DWK Heinlein makes me laugh everytime...when will American science fiction once again see a challenger for his throne......
(warning: m.k.b. is attempting the kind of social critique that is really just dressed-up complaining about tweets she saw once) The exhausting element of so much contemporary SFF discourse is that it's so often ideologically oriented and not aesthetically...every year there is real, vibrant literature in the field to grapple with and every year I have to watch supposedly well-read people shout "Team Tolkien or Team GRRM??????" at each other as if there have only been two people who have ever thought about dragons. I defer to your expertise, but I feel that the quality of the field's ideological rifts has declined significantly since the 70s; the closest thing to a meaningful clash in the past decade (besides Sad Puppies, who basically produced no literature of value) has been Isabel Fall. And all love to her for what she went through, of course, but that's one (excellent) story; it's not a generative foundation on which to build some kind of new vision for the field, like (say) the Khatru symposium and the underlying conflict it formalized was.
Anyway, this isn't super related to Slusser's review, but reading footnote 2 I got the feeling I often get reading random book people tweet with operatic confidence about "high fantasy" or "hard SF" or "the power of storytelling": that Slusser, in speaking of "the old SF," is arguing for an ideological construct only distantly related to authors and their works. I'm not really sure that Golden Age SF had as glowing an opinion of the scientific mind as he implies! Isn't it just as often that the bumbling egghead mucks up the plans of men of action? (The original 1951 Thing, as I think I learned from Stephen King, is not especially positive towards scientists and their pacifist inclinations.)
In conclusion, I think my favorite Tiptree story is "All the Kinds of Yes?" But the one I (personally) would anthologize is "And I Awoke And Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side." However I haven't read "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats."
I also sort of wonder if the relationship of current science fiction to current science is more fraught in some way than in the past… this is a very "source: I'm staring at my ceiling" kind of thought. But vis-a-vis the atom bomb, you know, the attitude of most stories is along the lines of Science Good Atom Bomb Bad. And some of my favorite science fiction stories are stories that deliberately embrace a kind of disturbing ending about moving toward posthumanity, because I enjoy the feeling of having my fur brushed the wrong way as it were.
But it seems like right now we're in a weird situation where (1) the faces of technology rn are people who grew up obsessed with old science fiction dreams like "colonizing Mars" and (2) the three way relationship among tech, science, and art has deteriorated into active hostility. Again, these are ceiling thoughts, I could be completely wrong here. But the "two cultures" problem was that people in the humanities felt no need to know about science, and I feel like we're in a much worse situation than that.
Definitely, yeah! I think there is a sense that even as American scientific discoveries have continued apace—the explosion in the complexity and variety of neural networks/Deep Learning technologies since 2020, even before the current LLM invasion, has been phenomenal—they've been increasingly enslaved and monopolized to the demands of corporate engineers rather than being put into public works. And even if discoveries have continued apace, they're still failing to address the elephant of climate. A significant portion of the "hard SF" that's made a ripple in the past decade has been climate fiction—VanderMeer's Hummingbird Salamander, Ned Beaumont's Venomous Lumpsucker, KSR's Ministry for the Future—none of it is particularly hopeful. And this all arguably predates the current AI labor dispute.
I would speculate, if we are going to get a revival in Golden Age forms and attitudes, it'll probably come from outside America. Liu Cixin is the obvious example, Chinese century and so forth. But it's only my intuition.
because my expertise has been invoked twice in the comments I feel the need to say… I'm in the process of acquiring expertise… but I'm not there yet lol. like in a year yes at this time no.
But yeah I think I agree with you. I mean I am sort of out of the loop with current stuff, though trying to get more in it. I think the two most recent things I've read are Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race (which I really liked) and the "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" story (which I thought was hilarious) and one of the Hugo winners this year (I think the one that beat "Omelas Hole"). But "out of the loop with current stuff" is kind of the story of my life.
