ILB Argues About Who is the Greatest Science Fiction Author

I know there are quite a few readers of sci-fi on ILB and thought it might stimulate an interesting discussion to propose this subject.

What matters most for you in determining first place: invention? trail blazing new types of stories? designing whole new worlds? craftsmanship? imagination? characterization? profound themes? stylish prose? a synthesis of all these aspects?

I really don't belong in this discussion, as I read little or no sci-fi, but I'll mention a few well-known names as grist for the mill:

Ray Bradbury
Arthur C. Clarke
Robert Heinlein
Ursula K. LeGuin
Olaf Stapledon
Philip K. Dick
L. Ron Hubbard (just kidding)
J G Ballard
Isaac Asimov
Frederik Pohl
Harlan Ellison (also kidding)
Roger Zelazny

Just adding your opinion on who else ought to be in the conversation should get the ball rolling.

greatests are not my bag

first thought is that Brian Aldiss unarguably belongs on that list

don't know why i gave him his own italics tho

better than his own exclamation point

this could also be considered as a nomination thread for some kind of poll, but I fear the vote would split so badly that 18 authors would get 1 vote and any one with 4 votes would win it.

Aimless, have you read anything by Thomas M. Disch? I like him a lot, though I don't have anything particularly intelligent to say about him

no. as I said, I read little or no sci-fi. but perhaps scott seward has read him.

Not sure what the point of this thread is, given that Aimless has little interest in the subject and I believe it has been discussed on other threads.

Ballard's short stories are amongst the very best short stories in sci-fi. Clarke too, although his short stories are more along the lines of shiny space rockets which are not to my personal taste.

Fair amount of talk about Disch on the rolling spec fic threads

But yeah why are we doing this?

We don't have to do this. I guess my interest is to hear what committed and enthusiastic sci-fi readers have to say about the qualities they find compelling in an author's work. Most of what I see or hear from sci-fi readers is limited to "I think author X is really great!" without much in the way of corroborating details about what that greatness consists of.

If all that great sci-fi has to offer are a few imaginative wrinkles and a certain strangeness of outlook that match some people's taste when reading for entertainment, then I guess I will continue to read little or no sci-fi, because I don't strongly share that particular taste. But it seems likely to me that the top of the profession must have more to offer a thoughtful reader and they may offer it in a way that is not possible in other genres.

Since ILBers tend to be a very discerning crew, I suspect they can bring a lot more to the table than just "hey, I loved this!" That's what I hoped to elicit by starting the thread.

everybody should read ray bradbury. everyone on earth.

Aimless, you're kind of implying that sci fi can't be considered "serious literature" without really explaining why..

If all that great sci-fi has to offer are a few imaginative wrinkles and a certain strangeness of outlook that match some people's taste when reading for entertainment

yes that is definitely all it has to offer, very astute of you

you stopped reading too soon, brimstead, and you missed the "if" entirely.

you're kind of implying that sci fi can't be considered "serious literature" without really explaining why..

On the contrary, I am saying that I suspect that it may abound in serious literature, but that I've not yet figured out whose work to look to for that. My difficulty is that I am not willing to wade through tons of stuff that appeal greatly to sci-fi enthusiasts, who are used to just telling one another what they personally enjoyed and that's good enough because they all belong to the tribe of sci-fi enthusiasts and "it's great!" is all the recommendation they need.

I can already find my way around in non sci-fi 'great' literature. If I am ever going to find those authors in sci-fi who will appeal to my personal taste, it will be because someone will understandingly point me to the qualities it shares with great literature, as distinct from the quality of evoking enthusiasm among those who mostly read sci-fi. There's way too much of the latter for me to even get a grip on it.

you stopped reading too soon, brimstead, and you missed the "if" entirely.

― Aimless, Saturday, October 24, 2015 12:36 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry i probably missed the convo that led to this thread, just assumed you were building a straw man with that "if" statement

If I am ever going to find those authors in sci-fi who will appeal to my personal taste, it will be because someone will understandingly point me to the qualities it shares with great literature, as distinct from the quality of evoking enthusiasm among those who mostly read sci-fi.

ok but i'm googling "qualities of great literature" and i'm not finding much in the way of qualities that are never present in sci fi..

had a seriously tumultuous relationship w ray bradbury as a kid, from poring over zen in the art of writing to taking it into the backyard and shooting it w a bb gun. we're just distant friends now and i love something wicked best of all, which is not sf. but the martian chronicles is second place (wish john ford had made it, in technicolor), and "the veldt", "the long rain", "the rocket", "kaleidoscope" i think the nasty one about falling into the atmosphere is called?, and a bunch of other stories i don't remember the titles of are really terrific, his weakness for solemn purple kept just enough in check to make things vivid+lyrical.

speaking of solemn purple kept in check, gene wolfe should be in here.

this is a pretty good list of starting points. not enough women though. and i wouldn't recommend the marge piercy on there.

https://www.worldswithoutend.com/lists_pringle_sf.asp

i think when most people don't know where to start they just read Dune. some stop there. some go on.

xps

i'm not finding much in the way of qualities that are never present in sci fi..

Again, you're responding to the argument you are used to hearing, but not anything I said. I could put it into italics for you: I believe that some sci-fi exists out there that would give me every bit as much pleasure as I derive from other books that are nearly universally considered great literature. I just haven't figured out where to look and the field is too fucking huge to just take stabs in the dark based on the types of vague but enthusiastic recommendations I normally run across.

oh god. I read Dune at about age 18. Please tell me it isn't the apex of sci-fi.

sorry, aimless. In all seriousness, ng ballard's short stories are wonderful, they can be thought provoking and emotionally stirring

jg

Dune is considered one of the best SF books ever written by lots of people. so, yeah, for a lot of people it's an apex of sorts.

This is a slippery business. A lot of great literature isn't considered to be amazingly written even now, like Dostoevsky - and yet it didn't matter that much to people who voted him above Austen on the ILB thread. Much great literature was rejected at first or had to be released through other channels -- Joyce and Proust. Bet we all have friends who love great literature and think Proust is a madman.

These qualities shift around too. Is Bolano's 'Part about the Crimes' great literature? Not going to answer that but the distinctions made between qualities in SF and 'great literature' are mostly bogus.

Aimless, have you read anything by Thomas M. Disch? I like him a lot, though I don't have anything particularly intelligent to say about him

― soref, Saturday, October 24, 2015 2:00 PM (2 hours ago)

Fundamental Disch is one of the best short story collections I've ever read by anyone.

In SF, I'd rather talk about peak value rather than career value, to borrow sportsy terminology. In other words, greatest works in the genre rather than greatest authors. But this is a "career value" thread, and that's worthwhile too.

there is an ILX best SF thread or poll or best 100 or something. from some years back.

but, you know, if you go into something suspicious from the start that you are not going to enjoy it or suspicious that there isn't enough value in it for you, it might not be for you. you should be open to it at least. just dig in! or don't.

Asking about the greats of the genre might not always be the best approach, especially in this one, where some of the most acknowledged turn out to be gas giants. I am interpreting this thread as "recommend an sf book to Aimless that you think would appeal to his sensibilities." In that spirit, I am recommending M. John Harrison's Signs of Life, because Harrison is a superior stylist who is very interested in the natural world and the outdoors-he took several off from writing to go rock climbing around the UK- and this book in particular has a lot of that.

Huh i love harrison's sf stuff but have never come across that one

Contra scott - idk anyone who considers Dune the apex of the genre.

This is a slippery business. A lot of great literature isn't considered to be amazingly written even now, like Dostoevsky

In my opinion, "amazingly written" is not a matter of stylish sentences, symbolism, or deep structure. A book can lack many of the attributes that are commonly admired in lit crit and still be great. "Amazingly written" should apply to a book's entire conception and execution. This applies as much to Dr. Seuss as to Dostoevsky. There are as many ways for a book to be amazing as there are for human faces to be amazing.

Is Bolano's 'Part about the Crimes' great literature?

The Part about the Crimes cannot be sensibly considered outside the context of the rest of 2666, but within that context it operates exactly as the author intended and contributes considerably to the overall effect of the book. So, yes, it is great literature imo.

Huh i love harrison's sf stuff but have never come across that one

Sorry, Course of the Heart came first. And the rock-climbing started way before. Still

idk anyone who considers Dune the apex of the genre.

same here.

I think the main problem w aimless' question is that it glosses over a) what is scifi and b) what constitutes "greatness". Both of which we could argue about forever.

And no doubt already have.

a) what is scifi

We may easily sidestep this difficulty by admitting as a sci-fi author any author that you or another ilxor considers in good faith to be a sci-fi author. Bad faith trolling is pretty easy to detect and ignore.

b) what constitutes "greatness"

To my mind there need not be a consensus about what is "greatness". We each get to define it in our own terms.

But merely calling author X or book Y "great" and stopping at that is pretty thin gruel. It constitutes an argument based wholly upon an appeal to authority, where the authority is ones self and no evidence of that authority is provided. At bottom, all it says is that the author or book suits one's tastes. Who could disagree with so bland a statement as that?

It is far better and more useful if one can persuasively describe the qualities one finds in that author or book, both good and bad, and then argue that the sum of these qualities should be viewed as having a kind of greatness. We can disagree, but there is at least a sound basis for agreement or disagreement. But this approach requires having personal standards that one can apply and personal appreciation that one can articulate.

I am still sticking to the idea that the purpose of this thread is to find some books for Aimless to read that he might actually have a chance of liking. Let's face it, if you have been reading ILB with the least bit of care this past decade, you know that Aimless is not skot, it's not like you can point him at a blog post about the 50 Greatest SF novels and then he will go out the next weekend and buy thrift store copies of all fifty, then buy fifty more by the same authors then another fifty more just for the heck of it and then start a photo thread about them.

Well, I did go to my library's site and put a hold on a book of short stories by M. John Harrison, so, thanks for the pointer JRatB.

Things That Never Happen? Awesome.

Yup. That's the one.

Wonder if your copy will have the Iain Banks intro. Probably is the Nightshade Books edition so I assume it does.

Ursula Le Guin: one of the most compassionate and generous authors I know. She does convincing world building and is famous for experimenting (in fiction, not in life afaik) with radically different sexualities, family units, societies, but it's all in the service of trying to understand people. The Left Hand of Darkness is usually the one suggested to start with as it has like plot and thrilling chases n stuff; The Dispossessed also highly rated, a bit drier imo but I need to reread it.

Stanislaw Lem: sci-fi as philosophy, or vice versa. His USP is exploring the idea that alien intelligence, if we ever find it, might be so unlike our own as to be utterly incomprehensible. He got two great novels out of that idea: Solaris (the relationship to the films has been highly exaggerated) and His Master's Voice, which also contains a lot of political rumination - I know, sounds awful. Also wrote The Cyberiad which is a collection of silly sci-fi folk tales, and a bunch of other stuff I haven't read.

Yeah so apparently my idea of great sci-fi involves being tediously worthy and highbrow.

It is far better and more useful if one can persuasively describe the qualities one finds in that author or book, both good and bad

Sure

and then argue that the sum of these qualities should be viewed as having a kind of greatness.

Nah

asimov seemed like the smartest to me

He got two great novels out of that idea

i hereby retract this factually and philosophically flawed statement

asimov seemed like the smartest to me

i'm not really jumping in on this but huh, no one mentioned delany yet?

He's my guy til I die, but sometimes I feel it's hard to make a case for him because his prose style can sometimes be an obstacle.

The Delany book for people who don't dig Delany is definitely Babel-17.

I would've said nova

I know you would have. But I have it on the authority of noted Delany

Aficionado WilliamC that that one hasn't aged too well.

tbf i think what i get out of delany these days (i've not read anything from before triton in a little while) is only marginally aligned with 'sf'

i don't by any means think harlan ellison is the best of these authors but i also don't think he deserves the original post's "just kidding" -- he wrote a number of first-rate stories.

Glad somebody said that, i agree. Good editor too.

We love to hate him, the same way he loved to hate Asimov. It is a form of tribute

You see this is another barrier to Aimless's entry, all of this inside baseball bickering.

Should have added the word "background" in there for the triple alliteration.

My pick to start with Delany would be Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, I think. (Though I should reread it to be sure.)

that's a godawful place to start!!

'oh so it's a didactic novel where monologues and sex scenes interrupt each other, by someone who's largely given up on narrative by this point and he never finished it anyway because all the friends the characters are based on died? man, i'm so glad i didn't read one of the pacy 150-page sf thrillers'

i mean i love 'stars in my pocket' a lot more than i do 'babel' or 'nova' but it seems kind of a hard sell

¯\(°_o)/¯

ok had some thoughts about this but was waiting until I could post from my computer rather than my phone... maybe Aimless just needs to skim through Clute's encyclopedia: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/. If you want to get a sense of various author's position within the genre, what they're known for, what they're generally regarded as being good at, that's a great resource.

I don't really foresee a lot of actual "arguing" going on here, since those of us who have been posting on the various spec-fic threads seem to be pretty comfortable with having personal favorites as opposed to defending or promoting a particular canon. I'm sure plenty of us would be happy writing detailed posts extolling the virtues of particular favorites, had we not already done so here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here, among others.

