Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

Hi

First up I love the concept of this site, the way the book tracker works and the ability to browse by awards, by authour etc. I am hooked but there is one request that would make a big difference to me personally.

I have been working my way through the SF Master Works Series and plan to make my way through David Pringle's Best 100 Science Fiction Novels. My request is that you add these two lists to the site.

I realize the premise for this site is to cover awards, but the overriding goal is to help find quality SF/Fantasy to read and then help keep track of what you have read and want to read. If you have a look at the list you will see there is already considerable overlap and I would argue that the books that are missing would not be out of place featured on this site.

Obvously it presents a problem for navigatiion and site layout to add lists as the currently the focus is on awards. The other problem is if you add lists you may get people requesting other series and lists which may not include notable material so you would then need a criteria for list acceptance.

I guess my point is that I am going to be reading these books anyway and would love to be able to use this site to track them. I also believe the books in these two lists would fit bill in terms of good SF and other members would find them valuable additions.

Thanks

htaccess,

I really love the SF Masterworks Series and the Fantasy series as well.  Some really great books in there.  You're right about the overlap.  I'd guess that about 75% of the books on the list are already in our DB which is convenient as that's fewer books for me to have to track down.

The purpose of WWEnd is to present the best books in the genre so those books would fit perfectly with what we are trying to accomplish.  So, in theory, I'd love to have those lists on the site in some fashion but our time and manpower resources are very limited.  Add to that our current list of improvements is quite long as is.

I know exactly how we could get it done but time will be the limiting factor.  One of the improvements I'm pushing for now is better tagging capability.  Right now we can tag books by series name but that's it.  What we want to eventually do is allow unlimited tags for every book.  We could tag the universe the books belong to, the series, alternate series names etc. that would make for better cross referencing.  If we can get that done we can also tag the books that are part of the Masterworks series so you'd be able to get just a list of them in a search result table.  That way we could have as many worthwhile lists as we can find.  We could poll our members to decide which ones are important.  Then it would be a simple process to create a clickable list of lists for our members to explore etc.

So, to sum up, it's a great idea and we'd love to do it but I can't give you any time frame for when we'll get it done but we will eventually make it happen.  It helps to know what people want to see on WWEnd so thanks for the input!  I'll keep you posted here when we have any developments to report.

It took longer than I had hoped but the SF Masterworks list is now up on the site.  I've been adding the books the last few weeks and we just got the page finished to display them all at once.

I've only read 11 of the books on the list, much to my dismay.  I've got 7 on my to read list now including some Philip K. Dick for my reading challenge.  There is a lot of PKD on the Masterworks list!

The omission of Verne is interesting. I'm not sure how they went about picking the books for the series but Verne would certainly fit in that list. If I had to guess, I'd say they didn't have rights to print it or, as you've suggested, it could be works in translation were left off.

So far, I've only added books by authors that were nominated for the awards we cover. That was to establish a solid foundation of great books. Now I'm putting in lists like the SF Masterworks, and later this week the Fantasy Masterworks, to fill in some gaps in our coverage. Not sure what list is next but I'm sure Verne will eventaully appear on one of these. I think instead of waiting I'll just make Verne the next priority. Thanks for the idea!

By the way, you can see the Fantasy Masterworks books going in every day in the site footer under Recent Additions.  I've got 15 more to go then I'll add the list page to display them.

I forgot to post here that the Fantasy Masterworks list is up and running but you guys have probably already figured that out from the blog or seen the link in the menu.

htaccess: I figured Verne would show somewhere along the way.  One of those lists you mentioned will probably be next after I make the Verne entry.  I'm keen to do the Verne page now.  Wikipedia has 55 books by Verne but I'll probably only add the top ones but we'll see.

I think a WWEnd list is a great idea.  We've got a Top 10 list in the footer but that's not actually accurate anymore.  It's a hard coded list that I put in there some time back to hold the space until we could work out the actual calculations. Like you said, we did not want a book with a single 10 rating to get into a list ahead of a book rated 9 by 50 people.

I suppose the same calculation could be expanded into a list of 50 or maybe 100 books. I'm not sure we have enough members to make the full 100.  May need to start at 50 and expand to make sure the list is meaningful.  It would likely be a dynamic list that would change as WWEnd grows rather than a static list so you'd have to check it every once in a while if you wanted to read them all.  whargoul likes the idea too which is cool cause he has to do the coding.

One thing is for sure, these lists are a great way to get more books on the site outside of the awards.  I'm going to create a new major tab called "SF/F Lists" and move the masterworks into it.  That will create more room for all the new ones to come.  Watch this space!