FW: Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales

[Ian Livingston]

I don't know much sci-fi / fantasy, but I did very much enjoy the
Foundation Trilogy, Dune, Magister Ludi, and, unlike Laura, much of
Heinlein (growing up in the Santa Cruz area, where RH lived, one could
hardly avoid his novels, and see-through dresses seemed a pretty attractive
idea to an adolescent boy.) I also enjoyed George MacDonald as a youngster.
His books don't make many lists, though. Later on did Stephenson, Gibson,
some others, and had a period where I went through a mixed bag of pulp. One
of my closet favorites since my first read in the early 70s, has been
Childhood's End. Rare to find anyone else who has even heard of it, much
less read it.

What makes it literature? One criterion for me is the way it breaks.
Somewhere far enough back for it to be fuzzy in my memory--was it last week
or 20 years ago?---I encountered some assertion that all great social
change begins in the arts. It is only after serious thinkers think
seriously in print about a serious work that it begins to turn heads in
culture. Melville comes to mind. Reviled by the spurious (a scene in the
Master and Margarita comes to mind in which the Real Writers dress just so
and get to dine at the finest tables) and left fallow until the right woman
came along to pull him into the light, he can hardly be dismissed from just
about any literary genre nowadays (MD is definitely science fiction, among
other labels.) A lot of books break big, last awhile and then just go away,
I generally prefer the ones that come to me word of mouth. But the real
point of the criterion is, did it say something that became important
later, something that lasts?


On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 9:38 AM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> 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.
> >
>
>


-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds
the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in
reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness
groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest
urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120625/45fe0cf9/attachment.html>