ILB Argues About Who is the Greatest Science Fiction Author

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?