ILB Argues About Who is the Greatest Science Fiction Author

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.