FW: Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales
Tom Beshear
tbeshear at att.net
Tue Jun 26 13:25:45 CDT 2012
2001 is officially based on a short story titled "The Sentinel."
----- Original Message -----
From: Ian Livingston
To: rich
Cc: Mark Kohut ; kelber at mindspring.com ; pynchon -l
Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2012 2:19 PM
Subject: Re: FW: Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales
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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