Super Reader
I joined LJ so I can use the logged in reply thing to other people.
Read Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. Have fun. :)
If you want to see my actual blogs, then :-
Super Reader
Australian SF Reader
Free SF Reader
Not Free Reader
Graphic SF Reader
Space Opera Reader
Free SF Best
Year's Best SF Reader
See info below for the first one, which will give you the idea :-
SUPER READER
FAQ
0. You don't have book/story X listed. I have done a lot of work finding things, but anyone doing this sort of thing will miss things, or not know about them, or not know about them, or not have been born, or live in a different hemisphere, etc. Any additions are gratefully appreciated, and many people have done so. I haven't kept a list as such, but they do get credited in the Update post. Thanks again to all these people.
1. Y is not a superhero? Absolutely true. I am not claiming that all the characters here are equivalent of Superman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, or the Justice League. The same thing applies to Batman, Doc Savage or whoever not being a 'super'hero in the sense of lack of extreme superhuman abilities.
This is a list of categories of interest to me, that, to me, relate in and around that area or sub-genre if you like. Hence the tabs to click on by section, and the main list sorted by section. So if all you are interested in is 'Original Heroes' you can just look at that, or if you just like Marvel. Pulp Heroes, similarly. The 'more relevant' should be higher up the list, as far as that goes. Some characters of course cross over.
I have not read all of them, and perhaps more particularly in the 'SF' section, some will be more relevant than others. There are countless stories about telepaths, etc., for example, I am sure. Whether SF, fantasy, horror, or otherwise. A few obvious major examples have been thrown in, but I am sure there are more than a few more or less relevant pieces missing.
2. Why is the format clunky? First I started a list, I had no idea it would get this long, or that I would put it on a blog, which is handy, free, and has feeds. I am no design genius either, unfortunately.
3. There is no bibliography? Partly see 2, and also this has taken a fair bit of time to do, that would have been even longer, given there is somewhere between eight and nine thousand entries listed here. A page with bibliographic info for everything would be massive. I did have a thought tonight though after this was mentioned, I can possibly hack something together from LibraryThing for a lot of it, that will at least give an entry for a lot of books. Some of the single stories, a bit more work.
Probably make it a file, perhaps in a basic machine-readable, spreadsheet importable format, or do two, with a human readable one as well. I think there was only one time I ever had to use an ISBN to find something on abebooks.com that I wanted to get, for example, title and/or author seems to work fine from that point of view.
Update :Bibliography Link
For the moment, before a file can be put together, here is a link to my LibraryThing catalogue, and it will have a large amount of the bibliographic information. Use View Style E if you want publishers, ISBNS, etc.
There are likely a couple there and not here, and vice versa, but it should be pretty much complete.
It is also searchable, etc.
It will be whatever edition happened to come up on their interface when I added it, in general, and some things like stories, pulps, etc., won't be complete, but it will be much much better than nothing, for those interested.
The tag used for this 'superhero prose fiction'.
Anything that is a short story should be tagged 'story section', barring the odd stray found on the internet, or short pulp, I think.
4. You don't indicate what the story actual is. e.g. novel, anthology, etc. True, and I have been contemplating at least an indicator for either book/short story, but hadn't thought of subdividing it further like that, or even the best way to do it, as yet. Likely this happens.
5. Some of this has bad jokes, obscure references, etc.? Yes, absolutely. The rating part was the important thing to me. Anyone that would like to volunteer to write a few thousand long reviews is welcome to do so. For example, 2000 times 300 words is six novels. :)
It has to be a bit of fun to do something like this, I think. Find the name, and rate if read was always the important part to me. If anyone has a question about an entry - which means I have read it, please do feel free to ask.
GUIDE
There are a few ways to approach browsing or using Super Reader.
Post Format
Firstly, I am titling each post so it will indicate a series, or if it is a standalone book, by indicating that with the Unique identifier. In this from : Character - Series Number (if this is relevant) Title Information.
Author Information
The authors, or author pseudonyms or house names, as the case may be can be found in the master SUPERHERO PROSE LIST. If you use your standard browser search function for that term, you will find the list, or you can just scroll down to below the archive listings and links listing and you will see it.
Navigation Information
1) The main page has the last 50 posts, which you can scroll down to look at.
2) The grid of labels at the top breaks the posts down into sections. Each section has 20 posts per page, and at the bottom of each of these pages are previous/next navigation arrows that will let you go through these a page at a time.
The sections are by category of book, and also by rating of book, if you want to browse that way.
If you scroll down to under my profile image, these labels will be reproduced vertically, with counts of how many posts are in each section, but otherwise function identically to the labels at the top of the blog.
3) If you scroll further down than that, you will find a blog archive section, where posts are archived by month. You can navigate through this in a similar manner to navigation of the sections above.
4) At the bottom right, if you scroll down, there is the complete list of books that I have put together so far. If there is a post about a book, the entry for that book will be a different colour, and have a url that links directly to the book.
5) Google Search - you can use the search box to search, the same as you normally would, but this will rely on googlebot's indexing. It may turn up other interesting links/ads when you do this, however.
6) Anyone is welcome to comment on the posts. There is an email address on my profile, or you can write to aussievamp2@gmail.com if you have suggestions about books to add to the list, or want to talk to me for some other reason.
This email address is also displayed at the top of the blog.
7) The ADMIN section will contain notes about things that have been added or discovered recently, or about any reorganisation or addiction of categories.
Rating System
5 = Outstanding
4.5 = Very Good
4 = Good
3.5 = Above Average
3 = Average
2.5 = Below Average
2 = Poor
1.5 = Bad
1 = Very Bad
0.5 = Laughable
SECTIONS
Adventure Section - For books that are men's adventure type series, which is mostly the Executioner and his spinoffs and the Destroyer, but some others do fit here and may be uncovered over time, and it doesn't mean no female characters.
Buffy Universe Section - Books about characters in the Buffyverse, generally Buffy and Angel. Books about the supporting characters will be put in either the Buffy or Angel subsection as appropriate.
DC Universe Section - Books about characters from the DC Universe.
Flying Aces Section - Pulp aviators and others that like to fly planes.
Eternal Champion Section - Books about Michael Moorcock's multiverse spanning Eternal Champion superhero. There are a few of his other books that are very tangentially related, too.
Ghost Busters Section - Books that are original creations and are about psychic/occult/supernatural detectives and other such monster hunters. Dark fantasy/paranormal romance doesn't really fit here.
Judge Dredd 2000AD Section - Books about characters from 2000 AD.
Jungle Lords Section - Tarzan and other Kings and Queens of the Jungle, and Edgar Rice Burroughs other heroes. Note that the Lords is deliberate. Jungle Queens will be found in Pulp Heroines, now that there is such as section, given there are not so many of them.
Kids Section - Books of a reasonable length that are clearly aimed at children, that I happen to have come across. I won't be going out of my way to find lists of relevant young adult or kids series here, but if you know of any, I am happy to mention them.
Lone Riders - The Western style hero that wouldn't be much without a good horse. The Lone Ranger, Zorro, The Masked Rider, etc.
Marvel Universe Section - Books about characters from the Marvel Universe.
Modern Legends Section - Books about heroes from legend, with a modern twist or character and published in the relevant time period. No Morte D'Arthur, etc. This is not something I have investigated thoroughly, but I have put down what I have read that I can recall, and others have suggested. Examples are when modern people run into heroes from legend, that sort of thing.
Old Adventurers Section - For books that are closer in ethos to the 19th than the 20th century. For this reason, I have moved The Hampdenshire Wonder and Green Mansions from the Original Section to here. Ghost Busters from this era will be found in the Ghost Busters section, at the start of the section. For Sherlock Holmes, I have included a few pastiche books of the more fun Wold Newton type crossover styles, which are more likely to appeal to Super Readers, in general. Listening all of these is a huge task, so I have included some links that have quite a lot of these listed. If I read them, I will put them down, but this is basically a job in and of itself and more.
Original Heroes Section - Books that are original creations and are pretty obviously superhero in nature.
Other and Tie-In Section - Books from comics from publishers other than the big two, also based on movies, tv shows, radio, internet, or any media yet to be evented. Ghost of Albion came from web animation I believe, for example. Ghostbuster types here, 30 Days of Night, Bureau 13, Cal McDonald, The Crow, Ultraviolet, Underworld, Van Helsing, Witchblade.
