Five SFF Works About Contests and Competition

[james_davis_nicoll]

It's not about winning, it's about doing your best! And also winning!

Five SFF Works About Contests and Competition

Comments

[chrysostom]

Anthony's Apprentice Adept books started with some kind of contest, I recall.

[rwpikul]

The science side of the world had an ongoing massive tournament where the ultimate prize each year was that you became one of the owners rather than a serf. The individual games in the tournament could be anything, a football game, (with robotic players to make up for the 1V1 nature of the contest), a chess match, a trivia contest or even the flip of a coin.

Some days ReacTor will let me post. This is not one of those days...

[sturgeonslawyer]

Joanna Russ, "A Game of Vlet," which (if I recall correctly) is the last Alyx story. (Vlet was reused, and made much more complex, in Delany's (Trouble On) Triton).

Burroughs (Edgar Rice, not William S): The Chessmen of Mars. Not really about a chess game, but...

Malzberg, Tactics of Conquest, about a chess game for the fate of the galaxy. He allegedly also wrote a self-parody called Tic-Tacs of Conquest…

Philip K Dick's The Game-Players of Titan features interdimensional football.

And no such list would be complete without mention of (a) Moopsball and (b) Ready Player One (though in the latter case I rather wish it would be).

Re: Some days ReacTor will let me post. This is not one of those days...

[jreynolds197]

ISTR that Philip Jose Farmer wrote a Tarzan short story as it could have been written by William S. Burroughs.

"The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod" is the title. Dredged from my memory, then checked to see if it was correct from the internet. (I cannot say how I could remember the name of a story I read once many years ago.)

[petrea_mitchell]

The one Retief book I read a few pages of decades ago featured the hero presenting the result of his search for the most beautiful female on Earth, to be entered in an intergalactic beauty contest. He hadn't been specifically told to pick a human female, though...

[dragoness_e]

I think I remember that--unfortunately, it was one of the late Retief stories, written after Laumer had a stroke, and wasn't nearly as good as his classic Retief stories.

[petrea_mitchell]

There are too many tournament arcs, killing games, and so forth in anime and manga to name, and a lot of them suck.

But I do want to mention Megalobox, an excellent nearish-future story about a guy rising from nothing to fight in a big augmentation-assisted boxing tournament. It's an update of the classic (non-sf) manga Ashita no Joe, which was about a scrappy working-class hero in 1960s Japan who goes into (regular) boxing.

There's a Megalobox 2, which was even better but was much less focused on the sports aspect, and probably also caused howls of outrage somewhere by directly repudiating the ending of Ashita no Joe.

[patrick_morris_miller]

Can't not mention William Harrison's "Roller Ball Murder", source text of a film of some note and a remake I will not watch.

[oh6]

Cordwainer Smith's "No, No, Not Rogov!" ends up being about a contest, of sorts, although it's mostly about the (inadvertant) audience, who are ill-suited to witnessing the proceedings.

[jsburbidge]

The original Retief story was about a gladiatorial-style contest, I seen to recall... and very unlike all the other Retief stories.

And how could one leave out Banks' Player of Games?

[dragoness_e]

Other people have mentioned the Apprentice Adept series, and Banks' Player of Games.

I'll toss in the sacred dragon boat race in Barry Hughart's Eight Skilled Gentlemen, the third and last of the adventures of Master Li and Number Ten Ox.

[philrm]

Jack Vance's Trullion (Alastor 2262), whose plot to a considerable extent revolves around the invented sport of hussade.

[dagibbs]

When you started with the Eurovision intro, I fully expected _Space Opera_ in the list.

[(Anonymous)]

Much love for Urusei Yatsura, which was my gateway drug.

Many years ago (about four decades, actually), a fan sat down and did the math to find the exact real world date best corresponding to Ataru Moroboshi's unluck origin. IIRC, Ataru's birthday from canon evidence works out to the 4th of April, 1966. Lum's birth year is canonically 1967 by our calendar; who knows what it is in hers.

Shinobu, thank goodness, does end up with a decent guy.

Teka Lynn