As to the subject of who's great at what, there's a variety of different angles one could pursue - who has the greatest ideas? who has the best prose? who is greatest at short fiction? who is greatest at novels? who is greatest at series' of novels? who is the most formally innovative? who is the most significant in terms of the genre? who had the longest sustained run of quality output? There are different answers to all these questions (and they are very different questions), but even each question would return a range of answers as opposed to just one.

For example, who's the greatest sf short fiction author? I'd be inclined to say Tiptree or Ballard, maybe Silverberg or Bradbury too (particularly if we count the Martian Chronicles as a collection of short fiction). All for different reasons: Tiptree for sheer variety and audacity, Ballard for the strength of his prose and the consistency of vision, etc. If anyone wants to talk about those authors or why they like/dislike them I'm happy to participate and maybe Aimless would find something he was curious about reading over the course of the discussion - but said discussion would have v little to do with "who is the greatest sci-fi author".

also re: Herbert - I've always considered him something of an outlier in the genre. He published very, very little prior to Dune, and was hardly a regular contributor to the pulps that served as a training ground for the majority of writers in the field. What he did was expand on the template provided by Asimov's Foundation series - that whole "universe building" schtick spread across several novels with multiple narrators, an intentionally broad scope, elements of politics/history/philosophy - which later became practically an entire subset of the genre unto itself. This idea that writers should have meticulously researched and detailed backgrounds w genealogies, languages, religions etc. to make their "world" as real as possible was something that had been germinating for awhile (certainly Tolkien is another important predecessor on this point) and shortly became de rigeur following Dune's massive success. And Herbert came up with this one thing, this one central concept/storytelling framework, that is effectively all he ever did.

But do I want to read it? Not really. I read the first one in high school and it was okay, definitely felt like some kind of accomplishment to make it all the way through it given it's length and density, but if you aren't overawed by the scope of Herbert's undertaking or especially enamored of the ecological or political analogies I feel like there isn't a lot there. To me Herbert fandom is the equivalent of Joe Bonamassa fandom or something - "wow look at that guy play all those notes! just like the masters!" It's like he's the culmination of a lot of other people's ideas, developed and applied with a fanatical attention to detail, but I don't find it anywhere close to deserving of "greatest" status. It's good, it's solid, there's interesting stuff in there - but stylistically, formally, conceptually it doesn't resonate particularly deeply with me.

these days my canon is like

Tiptree
Octavia Butler
Rudy Rucker

and then Dick, Sterling, Gibson, maybe Atwood?

then some other random old school dudes - Farmer, Pohl, Brunner

Dune is not a fave but I really like Herbert's Whipping Star

I should really give Butler a chance one of these days, I suppose

at first glance my reaction was "oh great an even more didactic Ursula K. Leguin"

shit I forgot Leguin, if only for Left Hand Of Darkness

re: Butler, Lilith's Brood trilogy is my fave fwiw, Fledgling is also fun and standalone

What Shakey said.

maybe I'll just pick one author a day to ramble about, would that make you happy Aimless?

I have quite a few shorts bks by Herbert and yeah Whipping Star co-sign. idk what Shakey is talking about.

In my opinion, "amazingly written" is not a matter of stylish sentences, symbolism, or deep structure. A book can lack many of the attributes that are commonly admired in lit crit and still be great. "Amazingly written" should apply to a book's entire conception and execution. This applies as much to Dr. Seuss as to Dostoevsky. There are as many ways for a book to be amazing as there are for human faces to be amazing.

So a lot of the conception and execution often falls down in so-called "great literature" too.

So if there are many ways for books to be amazing why apply harsher boundaries on stuff just because it comes with 'weird' covers.

yeah I should qualify what I said about his pulp stuff, he wrote more short fiction than I thought

xp

And Herbert came up with this one thing, this one central concept/storytelling framework, that is effectively all he ever did.

and this is overly harsh, I should've said it's all he's effectively famous for (he did do other stuff)

buncha Dune haters around here. it's universally beloved you know! it's also on EVERY list of the best SF ever made since it came out practically. i've never actually finished it...but i will someday.

So a lot of the conception and execution often falls down in so-called "great literature" too.
Yes, but you are merely confronting a straw man with a wicker man.

verne

the Dune world-making thing so influential in fantasy and SF it's kinda crazy. i guess you really can only compare it to LOTR previously.

greatest book in the sf canon says this guy. we needed it for tatooine to live.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/03/dune-50-years-on-science-fiction-novel-world

and he reminds me that i have the collected Lensman books at home and that might be my winter project. to read those.

i guess you really can only compare it to LOTR previously.

nah - Foundation. Although it's true Asimov doesn't get so hung up on the details and trappings of various planet's cultures iirc.

There's also the obvious element of real-world analogies at work (which happens in LOTR too, although Tolkien would and did deny it). Asimov basically wanted to re-write the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, and Herbert's debt to Gibbon is also clear, albeit one updated with parallels to oil in the middle east/Lawrence of Arabia etc.

I tried the first volume of Foundation a little while ago but soon gave up on it. Aside from the poverty of Asimov's prose style - so ugly - the narrative itself was crushingly dull. Asimov's complete indifference to character reminded me a little of Arthur C Clarke, without any of those compensating moments of serene, mysterious beauty that you find in things like Childhood's End.

On the other hand I read Dune for the first time a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. I think Shakey is slightly underselling Herbert's ability to get things moving really quickly - yes, there's lot of world-building, backstory, ecological-mysticism and whatnot going on in Dune, but the actual narrative construction is pretty breathtaking - it sweeps you along. Overall it struck me as a reaction to Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land - another big American blockbuster SF novel that also shares some of the same values as post-beat, pre-hippy early 60s counterculture - which brings us back to PKD of course (I read SIASL many, many years ago and imagine it's pretty close to unreadable now - it certainly doesn't seem to get on many of these Best SF novel lists any more).

gonna give Dune another read, so thanks thread. haven't read it since high school.

agree w Ward about Foundation. When I tried to re-read it a few years ago I had an identical experience.

i read the foundation trilogy when i was a kid and loved it but then again i also found 'battlefield earth' to be a "ripping yarn" when i was a kid.

'dune' is great, want to re-read it.

i love foundation but it is difficult to recommend it to ppl because the first book is by far the weakest one, basically just five semi-related stories about characters with silly names sitting around in rooms and talking (and every now and then jumping to their feet and shouting "confound it!").

feel like all the OG "Grandmasters" (Asimov, Heinlein, etc.) have fallen out of fashion, with their virtues becoming more and more obscured.

like, Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov were all respected and popular in the genre because they exuded *seriousness*, albeit not in a literary way. They were seen as serious because they took scientific concepts of the day and attempted to extend them into the future and extrapolate as to what that might entail, and they tended to do this in a way that was more coherent, rigorous, and methodical than their peers. This isn't to say there wasn't humor or poetry in their writing, because there was to varying degrees, but all of these guys seemed to approach writing like an engineer - as if it was just a matter of assembling the appropriate parts according to established laws, where the underlying concept was probably the most important thing. Robots! Alien civilizations! A history of the future! What would these things *really* look like? It's like they were conceptualizers first, and writers second. Clarke is easily the most lyrical of all of them, and the one whose work is most infused with a mystery that probably transcends his era.

But Heinlein and Asimov haven't aged as well imo, in that their projections seem quaint at best and delusional at worst, and there's nothing in the way of other qualities - engaging characterization, deft plotting, prose style, etc. - to compensate. This isn't to say their work isn't worth reading, because it is if you're at all interested in the way the genre developed and grew, just that I would hesitate to point to any of their works as GREAT writing. Heinlein's protofascist swinging sexism is mostly just laughable these days. Asimov can be cute and is best in small doses/short fiction, but from a distance something like the Foundation trilogy is something more to be admired than read.

sad no mention of Sturgeon yet

It's a little funny to pick up a copy of Best American Short Stories and find Bradbury and Sturgeon stories tucked in there. SF must have had a respectability boomlet back then.

Bradbury broke out of the genre early, he always managed to hold himself apart from it to some degree. Maybe because he was explicitly *not* interested in prognosticating about technology and other "hard" science concerns.

Sturgeon wrote some great short stories.

There is a Delaney piece- I mostly prefer his criticism to his fiction at this point -in which he says Sturgeon was the first sf writer to revise a story he had already written and this blew everybody's mind.

lol

I'm still catching up on this thread, and I don't really feel like engaging the initial question (even if I were more enthusiastic about exercises in ranking, I haven't read enough in the genre), but I find Delany's work as a whole more compelling than any other SF I've read. That preference does imply what I tend to value in SF (as a queer reader, perhaps, although I don't think it comes down to a matter of identity in any simple way): the possibility of experimenting with new modes of relation between people, or exploring existing but marginalized or devalued forms of sociality, along with sensitivity to problems of language and representation. Those qualities aren't unique to Delany's work, I realize--I still need to read more of Russ, Butler, Tiptree, Disch, LeGuin, Sturgeon and others--but I consistently find them in his fiction.
xp

also - my man Moorcock very otm (in my opinion) about why people like Dick and Ballard are still garnering new fans and receiving relatively high media exposure and the Big Three et al seem increasingly like irrelevant science fetishists:

“We live in a Philip K Dick world now. The technology-led, military-led big names like Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur got it dead wrong. They were all strong on the military as subject matter, on space wars, rational futures – essentially, fascist futures – and none of these things really matters today. It’s Dick and people like Frederik Pohl and Alfred Bester who were incredibly successful in predicting the future, because they were interested in social change, ecology, advertising. Look at Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google . . . These are Philip K Dick phenomena.”

many xxps

Tiptree>>LeGuin>Disch>Russ>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Delany

imo

is there a good book of Delany crit James? I would probably read that. I enjoy reading insider histories/overviews of the genre.

His first two books of essays, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine (the source for that Sturgeon revision anecdote) tend to get the most attention.

at first glance my reaction was "oh great an even more didactic Ursula K. Leguin

Taking this as a throwaway remark rather than a sincere criticism of Le Guin then. Out of interest what have you read, or not read, of hers? I think she might actually be an example of an SF writer who gets more respect, relatively speaking, from outside the SF community than from within it. I struggle a bit because I always want to recommend the Earthsea saga but don't want to come off like a mad Harry Potter fanatic all excited about half a dozen volumes of kid lit. It does start off pretty YA oriented but much less childish than Potter, and when she revisits and reshapes the saga after 20 and then another 10 years, struggling at first with her earlier choices but then fully in control by the end - for me that beats Dune or Foundation or Tolkien no question.

that was a throwaway remark meant as a joking criticism of Butler (whom I have not read, I was just thumbing through her books at the store), and not LeGuin, who I genuinely love. I've read Left Hand of Darkness, Disposessed, a bunch of short story collections. But she wears her political and ethical concerns on her sleeve, they are central to her writing. I don't think this is a fault (altho some do, cf Tom Disch), partly because I sympathize with the vast majority of her concerns but also partly because she is a good enough writer that these things don't bog her down. Her stuff is not like reading a lecture.

The Word for World is Forest is the only major novel I haven't read of hers I think, Always Coming Home is the only one I couldn't get behind, not so much didactic as joyless. Not that everything has to be fun, plenty of her short stories are serious and tragic and great. ACH was just a slog.

feels a bit boring/obvious to mention him but hg wells still deserves a spot on any list of the best SF writers imo. i reread a few of his novels earlier this year and they are still very sharp, funny, well-plotted. war of the worlds in particular has some haunting descriptions of a ruined countryside/bombed-out london that feel very prescient and even ballard-like.

otm. Plus I think Aimless would dig him. I second War of the Worlds and would also recommend The Island of Doctor Moreau.

“We live in a Philip K Dick world now. The technology-led, military-led big names like Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur got it dead wrong. They were all strong on the military as subject matter, on space wars, rational futures – essentially, fascist futures – and none of these things really matters today. It’s Dick and people like Frederik Pohl and Alfred Bester who were incredibly successful in predicting the future, because they were interested in social change, ecology, advertising. Look at Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google . . . These are Philip K Dick phenomena.”

imo this is somewhat unfair to asimov, who did not write v. much about the military or "space wars" (i guess foundation deals with a lot of "trade wars" haha) or even really much about technology aside from robots, and was a lifelong new deal liberal with none of heinlein's creepy right-wing tendencies. his characters tend to be thin and barely fleshed out (w/ a few exceptions -- the mule in the later foundation books, susan calvin in some of the robot stories) and his prose is certainly unflashy but i think his best stuff, mostly from the late 40s through early 50s, is still fun to read. imo his reputation was hurt by the awful, bloated novels he wrote in the 80s more than anything else.

Yeah i think asimov is more of a "rational futurist" part of that equation than a militarist.

Sorry that was a terrible sentence but i hope u get what i mean. I hate posting from my phone...

I remember reading Asimov's defenses of his terrible prose, where he would bash those fru-fru "stylists" like Kakfka

I also read that Delaney thing about Sturgeon--it wasn't so much that Sturgeon was the first guy to think to revision, it was more that the culture of the pulps (writing at top-speed, under various pseudonyms, in order to make enough $ to live on) had created a macho culture where attention to style was thought of as a weakness.

When I was a teenage SF reader I always found Heinlein a much more approachable writer than Asimov - some of the 'juveniles', like Podkayne of Mars, are bright and amusing, and The Puppet Masters is a pretty great alien takeover novel (surprised it hasn't been made into a movie).

It has been, in 1994

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_%28film%29

its story logic is solid, its science is satisfying and its thrills are nerve-wracking
Douglas Pratt
DVDLaser

About as nerve-wracking as a warm bath.
Nick Schager
Lessons of Darkness

good work, rotten tomatoes

a macho culture where attention to style was thought of as a weakness.

there was definitely some overcompensating going on among the 40s-50s writers - they were nerds but they wanted to be tough, manly, smart nerds! The kind of nerds that got sent into space by the government!

i read "foundation" about a month back. asimov strikes me as a writer who is staunchly opposed to writing having literary qualities, and as such his writing stands and falls on the strength of his ideas. and since his ideas are those of the mid-20th century, well, he ages about as well as malthus does. mind you i don't know what moorcock is on about re: asimov being fascist, as foundation is pretty consistently the story of free-market ingenuity trumping militaristic brutality.

dick, on the other hand, has transcendent ideas and writing that has overt anti-literary qualities. i love his work, but extolling his virtues as a writer always reminds me somewhat of extolling the virtues of 1970s doctor who. they both contain inextricable elements of the cheap, laughable, and generally unappealing.

asimov strikes me as a writer who is staunchly opposed to writing having literary qualities

haha yeah, I def got the sense that Asimov hated the literary kind of SF stories that were regularly published in the magazine named after him.

as foundation is pretty consistently the story of free-market ingenuity trumping militaristic brutality

what about that part where there's secretly an elite cadre of super-smart people running the galaxy. Lacks fascism's appeal to populism but it's definitely a rationalist future, one where the optimal course for society is determined and achieved through the application of mathematical models

dick, on the other hand, has transcendent ideas and writing that has overt anti-literary qualities. i love his work, but extolling his virtues as a writer always reminds me somewhat of extolling the virtues of 1970s doctor who. they both contain inextricable elements of the cheap, laughable, and generally unappealing.

agree w all this. although I find the cheap and laughable to have their own charm, especially when they're shamelessly employed over and over, and in some cases with a clear undertone of bitter irony - the ridiculous fashion descriptions in Ubik, for ex, or the way super-powerful aliens or technology are rendered utterly banal (like the telepathic denebian slime mold neighbor in Clans of the Alphane Moon).

there are no great sci-fi writers ::drops mic::

there are no great sci-fi writers

fixed

Asimov was really young when he started publishing SF, wasn't he? Including the Foundation books. He, Heinlein, and Clarke were scientists/engineers by training, hence probably did not spend a lot of time reading canonical literature in school. And the pulp markets were never demanding in terms of prose style.

I had fond memories of The Puppet Masters from childhood, but it didn't hold up to a re-reading last year, it smells too strongly of HUAC. What Οὖτις aptly labels Heinlein's swinging sexism manifests in politicians, military men, and their female sidekicks all having to become quasi-nudists to show they are not infected by space slugs. The book almost works as satire, there are definitely funny scenes and flashes of wit, but the main effect is straight-faced xenophobia.

I still have much love for all those Golden Age guys. Like most 30s-50s pulp writers, their ideal reader is a young teenager, but we wouldn't have the genre as we know it without them.

For a balance between original ideas and good writing, Wells is a reasonable candidate in the space race for Best SF Writer. I'd probably lean toward Ballard or Dick. Of those two, Ballard is a superior stylist and in some ways more daring, but Dick is better for pacing, humanity, and weirdness.

if we're talking strictly prose stylists - who writes the best sentences, who has the most impressive command of language - imo it's either Malzberg or Ballard. Both were capable of writing really masterfully constructed, beautiful passages that function as great writing qua writing, irrespective of genre.

xpost (re Dick's "inextricable[junk elements]...bitter irony")yeah that's why he gets called post-modern, could be called punk, beat---the voice of attitude--but not nihilism. He was always searching, sorting things out, undeterred by the garble of the outer or inner world. Valis is a good-faith effort to balance the artist and the crackpot voices in his head and fingers, like Dusty seemed to be trying to do in The Idiot, for instance, although PKD made it much more explicit toward the end (spoiler). Not that he had Dusty's kind of chops, but that's what makes his writing works as well as it does, that he does it the PKD way, and anybody else who tries it is likely to look like a lifting fule ( ditto imitators of Dusty, Joyce etc).

Dusty Joyce would be the greatest pen name.

didn't he used to play 3rd base for the Phillies

I think that was Brooks Eliot.

Dusty in Dublin

it occurred to me recently that i had read like 10 sci-fi books in a row that contained virtually no physical descriptions of the characters. which seemed weird when i thought about it. some elements of fiction writing just not a concern for some SF writers. i'm finishing a huge trilogy right now and i can't recall a single physical detail about anyone other than the mention of a few characters getting white hair over time.

just thought i'd note that here...

And yet they pay brisk money for that... ah, never mind.

"all having to become quasi-nudists to show they are not infected by space slugs"

haha! i kinda loved this in that book. so nutty. that book is nuts.

I'll always remember my first encounters with newer SF/fantasy and there being so little visual descriptions that I felt "What the fuck's going on here? This book won't work properly!", like I was trying to turn on a broken machine.

I used to describe every fucking thing, but now---maybe especially while still in the hive of Dos Passos' USA, I crave some breathing room, some space left for the reader to fill in, or not. Like when Miles Davis works a phrase, not adding notes, substituting chords, but gradually leaving out more and more (maybe putting something back in on the third chorus, as he leaves something else out for the first time), letting the phrase dissolve into the listener's system (which might or might not incl. speculative listening). But sometimes I want it all laid out, up front, badda-boom (the best/most fun artists/entertainers can deliver both ways, sometimes simultaneously).

Like I was writing this memoir recently, and I did try to describe the look of things that seemed to require it, *if* and only if I truly (?) remembered---but also, the little old man was always just "the little old man": I think I remember just what he looked like, but yadda-yadda. I'd already said that this was in the early-mid-80s, and he was old, so yes he was wearing what looked like polyester slacks or suit pants, as you might (as) well suppose.

you're writing your memoirs? i'd read that.

I prefer descriptions that characterize rather than list what they see. I don't like it when they get into specifics that don't matter.

"what about that part where there's secretly an elite cadre of super-smart people running the galaxy. Lacks fascism's appeal to populism but it's definitely a rationalist future, one where the optimal course for society is determined and achieved through the application of mathematical models"

sounds almost randian, doesn't it?

Nah, Rand would be the Mule

Aimless: how about giving us a list of, say, 5 non-SF books you love, perhaps as different from each other as possible, and I/we will try to give you some SF titles that you might enjoy as a progression from them, if that makes sense.

Getting the distinct impression aimless is not reading his thread

there are no, strikethrough, great, end strikethrough, sci fi authors

idk if dick's ideas are 'transcendent', or that asimov's ideas have to be good qua ideas for him to be interesting to read -- it seems more like the argument ppl are making is 'dick's books smell of a worldview that is more appealing to me than asimov's' -- which is fine, me too

i mean also all the unexamined talk about 'literary qualities' is just kinda baffling

w/e. sf rules aimless drools

it's not a matter of "appealing". dick's worlds are ones where everything is on the verge of collapse, where nothing makes sense, where everybody is paranoid and/or high and somewhere out there the roman empire is still going around crucifying people. asimov's world is one wherein clever robots solve locked-room mysteries. i feel like dick describes the world we live in a lot better than asimov does.

what is baffling you about the talk about literary qualities? i feel like at this point "literary fiction" is a pretty well-defined thing and discussion of literary qualities shouldn't need much explanation.

It's def true that some of the worst science fiction prose comes when the author aspires to 'fine writing' - something Chandler latched onto in his parody of SF. Dick's sentences are often clunky and ill-formed - in his manic hurry, he can be amazingly crude and cloth-eared at times, the very opposite of sophistication - but he doesn't often slip into the purple-poetic, and he's got a slangy ear for speech and observation that within the terms of science fiction feels like a modernist advance on pulp cliche.

you're talking about stuff like "eye of argon", right? to me that school of writing is more a holdover from reh and lovecraft than anything to do with "literary writing".

i love that dick was a huge fan of van vogt, possibly the strangest prose stylist in all of SF.

I had never read any van vogt until recently and was struck by how bad he is at basic things like plot construction, narrative, characters, etc., which is contrasted by how good he is with establishing this unreal atmosphere where literally everything is potentially illusory or threatening or unexpected. PKD def similar to him in both ways, altho I consider Dick far superior, something about Van Vogt's writing and interests just make his stuff more alienating/impenetrable.

Getting the distinct impression aimless is not reading his thread

au contraire! I am reading it with interest.

all the unexamined talk about 'literary qualities' is just kinda baffling

Most readers just distinguish only between more enjoyable and less enjoyable books. This is only normal, right and natural. They have no need of detecting 'literary qualities', but only their degree of enjoyment.

Having aspired to authorship myself, the things I notice as I read books are most likely different than the things noticed by those who have never suffered under this painful delusion. Unfortunately, having misshapen my mind in this manner I cannot revert to the simpler enjoyments of the casual reader.

What I would call 'literary qualities' consist of the varying degrees to which an author has command over all the tools at their disposal. The more skillfully and knowingly an author uses these tools, the better the author's material and the reader are served. I notice these qualities as I read and they directly affect my enjoyment.

are you gonna answer James' request?

Aimless: how about giving us a list of, say, 5 non-SF books you love, perhaps as different from each other as possible, and I/we will try to give you some SF titles that you might enjoy as a progression from them, if that makes sense.

I'll think about it. No promises.

SFR: Do you find it personally challenging to write science fiction?

VAN VOGT: Yes, very much so. When I write my eight-hundred-word scenes, I must work at a very slow pace, much slower than even the reader, who must solve the hang-ups as he goes along. In my science fiction, the reader is required to do an incredible job. Not only must he read the story, but he must also make a creative contribution in order to understand it. My readers are extremely bright people. They must create much of the story as they go along, largely out of their own imagination, because of the various hang-ups which are built in. Once a person has read any science fiction of mine, his brain will no longer be the same. Hopefully, he will be changed for the better.

http://www.angelfire.com/art/megathink/vanvogt/vanvogt_interview.html

degrees to which an author has command over all the tools at their disposal

in this respect, the only way in which sci-fi authors differ from other types of authors is that the tools at their disposal include genre conventions

xp

xps

My ulterior purpose in starting this thread wasn't to flush out a covey of sf authors I should be reading (which would not be such a bad outcome after all), so much as to see ilb readers of sf discuss the sources of their appreciation for various sf authors, as opposed to discussing the fact of their appreciation. Because this sort of discussion in regard to sci-fi seems to me to be rare, compared to such discussions about 'literary' authors and books.

tbf, there is an equal lack of in-depth appreciation out there when it comes to authors like John Grisham or Michael Crichton.

discussion in regard to sci-fi seems to me to be rare

lol gtfo

the only way in which sci-fi authors differ from other types of authors is that the tools at their disposal include genre conventions

which is probably true, but so vague and general as to be unrevealing. that is why getting down to cases of individual authors, who differ greatly from one another in their choice of material and how they approach it, and of particular books, where the application of those tools is specifically made, is a much more revealing ground for discussion.

scholarly, critical discussions of sci-fi are all over the place, some of the best ones are even written by sf authors (Lem, Malzberg, Disch, etc.)

xp

here's a good example: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm

lol gtfo

sure, I could be wrong. then it ought to be simple for you to show your appreciation at this level here in this thread. which is why I am reading it with interest.

My readers are extremely bright people.

I don't doubt it. This has been so well acknowledged as to become a stereotype. But extremely bright people don't always demand the same sorts of pleasure from their reading as requires great literary skill or execution from an author. This doesn't prevent an author from deploying such skill, but their are plenty of extremely bright people upon such skills are lost.

Again, this is NOT to say all sf authors or readers fit such lol stereotypes.

upon whom

can you maybe grasp why your request is being met with derision/dismissal? If it isn't clear it mostly has to do with you requesting that we reproduce/rehash a bunch of readily available critical viewpoints while refusing to do any investigations of your own. Like, why should we waste our time? You can easily search this stuff out yourself. Or just read through any of the other threads I linked previously...

words to live by from van Vogt: "When I opened a book in a library to see whether I would borrow it or not, if the paragraphs were too long, I didn't borrow it."

I guess he never made it through Finnegan's Wake

requesting that we reproduce/rehash a bunch of readily available critical viewpoints

I was asking, rather politely, for the critical viewpoints of ilbers. which may or may not reproduce the critical viewpoints of various academics you might point me towards. If you were to enthusiastically endorse the linked article as thoroughly reflecting your own pov, I'd be more likely to read it. Linking just to prove that some publish-or-perish journal jockey has solemnly dissected some sf author's oeuvre is essentially of little interest to me, just as much as reading their unreadable articles on Henry James or James Joyce.

some publish-or-perish journal jockey has solemnly dissected some sf author's oeuvre

DUDE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lemv

Lem doesn't need my personal validation, he is a critical voice worth paying attention to because of the breadth of his knowledge and the precision of his writing, for which he is widely acknowledged.

goddamit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem

Your validation, however valuable, does not ascend to necessity. For example, you seem reluctant to accept that my desire to hear directly from ILBers about what they find to appreciate in various authors has much validity and that I ought to be satisfied with the knowledge that various sf authors deserve plaudits for their literary merits, have received many of them, and they can discuss their craft at length and in depth. But it does not satisfy me and I still think my request was valid on its own terms, even if you do not wish to answer in those terms and choose not to.