Pulp Heroes Section - Books from the pulp era. The Shadow, Doc Savage, The Spider, The Avenger, and other heroes.
Pulp Heroines Section - Exactly as above, but a woman is the star.
Pulp Villains Section - Books from the pulp era where the bad guy was the star, Fu Manchu, Doctor Satan, etc.
Related Section - For books of interest such as Kavalier and Clay and that sort of book, and, just recently, a podcast, The Secret World Chronicle, that is audio, but likely to become a book.
Romance Section - For romance titles I happen to come across, or are suggested, with an appropriate theme, and not intended as spoofs. Dark fantasy and paranormal romance would fit here. The Nora Roberts book Night Shade will be moved here, for one. These are almost all suggestions from my sister that I took a quick look at, those that I haven't read.
SF Section - For science fiction with a superhuman, superman or similar type of theme. The divide between here and the Original Heroes Section can be a very blurry beast, or even the section itself.
Space Heroes Section - For the space heroes, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, John Carter, Perry Rhodan et. al.
Spoof Section - For sendups, parodies, satires, etc.. The Tick could certainly full under this area. I have now indicated which character the books are spoofing. For example, a Superman spoof is indicated with Superman S, S being for Spoof.
Spy Heroes Section - For superhero spies, James Bond, Modesty Blaise, and The Saint. The Saint does call himself a detective a bit, but seems to fit here for me, with the Robin Hood type antics he gets up to. There may be others I don't know about, but Le Carre and Deighton type characters have no place here.
Sword and Sorcery Section - For the superheroes of the Sword, Conan, the Kanes, Kull, the Lankhmar boys and others. Again, this is probably a little blurry and likely missing some. Your Dungeons and Dragons or standard fantasy trilogy type bands of adventurers generally speaking have no place here. Or, to put it another way, Heroic Fantasy, not Epic Fantasy.
Wold Newton Section - For books by Philip Jose Farmer and related authors that deal with this fun notion of character crossovers.
If you have any suggestions for additions, alterations, corrections, or other info, please feel free to comment on a post, or email me if that is easier for you. The email is listed - aussievamp2@gmail.com.
Read Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. Have fun. :)
If you want to see my actual blogs, then :-
Super Reader
Australian SF Reader
Free SF Reader
Not Free Reader
Graphic SF Reader
Space Opera Reader
Free SF Best
Year's Best SF Reader
See info below for the first one, which will give you the idea :-
SUPER READER
FAQ
0. You don't have book/story X listed. I have done a lot of work finding things, but anyone doing this sort of thing will miss things, or not know about them, or not know about them, or not have been born, or live in a different hemisphere, etc. Any additions are gratefully appreciated, and many people have done so. I haven't kept a list as such, but they do get credited in the Update post. Thanks again to all these people.
1. Y is not a superhero? Absolutely true. I am not claiming that all the characters here are equivalent of Superman, Spider-Man, the X-Men, or the Justice League. The same thing applies to Batman, Doc Savage or whoever not being a 'super'hero in the sense of lack of extreme superhuman abilities.
This is a list of categories of interest to me, that, to me, relate in and around that area or sub-genre if you like. Hence the tabs to click on by section, and the main list sorted by section. So if all you are interested in is 'Original Heroes' you can just look at that, or if you just like Marvel. Pulp Heroes, similarly. The 'more relevant' should be higher up the list, as far as that goes. Some characters of course cross over.
I have not read all of them, and perhaps more particularly in the 'SF' section, some will be more relevant than others. There are countless stories about telepaths, etc., for example, I am sure. Whether SF, fantasy, horror, or otherwise. A few obvious major examples have been thrown in, but I am sure there are more than a few more or less relevant pieces missing.
2. Why is the format clunky? First I started a list, I had no idea it would get this long, or that I would put it on a blog, which is handy, free, and has feeds. I am no design genius either, unfortunately.
3. There is no bibliography? Partly see 2, and also this has taken a fair bit of time to do, that would have been even longer, given there is somewhere between eight and nine thousand entries listed here. A page with bibliographic info for everything would be massive. I did have a thought tonight though after this was mentioned, I can possibly hack something together from LibraryThing for a lot of it, that will at least give an entry for a lot of books. Some of the single stories, a bit more work.
