantasy, although I do read both. Sci-fi just has more an air of possibility about it... Fantasy always has a medieval air to it but sci-fi is so varied, it's just amazing. The Rama series in particular by ACC was spellbinding... but by the same token, so was the Philip Pullman trilogy which is pure fantasy... er... can I just sit on the fence?


Yes, you can sit on the fence! That's why the poll options are not mutually exclusive!


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## thepaladin (Sep 8, 2009)

Sure, I voted fantasy..but I read all three. And other things besides of course..


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## Fried Egg (Sep 9, 2009)

thepaladin said:


> Sure, I voted fantasy..but I read all three. And other things besides of course..


You read..._other_ things too?


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## nj1 (Sep 9, 2009)

Fantasy (followed by Historical fiction)


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## thepaladin (Sep 9, 2009)

Sure,,,on occasion . I'd leave a list....but who's interested...it would just be, a list.


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## thepaladin (Sep 9, 2009)

Note again the result of "typing fast and posting without a second look".


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## Krystal (Oct 4, 2009)

I have to say scifi and horror, although recently I have been reading more horror than scifi. But my selections always got into this two categories.


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## J-WO (Oct 5, 2009)

SF for me, then weird tale horror. I think I'd read a lot more fantasy if it didn't have magic in it. I read one recently and- while i loved the imagined world, its cultures and characters- the wizardly stuff seemed a drag. 
I get the feeling that magic gets tacked onto a lot of fantasy worlds out of some knee jerk instinct- 'well, its fantasy, it can't possibly _not_ have magic!'

Of course I could be stereotyping. I haven't read all that much.


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## The DeadMan (Nov 2, 2009)

I read it all, but I mostly read Science Fiction. I really like Space Opera and Military Science Fiction. That being said, I have read over 100 Dragon Lance books too.


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