Sorry, but the voting-modules were all screwed up. Anyway, now they work, but we're having some other technical difficulties here with second votes and memberships that get lost and some problem with new recruits trying to register.....

A knockout event for sf & fantasy authors. Or, a self-help attempt by the SF & Fantasy meeting to inject more debate into monthly conversations*. Or a serious determination by Socratic method of underlying values implicit in SF & Fantasy. Or a piece of fun.

Over the next 6-9 months we'll be arguing our way through one main event and two subsidiaries. You can join in by:

1. Forecasting final results.
2. Voting in the various rounds (in the event of a close result here, non-attendees’ votes count)
3. Following write-ups of the action month-by-month. There will be prizes to a total of €100 for the best comments submitted to the website, to be judged by the International Tournament Committee’s spiritual advisor.

Vast sums have been expended on major prizes for the authors, collectable either from the planet Arisia or the Undying Lands. The local pawnbroker is presently mulling over our offer on some silverware.

*In English only

CRITERIA: All authors entered in the tournament must have written several genre-relevant works. This is a compromise list – the 64 authors competing in this tournament are not intended to constitute a definitive list of “the best 64” writers of science fiction or fantasy, but at least half would appear in any such list. Writers whose major works were written before the 60s have been entered in the Seniors’ Tournament. Writers whose works could under no circumstances be described as ‘major’ have been entered in The Other Competition. In our discussions we'll be focusing on how good a writer a particular author is, how good an SF or fantasy writer, and then ignoring such ratings in the vote. This will be taken on the basis of choosing the author it would give you the most pain not to have read**. Specifically, this should ignore personal historical significance, e.g. if you'd never read Tolkien / Heinlein you wouldn't have gone on to read Mary Gentle or Ian Banks. This means that while the debates themselves may trace historical development and webs of influence and inspiration, the voting process itself should be limited to a reaction to the specific authors purely in the context of the match. We do not pretend to be fair, either in the original selection or in procedures to be followed, though we have at least started with random drawing of opponents.

** This goes for the main event and the seniors competition. For the other competition REVERSE the voting criteria.

HOW TO VOTE ONLINE: Choose a pairing by clicking on the vote-button. You will find a button to go back to the sf-main-page on every results page. We will post an overview of all results as soon as it makes sense. We are aware that there are better technical solutions to count your ways, but this one works without having to fuck around with cgi-bins etc.

Read the form guide for the first round

Go and join the Big Tournament

The Other Competition

The Seniors

1st round - main event:

The following editorial comments are heavily influenced by local bias, and do not reflect the opinions or views of the International Tournament Committee. However, we hope that they will provide starting points for discussion, and fertile soil for off-the-cuff return comments, which will be judged by the ITC’s spiritual advisor, and the best of which will be awarded prizes to a total of €100.

Dick should make it, if only on the grounds of more coherent paranoia. Le Guin and Delany have relatively straightforward draws. Moorcock and Ballard should make it, though Megan Lindholm (aka Robin Hobb) could have some chance of causing an upset. Wolfe and Lem should go through, though arguably against better writers, as should Lee and Cook, though arguably over more interesting thinkers. Ryman vs. Stephenson could be close, but I'll take Ryman’s originality over Stephenson’s technique. Blaylock & Gentle are favoured over two worthy opponents. Powers and McKillip, the latter especially, may be vulnerable to the sentimental vote. The tie of the round is Martin vs. Banks - this is far too close to call. The Strugatskys against Tiptree Jr is just odd, with the latter holding a slight edge. Lafferty must be a favourite to progress. KJ Parker vs. CJ Cherryh is another difficult one. The latter's years of solid, major achievement against the former's Scavenger series, possibly the best fantasy trilogy since Mary Gentle's White Crow: Parker by a nose. In defiance of truth, justice and some good taste, Douglas Adams might upset Angela Carter. Ford vs. Aldiss might be extremely close. Leiber, Vonnegut and Robinson should just make it through. Butler might lose out to Noon, in that she generally inspires respect rather than affection. Yes, this is written by a male (...and typed by a trained monkey!) Jonathan Carroll probably has sufficient intellectual weight to go through, and Russ and Hamilton look reasonably solid, Russ because she’ll get the feminist vote, Hamilton because he’s an unscrupulous crowd-pleaser and weighs in as a Super-Heavyweight with the 3000+ page Night’s Dawn Trilogy. Most of the group have read Geston’s "Mirror to the sky", so I'll expect a clear win against Greg Bear. Egan / Harrison and McAuley / Watson are difficult, partly because of epoch. No clear favourites. Julian May could make it, though partly on sentiment, against G K Kay, whose worthiness may prove a handicap. Coney is a generally underrated author, but I can't see him progressing against Lucius Shephard, whose “psycho-spiritual” depths have already been dredged in the test round.

