[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Why I Don't Read SF Much Anymore
On Thu, 21 Nov 1996 00:14:49 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
>On the issue of why many of us don't read as much SF as we once did...
>1. I'm a lot older. The stuff that I thought was really great back when I
>was 14-22, or so, and even "pretty good" until I was about 25 or so, now
>really looks like dreck. (Not all of it, but more than I thought was dreck
>at the time.)
>Partly this is age and life experience, partly just increased sophistication.
Remember Sturgen's (sp?) law: 90% of everything is crap - I think most of
us just take awhile before we agree. The SF genre could be characterized by
a couple diamonds buried in a manure pit...
>(Vernor V. claimed to a friend of mine that the day he spent talking to
>several of us was the most fruitful day he'd spent in a long time...I take
>this as evidence that folks like us are to the new generation of SF writers
>what folks like members of the British Interplanetary Society were to
>writers of past generations.)
I'd agree 100%. A community as small as the SF writers *needs* outside
influence. Must be neat, though, to read a book and go "I *did* that!"
>(Interestingly, Eric Drexler says he cannot enjoy it because Simmons does
>not give nanotechnology a central enough role. This echoes the point Duncan
nanotech (and other things) can spoil a good story by making things too
easy. Take most (all?) of Forward's books - great ideas, but it reads like
a press release.
>- Orson Scott Card, "Ender's Game." A good fictional exploration of online
>anony mity. In many ways, Cypherpunks was explicity a kind of combination
>of "Ender's Game," "True Names," "The Shockwave Rider," and "Atlas
>Shrugged."
I think those books are partly responsible for getting a great many people
interested in this sort of thing...
>- and of course Heinlein, though his best stuff is 30-45 years old now
Always a mark of a great SF author: his stuff is still good even if the
science is outdated... Ditto EE smith - it's funny, when you read things
like the lensmen series it seems cliched until you realize it *is* cliched -
because so many others copied him.
# Chris Adams <[email protected]> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp
# <[email protected]> | send mail with subject "send PGPKEY"
"That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them."
--- Karen Hargrove, Microsoft (quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial)