Comments | jordan179: SF Lit-Critterdom and Political Correctness as a Means of Temporal Tariff

jordan179

SF Lit-Critterdom and Political Correctness as a Means of Temporal Tariff

Dec 04, 2014 16:11

"SF Lit-Critterdom and Political Correctness as a Means of Temporal Tariff"

© 2014

by

Jordan S. Bassior

Introduction

I was recently looking through the Table of Contents of Weinberg, Dziemianowicz & Greenberg's excellent anthology 100 Wild Little Weird Tales (© 1994) and reflecting upon the fact that almost all these stories were now in the ( Read more... )

science fiction, fandom, literature

Comments 11

One quibble occurs to me baron_waste December 5 2014, 01:53:17 UTC

Back in the days of video rental stores, a young lady of my acquaintance looked at the 'Classics' section, with all the great old movies of lasting fame, and said, “They made such better movies back then than today.”

I said what I would say to you here: “Um, no - you're looking at the survivors. For every 'classic' there are twenty or more duds forgotten in Time.” And it's true: Casablanca was just one of fifty-two movies Warner Bros put out that year. (Yes, that averages one complete film a week throughout the year - why they call it the film industry.) Now, name any one of the others. No? Right ( ... )

Re: One quibble occurs to me jordan179 December 5 2014, 05:08:13 UTC

Baen Books has thrived for decades, and both electronic and self-publishing are expanding.

Re: One quibble occurs to me jordan179 December 5 2014, 05:20:09 UTC

I'm well aware of how much crap was published in the past, since I edit Fantastic Worlds and wind up sifting through it for the good stories. Actually, the plot of Point Ultimate doesn't sound that bad to me, nor do its concepts seem particularly trite: though it wasn't to use the concept of bacteriological warfare (the neat gimmick here was that the occupiers were holding the populace down by controlling the treatment); that dates all the way back to "The Stolen Bacillus" (H. G. Wells, 1895, which predicted bioterrorism.

On the other hand, the writers of that era didn't have an actual ideology mandating the production of crap. Which makes a big difference.

Re: One quibble occurs to me wombat_socho December 5 2014, 05:42:16 UTC

Pick up any SF magazine of decades past and you'll see a contents page of unknowns writing unknown stories...

Beg to differ. ASF during John W. Campbell Jr.'s editorship generally had the best writers in the field, fellows named Asimov, Heinlein, del Rey, Hubbard and many others whose works are still in print today. This became less true in the 1960s, but the magazine revived under Ben Bova to a certain extent. Galaxy under Fred Pohl and Jim Baen. F&SF under Anthony Boucher, Horace Gold, and Ed Ferman. Nowadays all of these, including unfortunately ASF, have been absorbed into the Glittery Hoo-Ha Borg, but back in the day, the magazines were where all the great SF and fantasy writers got their start.

Thread 6

baron_waste December 5 2014, 01:58:33 UTC

hitching a ride on a comet - Raymond Gallun in 1953…

I naturally assumed you were talking about his "Old Faithful" (1934), wherein the eponymous character does just that. I'd never heard of “Comet's Burial.”

jordan179 December 5 2014, 05:07:15 UTC

Oh yes -- I forgot that that was how the Martian gets to Earth in that story. And I'm a huge Gallun fan. Silly me!

inverarity December 5 2014, 02:28:01 UTC

Interesting essay. I agree with a lot of your points about the pretentiousness of modern lit-crit applied to science fiction.

I think you're a little hard on Margaret Atwood, though. Yes, she said some dumb things about science fiction, but she's walked back her denial that she writes SF in recent years, and she wrote an article praising the genre a few years ago.

I've got a bigger bone to pick with Cormac McCarthy, whose non-SF-reading fans seem to think he invented the post-apocalyptic novel. And I generally like McCarthy, though I hated The Road, because it was even more of a "SF novel written by an author who doesn't know SF" than The Handmaid's Tale.

Which brings me to another point - until a few years ago, I rarely read outside the SF&F genres. Now, I read much more broadly, though SF remains my favorite. And being more familiar with both classic and contemporary literature enhances your enjoyment of science fiction (and everything else), especially when you recognize that a SF author you're reading knows his classics too. ( ... )

wombat_socho December 5 2014, 05:46:00 UTC

And for all that people slag Hubbard (deservedly) for Dianetics and Scientology, he was a VERY popular SF writer*, ranked with Heinlein and the other Golden Age stars, back in the 1940s. Much of his work hasn't aged well, but Final Blackout, Old Doc Methuselah, and To The Stars are all solid, entertaining work. They don't stay in print just because the Scientologists want to make a few bucks off the residuals, you know.

*This can be verified by going back and looking at ASF's Analytical Laboratory voting for the issues in question.

little_e_ December 5 2014, 07:35:22 UTC

They made us read The Handmaid's Tale in tenth grade. I got a few chapters in and threw it down in disgust. With all of the wisdom and experience of teenagerhood under my belt, I decided it was just too dumb. (Then I think I went and read Heart of Darkness instead.) I can't really comment on THHT book since I never finished it, but it never seemed (to my fairly ignorant mind) like a proper sci-fi, even if some sort of tech is involved. Likewise, some sort of AI tech must have been invented to make Thomas the Tank Engine capable of talking and moving independently, but I don't class TtTE as sci-fi. But I may have a habit of defining categories oddly.

There is a particular strain of extreme liberalism that has been infecting everything, lately.