The Big Tournament

The Seeds

The Seniors

The Other Competition

The seniors competition is bound to be fairly random. No clearent predictions, but would expect both Smiths, Henderson and Vance to do better than might be expected.

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The Big Tournament

The Other Competition

As stated, this is judged by different criteria. We’ll be weighing up the contestants in terms of: banality, lack of humour, just-this-side-of-actionable-plagiarism, didactic propaganda, uninteresting fetishism, disservice to the genre, complacency and sheer bad writing. In a crowded field, LaHaye and Jenkins are probably narrow favourites, with Hubbard close behind.

Terry Brooks versus David Drake is a clash of pure simplemindedness. Or to remind those of you who may have forgotten the joys of these two authors, reading them is like getting mugged by a syphilitic hobbit with a penchant for yelling out the caliber of each bullet he fires into your brain.

So, is Donaldson an abysmal writer with OK ideas, or should he be held responsible for having alienated so many readers from this genre? And would it help if van Vogt understood his own ideas better?

Anthony and Fanthorpe are both charged with industrial-level deforestation.

Salvatore and his legions of rich-kid zombie readers should triumph over Campbell, who, while not only being an exceptionally bad writer, was also a Scientologist.

The evening on Lackey and Weber should be a once-in-a-lifetime display of puerile and sentimental romanticism versus barely-sublimated Victorian reactionary tendencies. We expect a high turnout for this one.

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McCaffrey, by virtue of her legion of acolytes, should defeat the oldster Gernsback.

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The monolith that is Hubbard should have no trouble in defeating the nefariously ubiquitous Anderson…

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…but the real polarizing will occur in the following match, in which we shall bravely traverse the primeval testosterone sludge of John Norman’s Gor books to attain the dizzy Christian dreamlands of C S Lewis.

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Bova’s hard SF is boring to the point of coma-inducing, but Goodkind actually dedicated one of his books post-9/11 to the US intelligence community…

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Weis & Hickman, sires of the viral abomination that is Dragonlance, will probably have no trouble in vanquishing the discipline-fetishes and naval soporifics of Mr. Feintuch.

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The extraordinarily treacle-like consistency of Dennis McKiernan’s prose must indeed be strong of heart to stand up against the solid conceptuals of other authors distantly glimpsed through Piercey’s longeurs.

The true Clash of the Titans, this confrontation should shake many foundations many in a pyromantic display of narrow moral propagandist simplicity.

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While Lumley has done more than any other writer to defile the grave of H P Lovecraft, (the late) Heinlein displays the disconcerting spectacle of an ageing icon vanishing up his own reactionary asshole.

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The earnest plodding of Elizabeth Moon may not give her the necessary impetus to outrace the necrophiliac antics of Frank’s son in this bout.

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Here we have Christian fascists vying for supremacy with works which would normally fail the Turing test.

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De Lint and Pournelle. The beloved crypto-fascist parasite on Niven’s back versus the Prince of Twee.

The Big Tournament

The Seniors

Samuel R. Delany Ursula K LeGuin Philip K. Dick Gene Wolfe Mary Gentle Stanislaw Lem Michael Moorcock Geoff Ryman James Blaylock J. G. Ballard Angela Carter Kurt Vonnegut K. J. Parker George R. R. Martin Glen Cook Tanith Lee

The Big Tournament

The Seniors

The Other Competition

La Maison d'Ailleurs is a little museum in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland which hosts great sf-artshows online and in the real world.

