R.A.Lafferty

[David Casseres]

Joe sez

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

Yes, and it's a little bit hard to pinpoint the reasons, given how 
intensely I used to enjoy it.  Once in a while comes an exception: I 
devoured Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars," even though it had many of 
the faults I associate with SF: pedestrian prose, superficial development 
of characters, geopolitical views that work just like a Mickey Mouse 
watch.  Why did I like it?  Hard to say; for one thing, in spite of my 
complaint about mechanistic geopolitics, Robinson does refreshingly avoid 
the Gingrichism that pervades so much SF.  For another, the story's sheer 
ambition is impressive, as is Robinson's dogged determination to tell it. 
 So I grabbed the second part of the trilogy, "Green Mars," as soon as it 
appeared in paperback, and read it too, but found my legs getting weary 
by the end of it.  And when "White Mars" is in paperback I'll probably 
read it too, which will make the trilogy more successful, in my view, 
than the "Dune" series back in the 60's: I thought the first one was 
wonderful, never finished the second, and never gave a glance to the 
third one.

A lot of science fiction, at least since Heinlein, has had a very strong 
Libertarian-militaristic stench about it; this didn't bother me so much 
when I was an adolescent, but I find it too much for my aging stomach.  
And a lot of it is just some technically clever idea wrapped up in a lot 
of bad writing.  Usually a very large amount of bad writing, relative to 
the size of the clever idea.  This is especially a problem since the 
publishers gave up on editing what they print.

One of the things that makes Pynchon so much fun to read, I must say, is 
that he purveys a lot of the same *kind* of insights that made the best 
SF so fascinating, but does it with spectacularly good writing and is 
thus able to turn some of SF's faults -- for example, the use of 
2-dimensional characters -- into strengths.  And of course his unique 
irony transforms everything in a way that SF, that most earnest of 
genres, never dreamt of.


Cheers,
David