Probably make it a file, perhaps in a basic machine-readable, spreadsheet importable format, or do two, with a human readable one as well. I think there was only one time I ever had to use an ISBN to find something on abebooks.com that I wanted to get, for example, title and/or author seems to work fine from that point of view.
Update :Bibliography Link
For the moment, before a file can be put together, here is a link to my LibraryThing catalogue, and it will have a large amount of the bibliographic information. Use View Style E if you want publishers, ISBNS, etc.
There are likely a couple there and not here, and vice versa, but it should be pretty much complete.
It is also searchable, etc.
It will be whatever edition happened to come up on their interface when I added it, in general, and some things like stories, pulps, etc., won't be complete, but it will be much much better than nothing, for those interested.
The tag used for this 'superhero prose fiction'.
Anything that is a short story should be tagged 'story section', barring the odd stray found on the internet, or short pulp, I think.
4. You don't indicate what the story actual is. e.g. novel, anthology, etc. True, and I have been contemplating at least an indicator for either book/short story, but hadn't thought of subdividing it further like that, or even the best way to do it, as yet. Likely this happens.
5. Some of this has bad jokes, obscure references, etc.? Yes, absolutely. The rating part was the important thing to me. Anyone that would like to volunteer to write a few thousand long reviews is welcome to do so. For example, 2000 times 300 words is six novels. :)
It has to be a bit of fun to do something like this, I think. Find the name, and rate if read was always the important part to me. If anyone has a question about an entry - which means I have read it, please do feel free to ask.
GUIDE
There are a few ways to approach browsing or using Super Reader.
Post Format
Firstly, I am titling each post so it will indicate a series, or if it is a standalone book, by indicating that with the Unique identifier. In this from : Character - Series Number (if this is relevant) Title Information.
Author Information
The authors, or author pseudonyms or house names, as the case may be can be found in the master SUPERHERO PROSE LIST. If you use your standard browser search function for that term, you will find the list, or you can just scroll down to below the archive listings and links listing and you will see it.
Navigation Information
1) The main page has the last 50 posts, which you can scroll down to look at.
2) The grid of labels at the top breaks the posts down into sections. Each section has 20 posts per page, and at the bottom of each of these pages are previous/next navigation arrows that will let you go through these a page at a time.
The sections are by category of book, and also by rating of book, if you want to browse that way.
If you scroll down to under my profile image, these labels will be reproduced vertically, with counts of how many posts are in each section, but otherwise function identically to the labels at the top of the blog.
3) If you scroll further down than that, you will find a blog archive section, where posts are archived by month. You can navigate through this in a similar manner to navigation of the sections above.
4) At the bottom right, if you scroll down, there is the complete list of books that I have put together so far. If there is a post about a book, the entry for that book will be a different colour, and have a url that links directly to the book.
5) Google Search - you can use the search box to search, the same as you normally would, but this will rely on googlebot's indexing. It may turn up other interesting links/ads when you do this, however.
6) Anyone is welcome to comment on the posts. There is an email address on my profile, or you can write to aussievamp2@gmail.com if you have suggestions about books to add to the list, or want to talk to me for some other reason.
This email address is also displayed at the top of the blog.
7) The ADMIN section will contain notes about things that have been added or discovered recently, or about any reorganisation or addiction of categories.
Rating System
5 = Outstanding
4.5 = Very Good
4 = Good
3.5 = Above Average
3 = Average
2.5 = Below Average
2 = Poor
1.5 = Bad
1 = Very Bad
0.5 = Laughable
SECTIONS
Adventure Section - For books that are men's adventure type series, which is mostly the Executioner and his spinoffs and the Destroyer, but some others do fit here and may be uncovered over time, and it doesn't mean no female characters.
Buffy Universe Section - Books about characters in the Buffyverse, generally Buffy and Angel. Books about the supporting characters will be put in either the Buffy or Angel subsection as appropriate.
DC Universe Section - Books about characters from the DC Universe.
Flying Aces Section - Pulp aviators and others that like to fly planes.
Eternal Champion Section - Books about Michael Moorcock's multiverse spanning Eternal Champion superhero. There are a few of his other books that are very tangentially related, too.