I do wonder if some of the reasons the clashes are less interesting is that the field is just numerically bigger. There was a point up until which somebody who liked sff could actually read everything and that… is definitely not true anymore. While I don't have enough info to state this with confidence my impression is that at least through the seventies, science fiction had a higher sales floor than mainstream fiction and a lower ceiling. A community in which some reliable percentage is reading the new stuff and knows the old = a community with better arguments. Maybe? I don't know, it probably goes a bit deeper than that.
& yes I agree I feel like contact with actual Golden Age writing—which I like!—is like… number one there is plenty of hand-wavey science, and number two there is no single tone. And number one only gets worse when Campbell becomes obsessed with psionics, though I think we're post "Golden Age" at that point.
"The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats" is in the collection The Voice that Murmurs in the Darkness. I think it's also in The Best of New Dimensions. It might be other places… anyway, it's good.
As an elder, I have seen so many changes in what is regarded as "the canon," it's hard for me to take the idea at all seriously. My most vivid memory is the contrast of reading Tales of Neveryon in the 80s as a shitty glue-bound MMPB and then 20 or so years later seeing an English PhD friend toting it around in a glossy critical edition that she was teaching to her students.
lol… because I went to a "Great Books" college, the thought of teaching anything published after like 1930 in a college still feels bizarre to me. I have to consciously remind myself that people do this!
I like that you're posting regular accounts of the old battles over what was good science fiction. The Slusser treatment of Le Guin strikes me (as you present it) as a conflict where someone who was trying to preserve sf as a genre willfully misread an editor that he rightfully recognized had used the genre as a means to establish a reputation outside of the genre. I'm reminded of this scene from the TV show "Bad News Tour" (basically an English version of Spinal Tap) where the "intellectual" of the band is telling a journalist that he doesn't really consider his band "heavy metal", and the bassist and owner of the band's PA threatens to leave because he only joined the band because they were heavy metal. Le Guin wants sf to be great literature, but Slusser wants to make sure sf is really sf.
Am I right in thinking that the issue of science fiction writers breaking into the mainstream is a battle that is well and truly over, given that most writers these days have plenty of experience with reading science fiction, and it's not unusual for a writer who doesn't normally write science fiction to use elements from science fiction? Slusser was reacting to the situation of writers like Le Guin, or Vonnegut, or Philip Dick, where someone who had the intellectual resources to write conventional novels, but lacked the social resources to find a place in the literary world, would use science fiction to establish themselves as a writer of ideas. I don't know that that's something later writers have done as much, and this may just reflect that literary fiction was not what it was in the thirty years or so after WW2 ended. In retrospect, it's amusing that Slusser treated those authors as the enemy, since science fiction continues to have a large audience that hasn't been coopted in any way by the values of literary fiction.
On the large numbers of sf anthologies, your observation raises the question of the place of the sf short story in literary culture in general. I would love to know how similar the audiences for the short stories and the audiences for the multi-volume sagas are. To what degree are sf short stories still being produced because they can be anthologized for use in different kinds of high school and university literature classes? If you run into a history of science fiction that goes into how the readership and sales strategies have changed over time, I would love to know about it.
Well, I sort of disagree that Le Guin used science fiction the way you describe… I think it and fantasy really were just what she wanted to write. I think when offered off-ramps into a more Margaret Atwood kind of position, where she distanced herself from the genre while continuing to write speculative work, she didn't take it (and she got cranky about writers who did).
But other than that… I basically agree, the battle's over. The only genre that feels like it's really stayed in a narrow lane (to me) is romance, and that's probably partly because the Romance Writers' Association exercises pretty strict control over what is counted as such. I don't think there's any big barrier to being a writer of genre fiction who is taken seriously by the literary press these days. Maybe I'll feel differently when the book comes out… but for now, these do feel like yesterday's battles. You do still run across grants and such that exclude genre work, but that doesn't really bother me.
Mike Ashley has a four volume history of the science fiction magazine that I've dipped into but not read top to bottom. If I run across something that's less of a doorstop, though, I'll let you know.
