FW: Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales

[Ian Livingston]

That could be argued.

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 11:12 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2001 is sorta based on childhood's end, no?
>
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 6:01 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > I read this one when it was sixties-hot. Second the remarks.
> >
> > From: "kelber at mindspring.com" <kelber at mindspring.com>
> > To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> > Sent: Monday, June 25, 2012 2:17 PM
> > Subject: Re: FW: Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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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