I am familiar with ilb and ilbers and the discourse here is very valuable to me in part because of this sociable familiarity. I just want to know what you think about your favorite authors, when you inspect the sources of your pleasure. No one says you have to tell me, but I'd still like to hear.

aimless, you know that just because we read sci-fi doesn't necessarily put us on the spectrum, right?

yup.

Lol. This whole thread is actually starting to feel like some kind of Lem/Dick/Sheckley story about a single autistic robot from one corner of the galaxy asking for but, due to programming differences exacerbated by vast intersstellar distances, refusing to accept a brain dump from a band of robots from the other end of the galaxy,

haha

btw, in re: JRatB's rumination regarding my public library's copy of M. John Harrison's Things That Never Happen:

Wonder if your copy will have the Iain Banks intro.

Nope. It has China Mieville's introduction, and it was dreadful.

Dick's response to Lem's praise is nutty as hell.

I've heard some compelling recommendations of Van Vogt. Unfortunately wild and unique imaginations don't always have the best prose to communicate with.

I just want to know what you think about your favorite authors, when you inspect the sources of your pleasure

all well and good. review previous threads for this, as noted.

can't spell "lab rats" without "ilbers"

"Unfortunately wild and unique imaginations don't always have the best prose to communicate with."

he's beyond good and bad. he left good and bad in the dust.

best quote ever:

In assessing Van Vogt's career, Barry Malzberg has observed: "So much of his work, reread after many years, seems to work in terms which are sub or trans-literary; so much of his power seems to come not from sophisticated technique and/or pyrotechnic style as from his ability to tap archetypal power, archetypal 'them,' and open up veins of awe or bedazzlement that otherwise are found in love or dreams."

his books have sub-literary appeal! but it's true. that's the weird part. trance fiction disguised as pulp.

haha where did you grab that from? I was trying to find some of Malzberg's crit to post, he is v v good for that.

JE: Given the tremendous emphasis you place on logic, how important is imagination in the context of your writing?

VV: Writing science fiction has been a major cause for the development of both my imagination and my sense of logic. Everything I wrote, or studied in connection with writing, expanded my consciousness. Studies that I made which began as imagination often ended up as systematic thoughts, by which I subsequently handled my life and my associations with other people. There has been a continual feedback between imagination and reality. And I believe this also happens to people who read science fiction.

sci-fi can change your life!

what a weirdo

sub out "love" for "racism" and that malzberg passage also describes lovecraft

i actually do believe that reading SF has kept me sharper than i would have been without it. it makes me think.

lol dlh

all well and good. review previous threads for this, as noted.

OK. I have begun and therefore I may not be very active on this thread for a time.

But of the first, oh, 700 posts I've read, only about 3 approach the sort of direct addressing of an author's strengths and weaknesses I was hoping to read (all by Shakey Mo, fwiw). The remainder confine themselves to bantering, exclamations about who is good, or comparisons similar to "he reminds me of [author X]". I feel like I am toiling in hope's delusive mine.

I hate this guy and I hate this book, but he and it have a cadre of devoted fans here who address some of his specific literary qualities:

dhalgren
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, then DUNE and now, the major novel of love and terror at the end of time: DHALGREN, by Samuel Delany, four-time Nebula award winner (ilx book club #Y8554)

is this what you have in mind Aimless:

Best J.G. Ballard Novel

or this:

Gene Wolfe

boy this is hard, using the search function, must have been all that science fiction I have read that has mentally prepared me for this daunting, thankless task

take a break

JE: If you were asked to assess your work, how would you do so?

VV: Over the years, here in the United States, three groups of science fiction writers have enjoyed greater popularity than I. The leading writers of Group One are Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, and Isaac Asimov, all of whom have known scientific training. I believe that there is a growing audience which, in reading science fiction, requires the assurance that what they read is a genuine extrapolation from true science. The rapid rise of Jerry Pournelle, who has several Ph.Ds., is a further evidence of the importance of a scientific background for this particular audience. Group Two is headed by Ray Bradbury, Ursula LeGuin, Roger Zelazny, and Harlan Ellison. These are all persons who write wonderfully condensed fictional sentences-meaning, their use of the English language is unusually pure and beautiful. All of these writers accept human nature at its present level without argument, and seem to believe that is all there is, ever. And so the vast audience of television and film is within the reach of what they write about. And they have penetrated the fabulous women's market. I suspect that Ellison will eventually have to remove the four-letter words from future revisions of his works, because pornographic language always runs in cycles. I seem to detect that interest in the current cycle is waning. Group Three is headed by Robert Silverberg. He has an extreme ability for finding touching themes, as in Dying Inside. His are not sentimental stories. They have genuine feeling in them. There are also a few special individuals, like Frank Herbert, of whose education I know nothing. And then there is my own favorite, R. A. Lafferty. I don't know what his audience is. What I have isn't merely extrapolation of science. I've devised actual practical sub-branches of economics, psychology, education, physical fitness, politics, libertarianism, criminology, etc. None of this will displace, or transcend, the science fiction poets, the scientists-writers, ot the marvelously sensitive women writers who have entered the science fiction writing field. But I believe what I have done will eventually exert an influence on modern thought.

of course he loved Lafferty, that makes total sense

I thought about recommending Lafferty earlier, but I didn't have time to write a term paper on him into the little box, so I figured my little effort would have lived in vain.

Now started to wonder if we should as the mods to move this thread to AaD.

my little effort would have lived in vain

I see what you did there

not to post on all threads, that is the law

JE: Finally, do you still enjoy reading science fiction? If so, whose work do you admire?

VV: I read the first few paragraphs of every story in all the science fiction magazines published in English. If those paragraphs have story energy in them, I may read on. And if that holds me, then I will read the story. I also receive all the Doubleday book club selections. With them, I also read the first few paragraphs. In addition, I buy several paperbacks a month, and get others free, and do the same with them. My general impression: there's less action in stories these days, but some very ingenious ideas. Of the non-action writers, R. A. Lafferty writes (for me) the best fictional sentences, Robert Silverberg the best true emotion, Harlan Ellison the most condensed fictional sentences, Larry Niven the best hardcore science fiction, Randall Garrett the best pastiche writing, and Jerry Pournelle the farthest in the shortest time. Of the great ladies, C. J. Cherryh, Vonda McIntyre, Katherine Kurtz, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.), Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and Tanith Lee have all gone up into those rarefied heights that only women can attain. But the fact that I have to list that many names, and omit several dozen that have my respect-for example, John Brunner and Brian Aldiss-tells me that the field has changed drastically for the better.

two posts good, four posts pad

xp

BAD

bah

is this what you have in mind Aimless: [link to] Best J.G. Ballard Novel

I read the entire thread. It was only 80 posts long, so it didn't take long, because every post but one could be fairly characterized as 3 brief sentences or fewer, mostly consisting of pithy observations such as 'I liked such-and-such best. It would make a good movie.'

The sole exception was the one long post by Milton Parker that Οὖτις linked directly to. Yes, that post was extremely helpful, in that it was personal, detailed and strove to encapsulate the qualities of Ballard's various books using vivid imagery that is easily grasped. So, thanks, Οὖτις. And thank you, Milton Parker.

Tempted to just do blogstyle posts on every author in my library, one a day. Would that make you happy

My happiness is at your command.

i do wonder whether aimless's question might not have had a less hostile response had it been overtly the question -- 'why do SFF readers tend towards non-critical* discussions of the values of the works they enjoy' is an interesting question, and the answer isn't "lol because they're autistic."

*by which i do not mean 'uncritical'

-- all-in-this-together nature of fanships, fear of being boorish
-- if one is in x pastime for enjoyment then why does one need more than a fans-of-x-and-y-will-enjoy-z consumer-guide
-- internet accelerating/concentrating above tendencies

It isn't? Oh, I see.

Obv that was xpost. Agree that yours might be a more interesting question.

But yeah, actually difficult to answer properly on Internet borad without getting shot by both sides.

thomp otm

if I have some free time today maybe I will write a paragraph on Brian Aldiss

'why do SFF readers tend towards non-critical* discussions of the values of the works they enjoy' is an interesting question

i think we had this discussion once on ilx about the (much superior) fantasy genre. my general thesis was that most people in the position to add to the critical discussion would rather deepen their immersion in the world the novel creates. like there are ppl doing legit scholarship on fansites and messageboards about 'game of thrones' but its like 'who is the third head of the targaryen dragon' and not... w/e ppl doing scholarship on jane austen write about. most of the work derived from weird fiction tends towards deepening the creator's relationship w/ the original work, like 'heres my detailed map of what the colony on mars from kim stanley robinson's mars trilogy would look like' &c

obv stuff like this, or fan-fiction, can be and often is critical but some of it isnt. but its routinely 'critical' in a way that lacks the authority/distance of what literary types consider criticism? idk this ended up messier than i intended

why do SFF readers tend towards non-critical* discussions of the values of the works they enjoy'

I kinda disagree that this is generally true, though - it's true of things like messageboard threads, but it is not true of, say, academia, which has generated a rich and expansive critical discourse (one that is nonetheless not as old or as large as the academic discourse around more mainstream lit)

B-b-but what about Aldiss? What separates him from the pack?

not much I just figured I'd go alphabetically

One of the signs of being on the spectrum.

what can I say, I was raised by a librarian. I alphabetize shit.

Okay, ping me when you get to Zelazny.

so yeah, Aldiss. I've read two books of his, attempted and never finished a third, plus a smattering of short stories (not all of which I can immediately recall). The two books I do rate very highly - "Barefoot in the Head" and "Report on Probability A" - are both stylistic and formal exercises more than anything else, and as such more conventional metrics of fiction writing (plot mechanics, characterization, dialogue, etc.) are not relevant, as they are not really employed in any standard, recognizable way. "Barefoot in the Head"'s structure mirrors the progressive psychological states typical of a psychedelic trip. Things begin slowly and with giddy optimism, gradually building to a frenzied "peak", followed by the inevitable comedown. The text is an amalgam of Burroughs-style cutup, jumbled slang, songs/poems, typographical experiments, and stream-of-consciousness narrative. It is possible to discern plot points in the chaos, as well as recurring themes and imagery - driving and cars and their perpetual forward motion are central (in a way that perhaps presages fellow New Worlds contributor Ballard's "Crash" nearly a decade earlier), as are a commitment to simultaneously maintaining multiple points of view. The ostensible plot centers around a messianic protagonist, Charteris, against the backdrop of a Europe that has been devastated by successive wars involving the massive deployment of psychotropic drugs into the environment. The protagonist becomes the chosen one/messiah of a huge gang of motorized followers, who stream across Europe towards an eventual violent end. Chapters written in a more or less conventional format (Charteris addresses his followers, miraculously survives a huge crash, etc.) are interjected with pages featuring song lyrics by the musicians that are following Charteris, or a page consisting entirely of iterations of the word "acid" in the shape of skull (ASCI-image style), etc. I'm not sure what other points of comparison can be made for these kinds of interjections and textual trickery - which bear more similarity to things like pop art than other contemporary lit - certainly there's some precedents in e.e. cummings and Alfred Bester and Burroughs and probably some others I'm unaware of, but they contribute very much to the novel's "anything can (and might) happen at any moment" feel. The book is a rush, dreamlike, not always coherent but with enough density that underlying patterns can be discerned and enjoyed and picked apart. It is *very* 60s, a reflection of psychedelic anxiety and hysteria, in love with the violence of free association.

"Report on Probability A" is completely different (hilariously it is listed as a "fantasy" novel in the "Also by" column of my copy of "Barefoot in the Head") in construction and themes, but is similarly built around a strong underlying premise. It is about surveillance and observation and the crippling inactivity and anxiety produced when all one does is sit and watch something; it's a book about people watching other people watching other people - ie a book where nothing happens. Instead of plot action what we get is a series of nested narratives where different subsets of characters are observing each other. iirc (it's been 10+ years since I read it, forgive me if some details are fudged - they don't really matter anyway) there's a couple in a shack who are supposed to be spying on someone in a large country house. Detailed descriptions of the environs are provided. Motives and characterization are not. Then it turns out the spies in this world (which is the titular Probability A) are also being spied on by some people in another dimension, who are in turn being spied on by people in yet another dimension - with the parallels piling up such that the reader is implicated as being one in just a series of realities observing other realities through the prism of the book, all begging the question of who's observing the reader. The overwhelming effect of the book is one of tension and paranoia - no resolution is ever provided. It sounds a bit dry in practice, and it is, but it's compelling for the way it's telescopic construction, where the eye of the narrative keeps backing out and out and out until nobody in the book, much less the reader, can maintain any sense of certainty or autonomy. Obvious shades of Kafka and Dick and Foucault.

