ILB Argues About Who is the Greatest Science Fiction Author

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.