Shouting at people shouting at people
So, I was told about (by verlaine) and read Christopher Priest's barracking of the Clarke Award nominees for this year. Then, for fun, the ripostes from all and sundry.
It may well seem like authors such as Priest or Adam Roberts (a couple of years ago about the Hugos) throwing petty fits of pique. However, it's unclear to me what is actually gained from the mob hurling verbal firebombs through their windows in return. If it is undignified to make the initial furious declamation, a bunch of far less interesting and informed people carping back is worse, and unedifying as well consisting as it tends to of little more than personal abuse.
Both Roberts and Priest are are extremely well versed in literature; perhaps we might think of as formal or classical qualities in terms of writing, and of SF as a genre. Their criticisms come from that angle. In other words, they are literary SF elitists. I am somewhat sympathetic Roberts and Priest. Perhaps because I'm by nature something of an elitist, hoity-toity, intellectual snob myself.
But perhaps because their points are still relevant. Even where professional critics or commentators are perhaps wrong, they are nearly always wrong with right reasons. Charles Stross, as Priest points out, is indeed a poor writer of English; I can tell that, with a mere A-level in Eng. Lit. That he's also a popular, mostly entertaining and witty professional geek with many bones to throw his geek readership is neither here nor there. Priest's criticism of Sherri S. Tepper's opus is extremely brief, but extremely effective: "For fuck’s sake, it is a quest saga and it has a talking horse. There are puns on the word ‘neigh’." Quite.
What we surely do know is that many people are intensely irritated by what they perceive as a hoity-toity, intellectual snob telling them what they enjoy is actually shit according to certain standards.
It may well seem like authors such as Priest or Adam Roberts (a couple of years ago about the Hugos) throwing petty fits of pique. However, it's unclear to me what is actually gained from the mob hurling verbal firebombs through their windows in return. If it is undignified to make the initial furious declamation, a bunch of far less interesting and informed people carping back is worse, and unedifying as well consisting as it tends to of little more than personal abuse.
Both Roberts and Priest are are extremely well versed in literature; perhaps we might think of as formal or classical qualities in terms of writing, and of SF as a genre. Their criticisms come from that angle. In other words, they are literary SF elitists. I am somewhat sympathetic Roberts and Priest. Perhaps because I'm by nature something of an elitist, hoity-toity, intellectual snob myself.
But perhaps because their points are still relevant. Even where professional critics or commentators are perhaps wrong, they are nearly always wrong with right reasons. Charles Stross, as Priest points out, is indeed a poor writer of English; I can tell that, with a mere A-level in Eng. Lit. That he's also a popular, mostly entertaining and witty professional geek with many bones to throw his geek readership is neither here nor there. Priest's criticism of Sherri S. Tepper's opus is extremely brief, but extremely effective: "For fuck’s sake, it is a quest saga and it has a talking horse. There are puns on the word ‘neigh’." Quite.
What we surely do know is that many people are intensely irritated by what they perceive as a hoity-toity, intellectual snob telling them what they enjoy is actually shit according to certain standards.