I defer to your expertise on Le Guin. I was partly drawing on the remarks you mentioned about her views on great literature and the canon, so I'd be interested to learn more about her dealing with offers to distance herself from genre writing. I don't know nearly enough about her career - I was mainly aware of her writing from the '60s and '70s when I was reading as a kid, and her later books seemed to be exploring the outer limits of world-building, to the point where it seemed a little exhausting.
Maybe, based on her academic background and interest in world-building, the best comparison is Tolkien? Large quantities of intellectual firepower brought to bear on genres that don't normally ask for it.
One of the things bothering me more and more as I age is the impossibility of anthologies and canons and various collections and retrospectives capturing "what it was like" to be in the audience for a particular type of art at a particular time. There's so much stuff out there that's considered mediocre now that was someone's first inkling that the sort of thing they liked could actually be good.
These sorts of things are also kinda terrible introductions for people who might turn out to be interested in stuff. "Here's fifteen or twenty really good things. Oh, do you like this kind of stuff? Well, there's more of it to discover, and all of it is worse (in many different off-putting ways) than what you just enjoyed!"
Anyway, I might have talked myself into believing that anthologies should be more of a representative cross-section of the works of the time (i.e. 85% garbage, 10% mediocrity, and 5% genius) than a rigorous culling of the best works, the reading of which doesn't represent anyone's actual experience of being a fan at that time. Future generations will only listen to "Cruel Summer" and not have to find ways to talk themselves into enjoying the rest of _Lover_. (Is that the right analogy?)
actually future generations will have to pass a ten page examination on Lover, administered by me, before they are allowed to listen to "Cruel Summer"…
I have a copy of The Norton Book of Science Fiction and I admit I thought she (they) chose 1960 as a cutoff date because The Science Fiction Hall of Fame covered from Wells to Zelazny -- that is, about 1895 to 1964.
It's funny about Slusser (a critic I have never trusted) not mentioning Attebery and Fowler. The first time I met Brian Attebery was at a World Fantasy Convention at which Fowler was the Guest of Honor. (2017) And Brian talked to me about the Library of America editions of Le Guin's work, which he edited, and which were in the process of appearing at that time. He also talked about Fowler's work on the Norton book, and he said she was a full collaborator with he and Le Guin, but Norton had some rule about number of names on the title page, or something. Le Guin was obviously the more famous writer, and Attebery had the academic credits that I think Norton also liked, so Fowler was relegated to a lesser credit.
I do think some of the selections are eccentric. "Kirinyaga"??? And there are many cases where the particular story chosen seems not the right one. (For Russ -- why not "When It Changed"? Or my too favorites among her work, "Nobody's Home" or "The Second Inquisition". For Le Guin, why not "Nine Lives"? For Tiptree, why not "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain" or "And I Awoke and Found me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" or "The Milk of Paradise".) But you can always do that. As an anthologist myself, I can say that sometimes we choose less famous stories simply because the better known ones are already readily available. (Though I lost the battle with my collaborators concerning the "philosophical" Le Guin story to use for our upcoming book of philsophical SF -- they said we just HAVE to use "Omelas" while I said, more or less, every human being on Earth has read that story already, why don't we choose "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" ...)
That whole question of canon is pretty fraught. I like multiple canons. (I make my own lists all the time, after all!) But I don't like rejecting the idea completely. And I don't like discarding the older canon entirely.
He does mention Atteberry and Fowler very briefly but only to dismiss their influence because Atteberry isn't a science fiction writer and… he doesn't actually give a reason for writing off Fowler now that I look back at it, he just does it.
For Russ I think I would have picked "The Barbarian" because I love the line where Alyx says something like "create the world? you haven't the imagination." But yes, it's quite eccentric and some of the eighties stories are imho just not worth including. But what I like about the eccentricity is that it's not going to overlap much with basically any other book, because, like you say, everybody has read "Omelas."