After loving these two I started on "Cryptozoic", written around the same time as the others, and was startled at what a mess it was. Comparatively a straightforward narrative with classic sf themes of time travel and drug-induced states but everything about it was unengaging and tiresome. Where more standard plotting and character devices would have served him well, he just failed. Moorcock (who frequently commissioned and included material from Aldiss, including various sections of "Barefoot in the Head", for "New Worlds", the magazine he was then editing) has commented that Aldiss benefited from editorial guidance, that he flourished when he was given clear tasks. Which would seem to be borne out by my reading experience - "Barefoot in the Head" and "Report on Probability A" work so well because they are grounded in strong core concepts and executed with these sort of pre-laid restrictions in place, everything is in service to the central idea. But when it comes to more standard storytelling, he's less effective. That being said, if others here have other recs for Aldiss I would certainly entertain them. He's written a great deal of which I've read only a fraction, it's entirely possible (if not likely) that I'm missing out on some key works.

apologies for numerous grammatical errors

the (much superior) fantasy genre

?!?!?!?

In the spirit of this thread, would be interested in some current fantasy recommendations: I frequently find it hard enough picking out good SF from the dross, and have no idea with fantasy, since all the stuff in the bookshops seems to be desperately marketed as either Game of Thrones-lite or Tolkien-lite: not saying that's what it IS, but that's how it's presented, and I have no interest in either

def feel ya on that. the endless serialized novels featuring quests and savior figures and *zzzzzzzzz*

otoh I never would have guessed at the quality of Gene Wolfe's fantasy stuff based on how it's marketed/presented

Also gtfo any book which relies on a "prophecy" to push the plot along

I know I am the mjh street team in this thread, but does the word Viriconium mean anything to you, James M?

Yes indeed--i have it and really like it. It's that sort of thing that would interest me: I came to it via SF, having read several of his novels in that genre.

By "it" I mean the Fantasy Masterworks omnibus of Virconium stories

James, I would like to recommend to you the work of Elizabeth Hand.

I will investigate her this weekend. Cheers!

words to live by from van Vogt: "When I opened a book in a library to see whether I would borrow it or not, if the paragraphs were too long, I didn't borrow it."

― scott seward, Wednesday, 28 October 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

One for the 'ppl who figured out how to live' thread.

To each his own.

Is skot posting all these vV quotes because:
1) He thinks it will help Aimless understand the genre better
2) He read someone mention his posting style upthread and he wants to make good on that
3) He is just being skot

4) Because they are hilarious and the thread can have hilarity from both vV and Aimless.

Hah? Would you buy that for a quarter?

but it is not true of, say, academia, which has generated a rich and expansive critical discourse (one that is nonetheless not as old or as large as the academic discourse around more mainstream lit)

Most of the academic writing I've seen about SF has little to do with what is good or bad about the writing, but rather what ideas the text contains, or at least which ideas can be used as a jumping off point to write about politics, gender, etc.

probably a reflection of authors' own priorities there, to some extent.

also reflects that SF became a matter of academic concern in the current age

haha yes

should I do Armstrong or Aylett next or just skip straight to Ballard (feel like we already covered Asimov well enough)

actually feel like Milton covered Ballard p well too now that I think about ti

i just read SF writers on SF. because, man, they loooooove to talk about themselves and their stories and their ideas and other people's stories and ideas. but i kinda love that. i love when i get a short story collection and EVERY story has a two page introductory essay by the writer explaining the exact circumstances of their writing the story. you don't really get that with any other genre.

haha yeah I have a copy of Clans of the Alphane Moon that came with a fantastic afterward by Malzberg that apes PKD's writing style.

the recent Silverberg omnibus short story collections all contain introductory texts by Bob, they're great

I def prefer reading the supplementary material in More Dangerous Visions to most of the stories themselves

That reminds me to get a copy of Charles Platt's Dream Makers now that it's not a collector's item anymore. I had it in my teens and foolishly sold it for a buck.

i just read SF writers on SF. because, man, they loooooove to talk about themselves and their stories and their ideas and other people's stories and ideas. but i kinda love that. i love when i get a short story collection and EVERY story has a two page introductory essay by the writer explaining the exact circumstances of their writing the story. you don't really get that with any other genre.

i think some people are incapable of reading SF because you do have to read it differently than you would lit fic and you have to learn how to do this and this might take time and effort that a lot of people don't want to expend. like opera! you just can't compare it to straight fiction. not critically. i don't think. it would be like comparing lit fic to a poem or a painting or a comic book. they are just different things with different rules. the best sci-fi writers are often beloved for reasons that have little to do with trad literary elements. i think we have established that here. malzberg's blurb about vV explains it pretty well. just as a poet or painter can get to the heart of something that a novelist can't, good SF writers can take the human imagination to places that a trad novelist never could. or wouldn't even think to.

( i mean if you want to get INTO it for real it takes time and effort to get used to the form. not if you're just gonna read ender's game or ready player one or whatever. SF can obviously be enjoyed on the fly...)

SF definitely does stuff that trad lit just... doesn't. which is not to say there are not SF writers with trad lit qualities, because there definitely are.

people enthusiastically recommending Ready Player One around my office kinda bumming me out

just finished the coyote trilogy by allen steele - trad heinleinian space opera stuff - and there is no way in hell anyone not already interested in science fiction is ever gonna read those things. even though they are entertaining and straightforward and suspenseful and have sympathetic characters and all that. i wouldn't necessarily recommend them to anyone either! but i'm glad i read them. that's kinda my definition of genre fandom. i will read all these books that are not really great but they give me that thing that i like.

Definitely feel that it helps to make analogies with the way genres work in film or music and to understand that different rules are in play.

Two of the inherent problems in answering the original poster in the terms he demanded is that:
1) He wanted us that champion and sing the praises of our particular favorites, when in fact that there tends to be so much of that kind of thing within the world of the fans and the writers that some of us might want to steer clear of it and use other rhetorical devices such as late posting styleterse understatement.
2)He wanted us not to refer back to other opinions, but instead generate our own unmediated opinions of our untarnished uninfluenced encounters with the text themselves. How easy this can be if it is even possible at all for any kind of writing is a good question but in such a self-referential genre of SF it is particular challenging. I mean you don't listen to a Parliament album and then say afterwards "but my dear Mr. Clinton you have evaded the premises of your own proposition, you never satisfactorily explained what the funk really is."

lol @ P-Funk analogy

ugh ready player one was the worst.

just read about this in an old issue of Analog. would like to look at it. lots of essays by sf writers.

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Science-Fiction-Education-Tomorrow/dp/0913896152

putting this here so that i remember to read it later.

http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/teaching.htm

I loved that Van Vogt interview, especially this bit -

I write with total conscious craftsmanship. I'm always aware of the techniques I employ---my eight-hundred-word scenes, my five-step process, my fictional sentences, my presentation units.

You can tell why you liked dianetics!

Prompted me to dig out my Van Vogt holdings, all unread (by me) as yet - Weapon Shops of Isher (great cover by my fave SF artist, Bruce Pennington, who also did the New English Library cover for Dune); Voyage of the Space Beagle; The Anarchistic Colossus; The Mind Cage; Quest for the Future - think the first two are meant to be among his big hits?

https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5526/11510739785_074cacdfc9_b.jpg

Weapon Shop of Isher is a fixup - one of the stories it includes ("The Weapon Shop") was included in Silverberg's Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. 1 collection. This is to-date the only Van Vogt I've read and it has a very strange tone throughout, not the least of which can be attributed to its not very subtle didactic point about weapons ownership as a bulwark against tyranny. But motivations are generally both obscure and mutable, and I had a hard time just determining who Van Vogt thought were the real protagonists/antagonists of the story. I wouldn't say it was good exactly, but it has stuck in my mind.

Dick's favorite was Null-A iirc

I think Slan is his biggest hit.

Did he get sucked the whole way into scientology or not rich enough to get in?

Splendid as always, Ward; thanks. Here's Alfie Bester on his method, influences, strange encounter with boyhood hero Campbell, much else--think this might've started as background notes for publisher, re book jacket flap thumbnail bio, turned into excellent jazz spiral:
http://www.loa.org/sciencefiction/biographies/bester_writings.jsp

(I tend to think of science fiction as jazz)

Also his career in comics; nobody's mentioned comics yet, have they? Sorry if I missed it; feel like I have to duck in and out of here quickly and rarely, no offense.

I've never felt that the main genres of fiction read that differently. I don't feel like I have to approach reading them differently.
I think the values really depends on the writers.

Most of the academic writing I've seen about SF has little to do with what is good or bad about the writing, but rather what ideas the text contains, or at least which ideas can be used as a jumping off point to write about politics, gender, etc.

Not an expert, and can only write from a UK perspective, but there was def a pre-structuralist/semiotic but postwar tradition of British intellectual engagement with SF, somewhat tied to the universities, where there were Science Fiction societies, and epitomised by Kingsley Amis' New Maps of Hell - eg Amis v. matey with Brian Aldiss. It was also part of a larger appreciation for certain aspects of what became known as popular culture. Being old school style lit crit, there was plenty of evaluation of good and bad, and it only really went away here after French Theory had become deeply embedded within the teaching practices of British Higher Education Literature Departments - the whole idea of good and bad and value and critical perspective had been irreversibly problematised. Now, saying what's good and bad about the writing is the province of fans, and of us lot, right here, and across the interweb to infinity and beyond.

SF always best read mildy stoned, obv.

"Did he get sucked the whole way into scientology or not rich enough to get in?"

he was involved early on with dianetics and was a sort of west coast money drop for l. ron but got out when things got religious.

I appreciate the current push towards diversity and a reasonable sort of political correctness but within that movement it seems like there's a particular type of silly fan who faults writers that write about deeply unpleasant people/things, as if that's a wrong thing to do.

One of the best things about having writers from diverse backgrounds is when they bring completely different approaches, priorities and values to everything. That's particularly good for science fiction.
It seems these particular readers want the same old crap (Moorcock talking about the predictable emotional arc of bestsellers springs to mind) but with less racism, sexism and homophobia. That isn't such a bad thing in itself but I don't like the idea of large parts of fandom favouring POC & LGBT writers who basically write the same as the main bestsellers of the past. Or that books should always be like a nice hot bath.

Re Van Vogt: I only had a small number of anthologies as a kid, that I would read over and over. Scattered throughout were stories like "The Weapon Shop", libertarian authors making laboured points about the evils of gun control or communism or excessive bureaucracy or the urgent necessity of unfettered capitalism. Having little knowledge of such things I found these stories perplexing, with their bizarre but apparently hugely important concerns poorly concealed behind the standard SF trappings. Only much later did I realised it was all pointless flim-flam written by buffoons.

i would almost call some of the vV i have read outsider art. you couldn't really write like him if you tried. he does take you to some really weird places mentally. i would never recommend him to anyone who was thinking of reading SF though. most lit fic readers would just throw his books across the room.

the number one go-to writer to suggest to people who don't read sci-fi is le guin.

she's BEYOND the genre or TRANSCENDS the genre or whatever people like to say, but she is also god-like to sf fans and writers. lots of grouchy male SF writers who hated everybody loved her work. and she is as big an influence on SF&F as any living writer that i can think of.

yeah, her or Ballard. Le Guin's style is calm and lucid and very writerly, and yet I have always been gratified that she bristles at the suggestion that her work is *not* SF/F, she has a clear allegiance to the genre and well-reasoned arguments supporting that allegiance, and she loves playing with the tropes and possibilities of the genre as much as any old school pulp writer.

If you asked 14 year old me who the best SF writer was, I'd have answered: Lucius Shepard. Bummed that I just found out he died last year.

I didn't know that either!

Think some of the grumps didn't like Le Guin either.

What I really came to post is that I just saw Ex-ilx0r Casuistry and he recommended Aimless read Delany.

I've read some of the M. John Harrison stories I checked out of the library on your recommendation. I can see he is an unusual and talented writer, in that he has a style few could master and he makes it work.

In the two stories from his later period that I read ("The Great God Pan" & "Gifco") he manages to write sentences which obviously have a connection in time and space and emotional affinity, but he places enough psychic space between each sentence and the next that they convey an inescapable sense of alienation. Little happens. Even when there is motion there is no sense of action. His scenes read more like tableaux lit by a very slow-pulsing strobe.

The problem for me is that this deep sense of alienation, however much it truly comes from Harrison's personal and emotional vision of the world, is not my truth or vision of the world. As such, while I can't argue with the excellence or effectiveness of his artistry, or question his sincerity, I viscerally reject his presentation of the world as wrongly constructed, because so much life and beauty is missing in his world, that is abundant in the world that I see, know and love.

Because of this, reading him any further feels like I'd be voluntarily staying in a dungeon when the door is open and I have only to walk out and up to enjoy the air and light that exists above and beyond it. For someone who is depressed and alienated, whose daily experience does not include such an open door, these stories might give a certain bleak comfort, because seeing your world mirrored in art is affirming, even if your world is a bleak, mostly meaningless world.

Figuring out how to write this kept me awake for hours last night.

.

1) i'm not sure i particularly disagree with that.
1a) lol at his half-inching the title 'the great god pan', tho
2) i want to get back to some of the, tilde, ideas, tilde in this thread later but
3)

people enthusiastically recommending Ready Player One around my office kinda bumming me out

― Οὖτις, 2015년 10월 30일 금요일 오후 4:20 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

quit your job

With a thread like this, everybody wins.

while I can't argue with the excellence or effectiveness of his artistry, or question his sincerity, I viscerally reject his presentation of the world as wrongly constructed, because so much life and beauty is missing in his world, that is abundant in the world that I see, know and love.

