ILB Argues About Who is the Greatest Science Fiction Author

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 ... )