On 2/5/2001, OUSFG held a meeting to decide the top 10 things in certain SF categories. This may or may not have been a good idea.
Categories were chosen, nominations made, votes counted, and Top 10's compiled.
<sfgeek>i apologise on behalf of the society for the woeful lack of proper SF in these lists, and the presence of far too much mass-media toss.</sfgeek> :)
The notation used should be obvious - there are ordered lists of entries, and where a set tied, one of the items in the list is an unordered list of them. This does, sadly, mean that the numbering isn't handled properly.
This is a fairly obvious category - stories featuring time travel. During the discussion, we did decide that time travel had to be an essential feature of the story, and not just a device to transport the action to another time (eg the hero goes back to ancient Greece, becomes a warrior, slays the minotaur, gets the princess, comes home). That said, some of these stories fail this test, most notably (and here i am simply relaying the informed opinion of Tim) 'The Time Machine'.
This discussion got off to a flying start, so we didn't have time to decide if we were choosing actual alien races or (as was my original suggestion, hem hem) stories with good aliens in them; we ended up doing the former. We also didn't decide what we thought a good alien was; presumably, it has to have high alienness, but, IMNERHO, we didn't give sufficient thought to what this meant. Hence, we mostly ended up with beasties from the pulp viddies. Sigh.
I believe that we coined the term "we're fucked story" on the spot; it is pleasingly obvious in meaning. Basically, a story in which we, meaning humanity, or at least a fair chunk of it with which we, the readers, can identify, are fucked. We start off in a reasonably good way (eg as things are now, or as they might be if things carry on in a comfortable sort of way, ie somebody gets rid of George W. Bush (ooh, topical)), shit happens, and we're fucked. Apocalypse sort of thing. It specifically does not include post-apocalypse stories (that's another category - "we're still fucked") or stories about individuals or small groups of people. We're talking real hardcore large-scale fuckage here. IMNERHO, this category includes a number of stories which don't fit the category - Dr Strangelove isn't really SF (although it's great, and we are fucked), Twelve Monkeys has a happy ending (the characters die, but one brief shot clearly indicates hope for humanity), T2 has a happy ending (although at the end of T1 we're still pretty fucked - but arguably no more fucked than we were at the start, if you think about it), i'm not so sure about Twin Peaks, and Brazil is about the fucking of one particular person - society at large is no worse off than at the start. Still, it was getting late by that point, and we had to give the room back.
We are aware that this category has 11 entries rather than 10