FW: Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales

[kelber at mindspring.com]

When I was about 13 (circa 1970), my uncle gave me one of the greatest gifts I've ever received:  a tattered shopping bag filled with sci-fi paperbacks.  The funny thing is that I can barely remember which books were there (many of them were story anthologies) - just that they made for a rich summer of reading.  It wasn't my first intro to sci-fi (I'd seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, and had devoured every Arthur C. Clarke book I could find), but I remember that the covers alone (lots of streamlined spaceships) were so intriguing that they made up for the bad prose contained within.  

Some of them were so bad that I only read the descriptions on the back).  I was a lonely,repressed and prudish girl, so one book I stopped reading early on was Stranger In a Strange Land - a description of a woman in a see-through dress embarrassed me away from the book, never to return.  There was another Heinlein book, The Star Beast, that I also couldn't get into.  

The stars of the collection were The Martian Chronicles and City, by Clifford Simak.  Also in the collection were The Stars Like Dust, by Isaac Asimov (so-so), and Time of the Great Freeze, by Robert Silverberg (I liked it).  I can remember a lot of the short stories (one about a super-genius boy, who had to learn to behave like an ordinary kid, stands out), and I remember turning my nose up at an Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars pulp stories.  

The prose was average to horrible, but that wasn't the point.  It was the randomness and size of the collection (and again, those covers!), and the promise of finding treasures in it, that made it all intriguing.  So to get back to Mark's original question: yes, sci-fi prose is mostly pretty bad.  But that's OK.

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
>Sent: Jun 25, 2012 10:40 AM
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: FW: Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales
>
>JA>  How many dickheaded "serious" writers were contemporaneous to P K DicK?
>
>I'll stay away from the morass of "genre vs. 'serious'", but just to
>register a contrarian view: I've been re-shelving my library and -- somewhat
>to my surprise -- found no fewer than 17 Dick paperbacks from the 60s and
>early 70s, when I was gulping SF indiscriminately. He didn't loom that large
>in my memories, and frankly I'm puzzled by the ascent of his reputation over
>the last 10-15 years, culminating in the Library of America volume. 
>
>it seems to me that what has happened is mostly the zeitgeist (e.g. Blade
>Runner) becoming more receptive to his habitual themes of identity,
>simulation, and overload of the "kipple" of pop/marketing culture -- and
>thus anointing him as prescient. Another factor might be his drug use and
>mental illness: Misunderstood Artists With Demons are always in demand, as
>long as we don't have to deal with them in person
>
>IMO it has to be that, because when I skimmed a few of those paperbacks, his
>writing was as I remembered: workmanlike at best,  more often just clunky.
>Outside of the atypically good Man in the High Castle,  I'm hard put to
>remember a character or line of narrative or thought. So put me down as JDGI
>-- just doesn't get it.       
>