ILB Argues About Who is the Greatest Science Fiction Author

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."