Of all the murders on our block: the shooting of Irma Deitch, the stabbing of Harry the Rot and the drowning of the Schmidt twins last summer... none can compare to the poisoning of the hippy chick who made bogus chips of the Berlin Wall and sold them on the street next to the organ grinder at the Zoo bahnhof.
She was barely a teenager when they loaded her with bad candy. It took her a long time to die, she crawled by the bookstore where some of us watched her last spasms. I can never forget the bright cotton dress with yellow flowers all over it that she always wore.
The frantic way Darius poured beer into her throat hoping to revive her, him calling the ambulance on his cell phone, sobbing, shaking her shoulders, giving her mouth-to-mouth. His tears falling into her mock Jamaican blonde ringlets.

Yep, that's gonna be the topic for the next meeting of the sf-bookclub in June 1st.

Check out these links: Sex and Science Fiction at fact-index.com
Sex and Science Fiction at wikipedia.org

More pictures by the internet's latest unknown hero!

I rediscovered Habbohotel today, still the best chat-enviroment available!

You wanna save the earth on a daily base? Join the ranks of the mighty GALAGA SQUADRON KREUZBERG. Register behind the desk at the shop, read everything about the greatest video-game in the world and try to become the new commander on the legendary Knoppix-Galaga or practice your skills with this online-version over here

Run to the hills, run for your life! HERCOLUBUS IS APPROACHING EARTH! "And this situation is consequence of the badness of the human being, all the atrocities committed against its your own fellow creatures, the nature, the life and, for this reason, against God." Fuck, this sounds serious. Even the religious right is scared by now!

A tribute to the author...

Some people are obviously wasting a lot of time to produce strange fanfilms like this one!

"Jerry Seinfeld and Superman have joined forces with American Express to create an action-packed, sidesplitting "webisode" that chronicles the daily exploits and unique friendship between comedian and Kryptonian. The four-minute webisode, entitled "A Uniform Used to Mean Something," co-written by Seinfeld and directed by acclaimed film director Barry Levinson ("Diner," "Rain Man"), is a humorous glimpse into a day-in-the-life of pop culture's latest odd couple."

Well, don't know, I think the previews look really good. Have a look...

-I, Robot - Exclusive Web Featurette
-I, Robot - Trailers
-I, Robot - Homepage

-Asimov's Laws of Robotics

-"The Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase is an effort to catalog works of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. It links together various types of bibliographic data: author bibliographies, publication bibliographies, award listings, magazine content listings, anthology and collection content listings, yearly fiction indexes, and forthcoming books."

-BEAT THAT! OVER SIX THOUSAND LINKS TO WEB SCIENCE FICTION RESOURCES

-FREE SCI-FI CLASSICS -250 Years of Short Science Fiction by Famous Authors

-infinity plus

-Litrix Reading Room Science Fiction

-SciFi Guide

Dr. Darius James* will be giving two courses in creative writing and occasional single workshops this year.

“Introduction to creative writing” will be an 8 session course, covering a variety of writing forms – story, screenplay, journalistic articles etc. as well as an individual focus on general writing basics. Participants need only minimal previous experience.

“Adventures in creative writing” will incorporate similar content but at a rather more advanced level. Participants should have some experience and a committment to better themselves. The course will run bi-weekly, and with occasional breaks, through to october.

Sessions for both courses will be on saturday afternoons. For the “introduction” a flat fee of 120 EU (100 EU for students, unemployed etc.) is payable. For the advanced a deposit of 50 EU is held against missing more than 1 in 4 sessions, and a fee of 12 EU (10 EU) is charged per session. Groups will comprise a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 10 participants.

*Darius is a well published novelist, journalist and short story writer. He has given courses in creative writing in the US and Germany. The title ‚doctor‘ is a tribute to his fictive gift.

Unbelievable artwork of Toho's Sci-fi, Fantasy and War films . Over 800 posters from 1940 up to today!