FW: Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales

[Monte Davis]

I may have read a Heinlein juvenile in my older brother's Boy's Life, and a
"Mushroom Planet" book from the library, but it was an uncle who got me
going, too. He wasn't a hardcore fan, but on a visit to his house I spotted
a dozen or so Galaxy magazines (with Kool Kovers) that led me to think for
the first time: this is a *category* -- there must be a lot more like it.
When we got home I started systematically trawling the library for SF. Soon
after that my parents gave me a subscription to Fantasy & Science Fiction:
the first issue to arrive contained the first serial installment of
Heinlein's Starship Soldier (to be renamed S. Troopers in book form) and
Sturgeon's fine "The Man Who Lost the  Sea." The next year (1960, me turning
11) we moved to Manhattan, within walking distance of the old bookseller's
row where I could find abundant SF paperbacks for a dime (including all of
the titles you mention; Clarke's Against the Fall of Night, aka The City and
the Stars, also grabbed me hard). I read absurd quantities of SF and fantasy
through the 1960s, not turning away after that so much as being drawn to
other reading pleasures. The SF magazines' science columns (Asimov, Sprague
de Camp, Willy Ley) had a lot to do with my becoming a science writer after
college.

Samuel Delany and the late Thomas Disch have done some of the most
interesting critical work on the relationship of genre and "literary"
fiction.  

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of kelber at mindspring.com
Sent: Monday, June 25, 2012 12:38 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: FW: Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales

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.       
>