FW: Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales

[Ian Livingston]

>Childhood's End is Arthur C. Clarke's best novel.  Can't understand why
it's fallen into obscurity and why no one's >tried to make it into a film.

Agreed. Fear of the Overlords, maybe?

On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 11:17 AM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

>
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Livingston **
> Sent: Jun 25, 2012 1:33 PM
> To: kelber at mindspring.com
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: FW: Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales
>
> 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
>  **
>
>


-- 
"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
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