R.A.Lafferty, R.I.P.S.F.

[Alan Westrope]

On Thu, 27 Mar 1997, Joe Varo <vjvaro at erie.net> wrote:

>I still enjoy a good SF movie, but for the most part, I just find reading
>the stuff to be rather tedious.

>The only reason I can come up with for this change in taste is that in
>college I became more acquainted with the "good stuff" and developed the
>(perhaps snobbish) opinion that most SF authors really aren't all that
>skilled at writing.  (I'll allow for the possibility that I just wasn't
>reading the right SF authors.) They may have some really interesting ideas
>to write about, but the writing just isn't compelling enough to keep my
>interest any more. [...]

>Anybody else out there feel that they kind of "outgrew" SF?

I was never much of a SF reader, but I've become more aware of the genre
through people I meet in cyberspace.  I find that any appreciation I might
have developed for SF has largely been precluded by my having read "Tlon,
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," in which Borges hands most SF writers their asses,
IMO.  I've read the major cyberpunk stuff, but mostly out of a desire to
learn the terminology for use in discussions of what I think of as the
"ontology of cyberspace" (for lack of a better term).

I agree wholeheartedly that most SF is pretty vapid after encountering the
likes of TRP, JLB, Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov...

-- 
Alan Westrope     PGP public key:  http://www.crl.com/~awestrop
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