Ghost Busters Section - Books that are original creations and are about psychic/occult/supernatural detectives and other such monster hunters. Dark fantasy/paranormal romance doesn't really fit here.
Judge Dredd 2000AD Section - Books about characters from 2000 AD.
Jungle Lords Section - Tarzan and other Kings and Queens of the Jungle, and Edgar Rice Burroughs other heroes. Note that the Lords is deliberate. Jungle Queens will be found in Pulp Heroines, now that there is such as section, given there are not so many of them.
Kids Section - Books of a reasonable length that are clearly aimed at children, that I happen to have come across. I won't be going out of my way to find lists of relevant young adult or kids series here, but if you know of any, I am happy to mention them.
Lone Riders - The Western style hero that wouldn't be much without a good horse. The Lone Ranger, Zorro, The Masked Rider, etc.
Marvel Universe Section - Books about characters from the Marvel Universe.
Modern Legends Section - Books about heroes from legend, with a modern twist or character and published in the relevant time period. No Morte D'Arthur, etc. This is not something I have investigated thoroughly, but I have put down what I have read that I can recall, and others have suggested. Examples are when modern people run into heroes from legend, that sort of thing.
Old Adventurers Section - For books that are closer in ethos to the 19th than the 20th century. For this reason, I have moved The Hampdenshire Wonder and Green Mansions from the Original Section to here. Ghost Busters from this era will be found in the Ghost Busters section, at the start of the section. For Sherlock Holmes, I have included a few pastiche books of the more fun Wold Newton type crossover styles, which are more likely to appeal to Super Readers, in general. Listening all of these is a huge task, so I have included some links that have quite a lot of these listed. If I read them, I will put them down, but this is basically a job in and of itself and more.
Original Heroes Section - Books that are original creations and are pretty obviously superhero in nature.
Other and Tie-In Section - Books from comics from publishers other than the big two, also based on movies, tv shows, radio, internet, or any media yet to be evented. Ghost of Albion came from web animation I believe, for example. Ghostbuster types here, 30 Days of Night, Bureau 13, Cal McDonald, The Crow, Ultraviolet, Underworld, Van Helsing, Witchblade.
Pulp Heroes Section - Books from the pulp era. The Shadow, Doc Savage, The Spider, The Avenger, and other heroes.
Pulp Heroines Section - Exactly as above, but a woman is the star.
Pulp Villains Section - Books from the pulp era where the bad guy was the star, Fu Manchu, Doctor Satan, etc.
Related Section - For books of interest such as Kavalier and Clay and that sort of book, and, just recently, a podcast, The Secret World Chronicle, that is audio, but likely to become a book.
Romance Section - For romance titles I happen to come across, or are suggested, with an appropriate theme, and not intended as spoofs. Dark fantasy and paranormal romance would fit here. The Nora Roberts book Night Shade will be moved here, for one. These are almost all suggestions from my sister that I took a quick look at, those that I haven't read.
SF Section - For science fiction with a superhuman, superman or similar type of theme. The divide between here and the Original Heroes Section can be a very blurry beast, or even the section itself.
Space Heroes Section - For the space heroes, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, John Carter, Perry Rhodan et. al.
Spoof Section - For sendups, parodies, satires, etc.. The Tick could certainly full under this area. I have now indicated which character the books are spoofing. For example, a Superman spoof is indicated with Superman S, S being for Spoof.
Spy Heroes Section - For superhero spies, James Bond, Modesty Blaise, and The Saint. The Saint does call himself a detective a bit, but seems to fit here for me, with the Robin Hood type antics he gets up to. There may be others I don't know about, but Le Carre and Deighton type characters have no place here.
Sword and Sorcery Section - For the superheroes of the Sword, Conan, the Kanes, Kull, the Lankhmar boys and others. Again, this is probably a little blurry and likely missing some. Your Dungeons and Dragons or standard fantasy trilogy type bands of adventurers generally speaking have no place here. Or, to put it another way, Heroic Fantasy, not Epic Fantasy.
Wold Newton Section - For books by Philip Jose Farmer and related authors that deal with this fun notion of character crossovers.
If you have any suggestions for additions, alterations, corrections, or other info, please feel free to comment on a post, or email me if that is easier for you. The email is listed - aussievamp2@gmail.com.