SF is growing up?

[sartorias]

So I've been doing a great deal of (escapist) reading of late for various reasons that no one can fix, and had a thought about how sf has evolved during some recent reading

Comments

[asakiyume]

for various reasons that no one can fix --I'm sorry to hear this, and I hope the reading's been providing some good relief.

There really is a lot of marvelous stuff out there. And it's funny: speaking of classic-era SF, I've been entertaining the healing angel with some old Philip K. Dick stories (I'd never read any), and wow! So different from SF now. Lots of time taken explaining various bits of tech, which I get the impression is considered uncool now (nowadays, it seems like stories like to refer to the tech as just natural, because it would be natural to the characters). The plots are clever in a mystery-story sort of way, the dialogue very stagey, like film noir. And, most surprising, there occasional glaring continuity errors--like he just wrote the story out, bang, and never reread it, and the editors just published it as is.

[sartorias]

I wonder if Dick might have been high. At least, I remember wondering that when I tried to read him as a teen, and finally gave up!

[kalimac]

PKD's writing practice was to write two novels a year by spending five months just sitting there thinking out the plot, and then writing out the whole thing in like five or six weeks flat.

[asakiyume]

This seems borne out in the results (though I'm only reading short stories, not novels): clever, high-concept ideas, some loose ends and inconsistencies in the execution.

[kalimac]

Yes. If you're going to read PKD, you have to accept wild and sloppy as a feature, not a bug. It really can be great fun to read.

[asakiyume]

They're fun to read aloud as if you're in a noir-ish radio play--which is essentially what I'm doing.