Because of this, reading him any further feels like I'd be voluntarily staying in a dungeon when the door is open and I have only to walk out and up to enjoy the air and light that exists above and beyond it. For someone who is depressed and alienated, whose daily experience does not include such an open door, these stories might give a certain bleak comfort, because seeing your world mirrored in art is affirming, even if your world is a bleak, mostly meaningless world.

You definitely won't like Thomas Ligotti then. But in his case it's not so much the world being wrongly constructed (nobody's fault, just an accident of evolution) as the human predicament being not worthwhile.

B-b-but how do you reckon he would feel about Lovecraft?

Lovecraft knows the universe is horrible and meaningless but he loves too many things to want to have never been born. I'm pretty sure he'd say survival is worthwhile.

Re: that Van Vogt description above nearly applying to Lovecraft? I don't think so, he is full of pyrotechnics but not always sophisticated.

Somebody fedex some well-written, morally uplifting, life-affirming SF to this thread pronto. Please do not forget to include the paperwork, an eight-page minimum double spaced document written in your own hand- no secondary sources- affirming its literary worth and evidencing its salubrious effect on your personal mental and spiritual hygiene, or it will be returned.

Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FPmSLzsbdM

"The Great God Pan" became the novel The Course of the Heart, which I highly recommend to those who have acquired a taste for that sort of coterie writing.

Has it any relation to Machen's "Great God Pan"?

How much of science fiction leans towards bleak? Is Hard SF usually bleak? Or maybe roboticly indifferent?

Sure, of course it is related to Machen.

I can't speak to bleak.

i actually bought a short story collection recently of POSITIVE SF. that's the whole theme of the book. looks kinda boring...

Whom do you consider the most underrated or unappreciated writers, past and present?

Too many to name, but I think of Bessie Head from South Africa, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay in India, and also writers like Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin, who were said to write science fiction, though their male counterparts were called magical realists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/books/review/gloria-steinem-by-the-book.html?ref=books

How much of science fiction leans towards bleak?

Surely no more and no less than regular fiction? Optimism in technological progress easily counterbalanced by a belief that we will always find new and more exciting ways to be horrible to each other, or the threat of the unknown. Or the middle option, 'Twas ever and will be thus', just as fertile, despite how it sounds, for speculation in the ways that technological or social change will leave us more or less the same.

Eh, straight snobbishness there. Le Guin and Butler firmly in the SF/F camp.

This thread should be buried in the bomb shelter along with the Blessed Leibowitz's shopping list.

Lol at Steinem
LeGuin's male counterpart is like Disch or something

He was notoriously not a fan

1) i'm not sure i particularly disagree with that.
1a) lol at his half-inching the title 'the great god pan', tho
2) i want to get back to some of the, tilde, ideas, tilde in this thread later but
3)

/people enthusiastically recommending Ready Player One around my office kinda bumming me out

― Οὖτις, 2015년 10월 30일 금요일 오후 4:

1) i'm not sure i particularly disagree with that.
1a) lol at his half-inching the title 'the great god pan', tho
2) i want to get back to some of the, tilde, ideas, tilde in this thread later but
3)

/people enthusiastically recommending Ready Player One around my office kinda bumming me out

― Οὖτις, 2015년 10월 30일 금요일 오후 4:20 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink/

quit your job

Some positivity:

Be!
Be!
The past is dead,
Tomorrow is not born.
Be today!
Today!
Be with every nerve,
With every fibre,
With every drop of your red blood!
Be!
Be!

do fuck off, james

Steinem is great i love her but that quote is ridiculous

'why do SFF readers tend towards non-critical* discussions of the values of the works they enjoy' is an interesting question

i think we had this discussion once on ilx about the (much superior) fantasy genre. my general thesis was that most people in the position to add to the critical discussion would rather deepen their immersion in the world the novel creates. like there are ppl doing legit scholarship on fansites and messageboards about 'game of thrones' but its like 'who is the third head of the targaryen dragon' and not... w/e ppl doing scholarship on jane austen write about. most of the work derived from weird fiction tends towards deepening the creator's relationship w/ the original work, like 'heres my detailed map of what the colony on mars from kim stanley robinson's mars trilogy would look like' &c

obv stuff like this, or fan-fiction, can be and often is critical but some of it isnt. but its routinely 'critical' in a way that lacks the authority/distance of what literary types consider criticism? idk this ended up messier than i intended

― dead (Lamp), Thursday, October 29, 2015 6:13 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i don't know if i want to admit these modes of engaging with the text as ~criticism~, although it's probably gatekeeperish in a pretty pointless way to do so. some practices which are akin to these: writing a lyric from a band you like on your bookbag in correction fluid; grinding your characters up to lv99 ...

(though, ok, some practices not unrelated to those which also share a family resemblance with criticism: cover versions, game-breaking LPs, whatever)

there's a lot of stuff available to readers of austen that's not available to readers of KSR or GRRM: like, in the past thirty years you'd have new historicist or related attempts to locate austen in other discourses of the time, there's a famous queer theory take ('jane austen and the masturbating girl') which is not unrelated, and i imagine some very tedious history-of-the-book stuff comparing editions and serial publications

i think the absence of a lot of these possibilities is part of why some published lit-crit on SF seems ... really impoverished? like there's a couple books on gene wolfe which are just spectacularly empty (but then, lol, gene wolfe) (but then, hey, maybe aimless should read gene wolfe)

i would be interested to read an account of, say, the practice of the 40s-60s SF fixer-upper

actually i was tempted at one point to work on the intersection of 'avant garde' and 'genre' fiction in britain in the 60s with some specific attention to the politics of literary journaling, the moment after the one ward fowler describers upthread -- but then i decided not to try and be an academic

...

i think you're basically right tho in what i guess is yr implied claim -- 'they have these other ways of relating to the text open to them so why would they bother with ~criticism~' -- but i feel this is net bad for genre fiction, net bad for genre fiction readers

--

i think some people are incapable of reading SF because you do have to read it differently than you would lit fic and you have to learn how to do this and this might take time and effort that a lot of people don't want to expend. like opera! you just can't compare it to straight fiction. not critically. i don't think. it would be like comparing lit fic to a poem or a painting or a comic book. they are just different things with different rules. the best sci-fi writers are often beloved for reasons that have little to do with trad literary elements.

i think we have established that here. malzberg's blurb about vV explains it pretty well. just as a poet or painter can get to the heart of something that a novelist can't, good SF writers can take the human imagination to places that a trad novelist never could. or wouldn't even think to.

― scott seward, Friday, October 30, 2015 4:17 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i agree with this up to the paragraph break i put in -- idk if we've 'established' this, unless dialectically, by the process of poking aimless. i think establishing it might mean showing a model of what 'trad literary elements' are

samuel delany is pretty good as a critic when he starts talking about the problems of using lit-crit tools to unpack SF, but then i can't remember a single long reading of an SF text by him which i actually like --

some kind of most-honest-post-in-thread award for scott here tho:

that's kinda my definition of genre fandom. i will read all these books that are not really great but they give me that thing that i like.

i think possibly the problem is that the thing i'm looking for has no obvious place to exist -- the conversations you have with a fellow reader of genre fiction are often predicated on the idea that they are a fan of whatever genre or author, whereas conversations you have with someone else who ~reads~ are not predicated on the idea they are fans of reading. that said, i don't really know anyone else who reads, these days.

(expand this to the conversations available on the internet)

(i think one counter-argument to this is that, being a reader of books is just a fandom with a different set of rules, i.e., that instead of pretending map-drawing matters you pretend aesthetics matter. i obviously think this is wrong, if you have a convincing elaboration feel free to go w/ it ... )

Delany is the best interview. And the book of interviews with him that i have is a real favorite of mine. lots of interviews online too and they are worth reading as well.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6088/the-art-of-fiction-no-210-samuel-r-delany

I got his book On Writing to give to my daughter, started reading it, and kept it for myself.

scuse me, About Writing.

i need a copy of the jewel-hinged jaw.

some kind of most-honest-post-in-thread award for scott here tho:

/that's kinda my definition of genre fandom. i will read all these books that are not really great but they give me that thing that i like./

Yeah i love scott but i dont read like he does (maybe i would if i had the access to material he does tho)

i don't read just ANYTHING though. lots of stuff i don't buy when i'm browsing SF paperbacks at the used book store.

i just started reading robert silverberg's the masks of time. which looks cool.

looking at the july 6, 1981 issue of isaac asimov's science fiction magazine and the point i was making above about fandom sorta/kinda reflected in a review of disch's on wings of song. (a book i own and have never read partly because the cover is so terrible...)

"I'm still not sure whether I liked it or not. But I can certainly say that it's well worth reading."

"You don't have to like a work to think it's good."

Harold Bloom put that book on his Western Canon list

(also a review of m. john harrison's a storm of wings in the same issue. overly baroque for the reviewer, but still a book that should be read slowly and carefully and perhaps immediately again which the critic assures us is something that they have never suggested before.)

also includes a review of this book which looks interesting:

http://www.amazon.com/Aliens-Linguists-Language-Atlantic-Association/dp/0820304875/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1446316119&sr=1-1&keywords=aliens+and+linguists

Picking up on some of the ideas that have been broached lately:

Being an analytical reader is not the same as being a critical reader. Everyone who reads enough to develop tastes and affinities also develops a template that describes in outline what 'that thing they like' looks like, so they can maximize their ability to capture that thing. For the vast majority of readers this template is very crude, but serviceable. It does the work it was designed to do. For example this template might include 'never read anything where the paragraphs are too long'.

For the type of reader who finds ILB and frequently comes back to it, that analysis is going to be much better defined and based in an ongoing dialogue between that reader and the books and authors being read. But that analysis is very personal and is not quite the same as developing a critical point of view. That requires a further step of creating a critical vocabulary that can generalize and communicate their findings as they read a book, and how it fits into the universe of existing and possible books.

When the ordinary reader attempts to communicate their appreciation of a piece of writing, even though their personal analysis of 'that thing' might be fairly exacting and quite adept at identifying 'that thing' when they seek it, their critical vocabulary is almost certainly going to begin with "I liked it" or "I didn't like it". The next stop is "it reminded me of [book or author that fit my template in similar ways]". But it is dicey whether they can go much further than that. And that's just normal and understandable. Developing a more flexible and acute critical vocabulary than that is a highly specialized endeavor and doesn't pay very well.

One thing ILB does as a matter of course, is to encourage ILBers who post to threads to stretch themselves a bit and develop their critical vocabulary beyond these basics. You can see this at work in every thread. I think I also irritated a bunch of ILBers in this thread by pushing too hard for that development and not realizing that this would feel like inviting enthusiasts to dinner and then making them sing for their supper. I apologize for that.

P.S. Hi, Casuistry. I will seek out some Delany and give it a whirl.

I believe my wide-reading/scientist Dad likes LeGuin and Heinlein and Asimov, the last I think more for the science than the fiction, as well as Clarke.

I know another scientist/reader/writer who's pretty into David Brin, and perhaps Pohl but I may be misremembering.

I was a big fan of Ray Bradbury as a kid but not necessarily his sci-fi stuff. I liked the little Heinlein I've read too but less my thing.

bradbury was my way in/gateway drug ten years ago. i had a lot of regret at the time that i never read him in high school. his imagination is now one of my favorite things in the galaxy.

i NEVER read SF as a kid/teen. like, never. i'm making up for lost time.

Picking up on some of the ideas that have been broached lately:

Being an analytical reader is not the same as being a critical reader. Everyone who reads enough to develop tastes and affinities also develops a template that describes in outline what 'that thing they like' looks like, so they can maximize their ability to capture that thing. For the vast majority of readers this template is very crude, but serviceable. It does the work it was designed to do. For example this template might include 'never read anything where the paragraphs are too long'.

For the type of reader who finds ILB and frequently comes back to it, that analysis is going to be much better defined and based in an ongoing dialogue between that reader and the books and authors being read. But that analysis is very personal and is not quite the same as developing a critical point of view. That requires a further step of creating a critical vocabulary that can generalize and communicate their findings as they read a book, and how it fits into the universe of existing and possible books.

When the ordinary reader attempts to communicate their appreciation of a piece of writing, even though their personal analysis of 'that thing' might be fairly exacting and quite adept at identifying 'that thing' when they seek it, their critical vocabulary is almost certainly going to begin with "I liked it" or "I didn't like it". The next stop is "it reminded me of [book or author that fit my template in similar ways]". But it is dicey whether they can go much further than that. And that's just normal and understandable. Developing a more flexible and acute critical vocabulary than that is a highly specialized endeavor and doesn't pay very well.

One thing ILB does as a matter of course, is to encourage ILBers who post to threads to stretch themselves a bit and develop their critical vocabulary beyond these basics. You can see this at work in every thread. I think I also irritated a bunch of ILBers in this thread by pushing too hard for that development and not realizing that this would feel like inviting enthusiasts to dinner and then making them sing for their supper. I apologize for that.

P.S. Hi, Casuistry. I will seek out some Delany and give it a whirl.

I mean it isn't as if the half dozen threads shakey linked are full of people simply saying I liked it/I didn't like it?

I definitely think that a person interested in c20 literature would benefit from reading Ballard Delaney and LeGuin

As an omnivore/dilettante I think the merits are apparent but I acknowledge that there are notes that I miss as a non-connoisseur, kind of like when I listen to country music or something

xp to wins

tbh, yes, they are very full of people saying exactly that, punctuated occasionally by people saying very much more. the typical reply in every thread on ILX, including ILB, is one sentence long. it's hard to fit much in one sentence without relying on common knowledge to do all the heavy lifting.

I wonder if there is a science fiction (etc.) equivalent to Lucasta Miller's The Bronte Myth? After describing how Charlotte built up the mystique of the Bronte brand in her memoirs and influence on Gaskill's bio, she considers how pop media reviewa and academic takes reflect cultural changes---and it's not *just* lol Victorians Freudians etc,, she goes back to the texts and notes how different approaches can come up with points that still make sense, still have some value, no matter how aware we are of ancestral limitations (we're all products of our own time and place). It's a book that might inspire fan nonfiction: how do the Brontes fit with some schools of crit she doesn't mention? Don't think the Cyborg Manifesto's in there...
(The closest SF comparison I know of is fiction: In Nancy Kress's "Exegesis," scholars interpret "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," down through the ages [Year's Best SF 16, edited by Hartwell & Cramer]).(There are other examples of the reflective mcguffin,to use Hitcock's term, I think, but Miller never lets the texts become pretexts).
(Ben Ratliff's The Coltrane Legacy is a worthy trek through the word wars and anxieties of musical influence.)

"MacGuffin," prob, and def "Hitchcock."

I read a ton of SF as a kid: pretty much anything I could get my hands on at the library that looked cool, stuff I got through the SF Book of the Month Club (the bunch of free books they send you for signing up, and then the ones that sneak through if you didn't send the postcard back in time), the stories in Omni magazine, old books of my Dad's. I'd read pretty much anything I came across by Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, or Clarke. Bradbury was kind of my gateway into more lit-fic (I guess he can function as a gateway in either direction) - him and Vonnegut. Some other classics I discovered later by H.G. Wells and C.S. Lewis.

Oh, forgot to mention the Tom Swift books. Those were probably my original gateway into SF.

i would definitely recommend a bradbury story collection to anyone on earth.

Be less patronizing aimless

I know aimless has cheesed a lot of people off here, but i have found this resulting thread interesting, entertaining and worthwhile

I am aware that was a 1-sentence rsponse

LOL well I never thought I'd re-consider reading van Vogt -- just couldn't get through the one time I tried. Truly a 'result' I wasn't banking on.

Been thinking abt what skot and others are saying in terms of what SF does and lit fic doesn't do. Like o.nate I can say its a 'gateway' into lit fic (and back into SF) but I wonder if there isn't an overrating of what both sides bring to the table to separate them out more than we want them too? A lot of lit fic is such overwritten tosh and a lot of SF might be more all ~contemporary concerns~ with not as much attention and concentration paid to the craft except it doesn't feel that way. Right now I am reading/struggling (more the week I had as I am loving the writing, but its more fragmentation than I need) through a novel by a gay and Jeiwsh Czech writer from the 20s, all those of scenes of not being there and utter displacement that you could find in a lot of SF writing. I wonder if that would pass Ward's "best read mildly stoned" test.

Earlier ppl were talking about vV's politcs that reminds a lot of how we would talk about a more literary writer's 'backward' politics (whether that's LOL Amis or someone I really love like Celine). Isn't Kafka Or Borges SF? Or when Proust talks about memory? otoh my only reading skill is stubbornness and being able to read while in public transport and restaurants.

Delany so looks like a major Old testament figure even more these day huh? (the pic on wiki is just) #analyticalCriticism

I appreciate some of the more recent posts on this thread but I dunno, ping me when Aimless comes down off the mountain. I have my doubts that he is ever going to find anything in this genre to please his refined schoolmarmish sensibilities.

xpost Long after I read many of Delany's books I discovered that he lived a few blocks away from me and was that interesting looking fellow I'd see out from time to time

i always think of ursula's quote about pkd - mostly because it's on every dick paperback - about him being "our own homegrown borges". it's a nice quote. i guess it's true?

speaking of zelazny, and fantasy, has anyone read his Amber books? always think i'm more likely to read fantasy written by people who mostly write SF.

also feel bad for old olaf that nobody has mentioned him since the first post. i still have never read any of his books.

i always think of ursula's quote about pkd - mostly because it's on every dick paperback - about him being "our own homegrown borges". it's a nice quote. i guess it's true?

She also said Wolfe was our Melville. Closer to otm on that one

That is def better. Borges not really the idiot savant type that Dick was imo.

speaking of zelazny, i read this the other day after reading that it was a big influence on him as a kid. it was a big influence on a lot of people. one of the cornerstones of modern sci-fi, though that might be hard to believe now.

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601191h.html

i always think of the "homegrown" part of that quote to mean: well, that's what THIS country grows when it grows a borges. kinda wild like a weed.

Haha okay sure

Kinda doubt that was the original intention there

also, i wish i had all these: http://www.nesfa.org/press/Books/Zelazny-Project.html

Just breaking: https://mobile.twitter.com/michikokakutani/status/545009684495998977

http://isites.harvard.edu/course/colgsas-66707

i always think of the "homegrown" part of that quote to mean: well, that's what THIS country grows when it grows a borges. kinda wild like a weed.

lol

you do sometimes see backhanded stuff ending up as back matter, like the quote you sometimes see on old editions of henry miller, something to the effect of "our finest amateur writer"

aimless should just read borges.

^this

speaking of zelazny, and fantasy, has anyone read his Amber books?

Yes, I've read the first couple, they're great fun - classic fantasy type story but told in a much slangier, early 70s hipster style (for example, the main character smokes cigarettes all time) - seems to have been a huge huge influence on Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, which may or may not put you off.

actually i was tempted at one point to work on the intersection of 'avant garde' and 'genre' fiction in britain in the 60s with some specific attention to the politics of literary journaling

Would read! Again, my very sketchy idea of all this is that in the UK, white male middle class science fictiondom first began to be dismantled in the early 1960s, when you get more or less 'experimental' writers like Doris Lessing, Naomi Mitchison, Anna Kavan, Christine Rose-Brooks etc working within science fiction, and then a little later you get New Worlds under Moorcock encouraging a 'new wave' of science fiction that was at least familiar with Borges or Robbe-Grillet AND with the first forms of gender politics. But how this was felt 'on the ground' - ie within 'mainstream' SF opinion -is hard to get a feeling for, I think.

in honor of this thread i bought a fantasy novel today. though not a sword & sandals fantasy book. paul park's a princess of roumania. huge rave blurbs by ursula on the front and karen joy fowler, kim stanley robinson, jonathan lethem, michael swanwick, elizabeth hand, and john crowley on the back. (also bought a horror/weird/fantasy book by someone named steve rasnic tem. jeff vandermeer compares him to mervyn peake, ray bradbury, edward gorey, and shirley jackson in his blurb. which made me buy it.) (also bought tim powers story collection which i might already own...) (also bought paperbacks of zelazny's the guns of avalon and joanna russ's picnic on paradise.) (also bought the expanded edition of laura riding's progress of stories. which everyone should read. it's the only book that rebecca west and john ashbery and harry matthews ever agreed upon! also bought an old copy of chelsea magazine that has a long great article about the friendship between chelsea mag's sonia raiziss and laura riding. and it also has a great photo series of writer portraits by gerard malanga including a nice photo of borges. and john ashbery. to name two. borges is holding a crystal ball in his portrait.)

I appreciate some of the more recent posts on this thread but I dunno, ping me when Aimless comes down off the mountain. I have my doubts that he is ever going to find anything in this genre to please his refined schoolmarmish sensibilities.

― You're a Big URL Now (James Redd and the Blecchs), Sunday, November 1, 2015 11:41 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Strange_manuscript.jpg

borges is holding a crystal ball in his portrait

he was probably amused at this, since he was blind

I could be wrong but (essay title notwithstanding) I don't think he was ever totally blind

Interested to hear what you have to say about that Paul Park book. I tried to read once or twice because of the rave reviews from that respectable crew but ended up finding the writing a little bland, it's written for a YA audience, I think - another "opinion" to argue about!- and didn't stick around long enough for the big ideas to show up and catch hold.

borges is holding a crystal ball in his portrait
The Aleph!

"I see the future and it is... extremely blurry."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brick_Moon#/media/File%3AThe_Brick_Moon.gif
(Xpost)

try again
https://mix.msfc.nasa.gov/IMAGES/HIGH/8903292.jpg

i almost bought a copy of flatland today too. it was written by a british schoolmaster if not a schoolmarm. you can read it online:

http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~banchoff/Flatland/

Now imagine a Priest, whose mouth is at M, and whose front semicircle (AMB) is consequently coloured red, while his hinder semicircle is green; so that the diameter AB divides the green from the red. If you contemplate the Great Man so as to have your eye in the same straight line as his dividing diameter (AB), what you will see will be a straight line (CBD), of which one half(CB) will be red, and the other (BD) green. The whole line (CD) will be rather shorter perhaps than that of a full-sized Woman, and will shade off more rapidly towards its extremities; but the identity of the colours would give you an immediate impression of identity of Class, making you neglectful of other details. Bear in mind the decay of Sight Recognition which threatened society at the time of the Colour Revolt; add too the certainty that Women would speedily learn to shade off their extremities so as to imitate the Circles; it must then be surely obvious to you, my dear Reader, that the Colour Bill placed us under a great danger of confounding a Priest with a young Woman.

I thought for a second there you were going to talk about Christopher Priest, another worthy topic.

scott c'mon if there's a bit to excerpt from flatland its this:

The power of Fashion is also on our side. I pointed out that in some less civilized States no female is suffered to stand in any public place without swaying her back from right to left. This practice has been universal among ladies of any pretensions to breeding in all well-governed States, as far back as the memory of Figures can reach. It is considered a disgrace to any State that legislation should have to enforce what ought to be, and is in every respectable female, a natural instinct. The rhythmical and, if I may so say, well- modulated undulation of the back in our ladies of Circular rank is envied and imitated by the wife of a common Equilateral, who can achieve nothing beyond a mere monotonous swing, like the ticking of a pendulum; and the regular tick of the Equilateral is no less admired and copied by the wife of the progressive and aspiring Isosceles, in the females of whose family no "back-motion" of any kind has become as yet a necessity of life. Hence, in every family of position and consideration, "back motion" is as prevalent as time itself.

amber is great fun btw, i've read the first few at least three times each. they are slangy and hipster, as wf says upthread (though still ... pretty dorky nerd power fantasies,) and they get through a whole bunch of epic fantasy stuff at a great pace. like, quick, next revelation, please. they're pretty hokey (amnesiac protagonist, oh dear) but great comfort food, i think. never made it anywhere with the five sequels he wrote a few years later which had ~cyberpunk~ in the mix. probably for the best.

aimless should read battlefield earth

I am not such a babe in the woods as to take that recommendation seriously.

how else will you fathom the heights and depths of science fiction i ask u

tbf i was like 12 when i read it, and it is not actually the worst book i've ever completed

What's the worst book you've ever read (all the way to the end)?

i am occasionally tempted to read battlefield earth

Several sources (like Science Fiction Encyclopedia Online) with 0 use for most things L. Ron, have indicated that Fear actually doesn't suck, and that Typewriter In The Sky might be worth checking out, Suppose Battlefield Earth might be okay space opera.
I've never read much Zelazny, but came across an anthologized story which considers the history of a street or neighborhood (in an underground city, I think) from the POV of one who takes it personally---he fell in love with a woman who lived here, hundreds of years ago, now even descendants are scattered who knows where; he remembers a conflagration and hopeful rebuilding, with no traces left---he's a diplomatic courier, who has to travel the spaceways via suspended animation. I always thought this was a lousy way to run an interstellar empire---"We're sending a guy; sit tight"---but the writing pulled me in: what they used to call "willing suspension of disbelief." Or just that I didn't care if the premise was ridic, because I sympathized with, even somewhat identified with the protagonist, based on my experience as an earthbound geezer: extrapolation, another favorite term of thee SF ancients.

Typewriter in the Sky sounds p fun actually, like a proto-PKD (esp that title)

i don't think i've ever read any L.Ron. he doesn't even really pop up in the golden age collections i have.

this is interesting to read. about ol' L. Ron. good history...

"I recall his eyes, the wary, light-blue eyes that I somehow associate with the gunmen of the old West, watching me sharply as he talked as if to see how much I believed. Not much."

http://www.panshin.com/higher/hubbard.html

I tried to read Battlefield Earth in high school but didn't get very far - it is really terribly written and it is *endless*

re: lack of Olaf content ref'd upthread - it took me awhile to get a copy of Starmaker, but it lives up to its rep. It's like an extended Aristotelian thought experiment, the spiraling scope of it is v well done.

massive van Vogt appeciation on that same website:

http://www.panshin.com/articles/vanvogt/vanvogt1.html

I tried to read Battlefield Earth in high school but didn't get very far - it is really terribly written and it is *endless*

Ditto, before I knew anything about scientology, etc. My dad saw I was reading it and was appalled, told me all about the Seaorg boat, etc

yeah I think I was vaguely aware that there was a book called Dianetics that got advertised on TV but that was it

Some say that Fear relies heavily upon not knowing the twist ending, but a horror survey spoiled the ending for me, so I'll probably never read it.

I think I first heard of Lron when the Mission Earth books started coming out and got adverts everywhere. I remember there was an intro where he defended writing shitty undeveloped characters because he was into FUN.

i STILL remember seeing the huge paperback of Battlefield Earth at Caldor in Brookfield, Connecticut when i was a kid. I have no idea why it would be so memorable other than the fact that it was huge. i'm pretty sure the only books i ever bought there were the Mr. Bill book and 101 Uses For A Dead Cat.

the dead cat guy was such a Kliban rip-off, but i didn't care.

i mean Kliban + Jack Ziegler = Gary Larson and that didn't bother me either. steal from the best. that's what i always say.

so is this just the rolling random spec fiction thoughts thread

now

But with more arguing

i can't actually remember the last time anyone argued on ILB. for some reason i am no longer a mod on ILB. which means we are moderator-less. or have been for years actually. nobody noticed.

cool let's fight

thou art a prinking varlet and so is your mother

ILB will be 12 years old this december. almost a teenager.

I'm Gonna Post Here All The Time-I Swear!

Turn back in time, you poxy fule!

my oldest kid is turning 13 in december. good grief! you can blame him for ILB. home with babby all day...

got Ballard's "Complete Short Stories" from the library over the weekend. hooooooly shit. Even having read a a fair chunk of his output, a lot of these stories are new to me, and it's crazy how almost fully-formed he was right out of the gate. I have the "Vermilion Sands" collection, which iirc is from 1971, but for some reason was unaware that a bunch of those stories date from the late 50s.

Would have been seriously put off if Vermillion Sands had been the first stuff I'd come across. Everything else is next level, those are dreadful.

That wasn't the first Ballard I read (I'm not sure what the first was, maybe Concrete Island?), but I don't think they're dreadful at all. A lot of his themes are already there, fully formed - the dreamlike, wasted landscapes, the group dynamics of cultists, the psychological unraveling of various unstable protagonists, etc.

this Ballard book continues to reap prodigious rewards, damn.

er reap return

Wish you had been liveblogging.

I'm only a little over halfway through it there's still time

I just read Concrete Island. Funny!

your one-word review will not satisfy Aimless

I've had the first volume of the Ballard short stories on my shelf for years but never touched it. What's a good one to start on?

book is pretty short too

like, what's a good story to start on? idk um "Mr. F is Mr. F"? "The Illuminated Man"? "The Concentration City"? "Prima Belladonna"?

manhole 69

that's a good one

for some reason it's the abiding memory of the collected short stories for me. I got it out the library in 2007 or something and I didn't read all of them but that was a creepy and enigmatic one

I bring that one up one whenever a new wall appears out of nowhere- it happens!- as at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament a few years ago.

Yeah that's one of the best. Also would recommend Track 12, a perfect little revenge fantasy and the mysterious and paranoiac The Watch Towers. Some of the longer ones are pretty similar, lonely scientists obsessed with deep time and playing strange power games - The Waiting Grounds gives a good example of their highly oblique but hypnotic tone.

I remember your favorite from this thread, ledge: best story in the penguin science fiction omnibus, 1973

I like everything I have read in the Ballard Collect Short Stories but just sort of chip away at it now and then rather than reading systematically or plowing through.

your one-word review will not satisfy Aimless

Heavens!

finally up to the mid-70s w Ballard collection, omg @ "The Ultimate City", so eerily perfect in composition.

reading them chronologically it's also interesting how there are often minor details that carry over from one story to the next - a variation in premise, a character name, etc.

Have never really gotten Ballard. He seems admirably dry (admirable because of the nature of the material he writes about in that dry style?), but that's about it. I don't think I ever finished Crash, but I have read a few of his stories, at least.

His style is a very unusual combination of clinical and poetic. I can't say I really like Amis' description of it as "creamy" lol. "Crash" is a singular achievement but it is also (not unsurprisingly) puts the reader in a mental space that is def not pleasant to occupy.

uh not surprisingly

that'll teach you to use the "not un-" formation!

i think crash is his best work of his that ive read - a few of his novels and a reasonable amount of his short stories - reads like a mix of pornography, a technical manual, and topographical description. also has the plus point of being "relevant" through its "prescient" exploration of celebrity culture

I haven't read all of his novels, such as the early "disaster" ones, but most days I actually think "Hello, America" is my favorite. It's got a lot of his usual tropes - obsessed/insane cult figures, dissections of mass media imagery, strange aircrafts, desolate landscapes and deserted cities - all wrapped up in a tidy bildungsroman.

I loved concrete island

I'm not sure what to say per se about Ted Chiang except he should absolutely be mentioned on this thread.

Arguably one of the best authors of sci-fi short stories ever, certainly the most consistently amazing.

Here are two of my favorite recent ones online:

http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2010/fiction_the_lifecycle_of_software_objects_by_ted_chiang

http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang

(I think about the latter pretty constantly)

(i know he gets discussed on occasion on ILB -- I don't know if we've had convos on him that go beyond "holy heck that's good" or even if there's a good way to have them)

He's done so little he's easy to forget, unfortunately. Agree he's a superior stylist.

not just a stylist. the way his later stories use technology as a way to think about memory and communication is really subtle and insightful.

Allegedly 'Stories of Your Life' is being Hollywood moviefied. Just reread it, and can't see how it won't be fucked up.

I cant see that getting made. Not a franchise + zero name recognition.

It's definitely being made (I think Vintage is reprinting the collection as a tie-in, I saw some ARCs at a local bookstore last month), but I don't know what kind of audience it'll find.

I know he has been mentioned here several times because I read whatever I could find of his about six years ago after seeing him rated very highly by a few ilx0rs.

just checked IMDB, it's in post-production and stars Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner. This does not seem like a success in waiting.

We are talking about the story itself right. It's so well done, he has kind of an amazing controlled but not controlling tone to go with the emotional issues he is dealing with- in this story and others (what's the one about the guy finding out he can divide by zero?)- feel like the movie machine moguls of today will have to amp it up and set the pendulum swinging with tender waterworks alternating with big rescues from fiery buildings, but hey stranger things have happened.

yes, just the specific story. Though now I'm imagining one of those anthology films derived from his stories.

whatever they've made of that story is going to be nothing like the story, whether it's a horrible film or a good one

lifecycle of software objects would make an amazing film in the right hands.

I like this recent piece by Chiang, the only nonfiction of his that I've seen:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/if-chinese-were-phonetic

he has kind of an amazing controlled but not controlling tone to go with the emotional issues he is dealing with
This is the appeal of all the TC stores I've read. The kind of disciplined self-(and-other)-searching which may be why he's such a quality-over-quantity guy, unusually enough in SF and fantasy.

and other genres etc.

I've only read the two upthread and The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate and the latter is without question the best time travel story ever written. It doesn't fuck around with bullshit physics, incomprehensibly tangled causal loops or alternate timelines, and although it's ostensibly (sf&) fantasy it is, even more than the two upthread, purely and transparently about the human heart. So yeah I really should seek out more of his stuff.

Working my way through Stories of Your Life and Others, finding it fairly so-so tbh, not really feeling the emotional resonances; Tower of Babylon is neat, Seventy-Two Letters feels like a weird solution to a question no-one was asking. Then I got to Hell is the Absence of God, holy shit. Like a stand up routine that ends with the comedian jumping off the stage and punching you in the stomach.

Tower of Babylon is the one that's stuck with me the most for some reason. central imagery is v memorable I guess

*don't bump*

oh, wait.

I thought I had escaped this Charybdis of a thread.

now reading 'a scanner darkly'

it is good and better than the other dicks i've encompassed, if you will. we'll see.

of the others in aimless's original list, heinlein sucks and was a dick, asimov had wonderful ideas but was a terrible writer, i like most of the others, and it's probably ballard for legit pushing the envelope

Frank Herbert should probably be included, just for Dune, if nothing else.

fyi, that list was compiled out of my exceedingly scifi-deficient knowledge base in about four minutes, tops. it was only meant as a provocation.

dune is too weird/fantasy adjacent/sui generis and niche.

I think it's a rather narrow definition of science fiction that would exclude it though.

sure but i wouldn't put him in a list of greatest authors for his one weird magnum opus. either way there's really no need to carry on arguing about yet another canon of white dudes.

so, how about we usher in Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin for a refreshing twist?

I think we could do better than that.

Joanna Russ, The Female Man. Articulate rage about the expectations for women in mid century America (marriage, children, housewifery; education? get tae fuck) in a mindbending postmodern style.

Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time: I came for the feminist agrarian utopia, I stayed for the brutal picture of a woman trapped in an abusive relationship by poverty and the state.

James Tiptree Jr: The Screwfly Solution. A sublime example of using science (in this case biology and sociology) to hold up a mirror to society, done with absolute panache. Head and shoulders above 99% of other SF short stories, Aimless if you haven't read this one then start here, it won't take up much of your time.

^this last

James Tiptree Jr is really good, but I read an entire collection of hers front-to-back recently and it gets incredibly depressing after a while. If I hadn't known she was a woman I'd have thought "why does this author love making women suffer so god damned much?"

Fair enough, but if it is the main collection of her work, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, it is grebt.

Yeah, not going to disagree, just my own experience with it wore me down a little. And honestly, it's at least partly because she has important shit to say that it was so depressing. The ways in which women were and are treated, and what humans do to each other in general - those are super important topics. But it's hard to read a collection where literally every story involves rape or the prospect of it, and similar violences. My interpretation is also that she intentionally mimics that "macho sci-fi" tone of voice that was prevalent for some decades, which makes it more exhausting to me, and why I said if I didn't know she was a woman I'd feel like it was some scumbag dude getting off on making women suffer. I don't feel like any of this is doing her down as a writer, or saying that her stories aren't great, but rather explaining my own feelings while exploring that work.

not being a big reader or sci-fi i would venture to say that i would include cixin liu in my personal pantheon as his three-body problem is probably my favourite sci-fi series

emil.y agree with all of that. even if one is prepared for some brutal misogyny the 'macho sci-fi' tone does grate and make it hard to get into the stories, though it's used to particularly good effect in 'the women men don't see', where the whole story passes over the head of the macho narrator.

depressing though it is i guess it speaks to the maturity of SF that some of the most celebrated stories by women are about patriarchy and male violence (the ones mentioned above, 'the handmaid's tale', 'kindred', 'tehanu'...)

I'm sure you've had the same reaction as me to reading 1950s SF written by men tho, ledge - those stories about patriarchy and male violence HAD to be written, urgently, just because of the genre's legacy of crazy sexism and outright misogyny.

This is a difficult thing to express - but isn't Sheldon's use of the Tiptree persona, and use of 'macho' language/viewpoint, partly a 'cover' for the expression of lesbian desire in her work, and life, from what I know of her biography.

Robert Sheckley seemed to have a very golden 1950s - that NYRB collection of his short stories is enough to put him into the v top tier of SF authors.

those stories about patriarchy and male violence HAD to be written, urgently, just because of the genre's legacy of crazy sexism and outright misogyny.

yes, absolutely.

i know the hugo and nebulas are no longer the sausage parties they once were but i've just discovered the otherwise award (formerly the tiptree award) 'encouraging the exploration & expansion of gender' which I think might be a more fruitful source of un-macho sf - started in 1991, the retrospective awards in 1995 mention russ, piercy and tiptree, delany, butler, atwood, and some others i haven't heard of:

https://otherwiseaward.org/award/1995-retrospective-award
https://otherwiseaward.org/award/1995-retrospective-award/1995-retrospective-honor-list

Which, um, used to be the Tiptree Award.

which I think might be a more fruitful source of un-macho sf

― Believe me, grow a lemon tree. (ledge), Thursday, August 5, 2021 11:25 AM

Good publisher
http://www.aqueductpress.com/

I don't know if it's un-macho but woman centred swashbuckling is an interesting mission statement
https://queenofswordspress.com/

Which, um, used to be the Tiptree Award.

I recently seen Farah Mendlesohn say that Gollancz Masterworks had a shortage of women because they only pull from their own already existing catalogue (I think Lafferty was an exception?) which is apparently missing a lot of contenders despite its enormity. Gwyneth Jones recently got 5 books on the list and they were mostly Gollancz books in the first place. I'd like to see Tanith Lee on there sometime, they have a large chunk of her on ebook.

I posted that Mendlesohn interview on the speculative thread, it's really good and she stans pretty hard for Heinlein over authors she's more politically in line with, but she's convinced most people (including his fans) are wrong about him.

btw there is a great article about Cordwainer Smith and TIptree by a guy who was writing a bio of the former which I don't think he ever finished.

Oh, here is a link to download the pdf: Painwise in Space: The Psychology of Isolation in Cordwainer Smith and James Tiptree, Jr., by Alan C. Elms.

Took a while but here is the index that shows more of his publications. Some have links to pdfs, including a few more about Smith, some don't, include more about Tiptree.

https://elms.faculty.ucdavis.edu/publications/

One of which is mentioned here: https://weirdfictionreview.com/2016/02/101-weird-writers-39-james-tiptree-jr/

But I can't click on those pdfs directly, I had to copy the links and repaste to browser.