I am definitely pro-canon, personally, but I think to be useful a canon is always going to be a mix of the great and the significant. "Significance" is a very easily abused category for shutting writers out but if you go too far the other way you end up with a list of things that may not seem like they have much to do with each other, or which are so dominated by somebody's personal taste that you aren't getting a sense of anything wider. But I feel like when I read Le Guin talking about this I can see her imagining something better and beyond what exists… as opposed to people just sort of refusing to think they should have read things that were written before they were born (which is a position people are happy to hold online whether or not they actually believe it).
Also, science fiction has a long tradition of those quasi-academic, neither feast nor fowl, journals, in great part because true academic journals refused to treat it at all for a long time.
yes, it's a personal problem I need to get over. To me it reads as very condescending but ofc it's not meant to. Well, in this case, maybe it's meant to.
Very nice. In one day you went from a post that "I can't read it (I don't like it)" to a post "I can't read it (I'm not cued in enough)". That's a spectrum. I'm going to put it in my special application so I can read it slowly again.
And this is great, it's why I read basically everything despite being of opinion that perfume is liquid Satan or Swift is a liquid Satan that harden in human shape. It shows that you're a person in the world, not a brand (unless it's a brand, "I'm so varied and authentic!", then good job on selling it!).
I recently sent a video of a quick tiny game I coded to a girl I love (a neat writing trick for you, "a girl I love" plants an idea she loves me, too.) and she wrote back saying, "Didn't know you code games?", to that I said, "I don't, it's my mission to be bad at multiple things, it's still better than doing nothing". My other offline pastime is football hooliganism.
fair enough, he can be A Lot (I liked Center of the Earth and 80 Days but I haven't gotten through 20,000 Leagues yet because of the parts that are so obviously just "I retyped a cetology textbook and added Ned Land saying 'sacre bleu!' and 'I'll be blowed!' every two or three paragraphs")
this what she says about Weinbaum: "Until Stanley Weinbaum’s 'A Martian Odyssey' came out, the only good aliens were dead ones. That vivid and charming story (first published in 1934) opened the door to a great domain of science fiction, replacing tentacled horrors with fully imagined non-human physiologies and societies."
She's favorable about him in her overview of pre-1960 fiction but I might have deleted that footnote (much reshuffling had to happen in here to keep it in the email limit lol). I think she just didn't want to have this fight.
DWK Heinlein makes me laugh everytime...when will American science fiction once again see a challenger for his throne......
(warning: m.k.b. is attempting the kind of social critique that is really just dressed-up complaining about tweets she saw once) The exhausting element of so much contemporary SFF discourse is that it's so often ideologically oriented and not aesthetically...every year there is real, vibrant literature in the field to grapple with and every year I have to watch supposedly well-read people shout "Team Tolkien or Team GRRM??????" at each other as if there have only been two people who have ever thought about dragons. I defer to your expertise, but I feel that the quality of the field's ideological rifts has declined significantly since the 70s; the closest thing to a meaningful clash in the past decade (besides Sad Puppies, who basically produced no literature of value) has been Isabel Fall. And all love to her for what she went through, of course, but that's one (excellent) story; it's not a generative foundation on which to build some kind of new vision for the field, like (say) the Khatru symposium and the underlying conflict it formalized was.
Anyway, this isn't super related to Slusser's review, but reading footnote 2 I got the feeling I often get reading random book people tweet with operatic confidence about "high fantasy" or "hard SF" or "the power of storytelling": that Slusser, in speaking of "the old SF," is arguing for an ideological construct only distantly related to authors and their works. I'm not really sure that Golden Age SF had as glowing an opinion of the scientific mind as he implies! Isn't it just as often that the bumbling egghead mucks up the plans of men of action? (The original 1951 Thing, as I think I learned from Stephen King, is not especially positive towards scientists and their pacifist inclinations.)
In conclusion, I think my favorite Tiptree story is "All the Kinds of Yes?" But the one I (personally) would anthologize is "And I Awoke And Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side." However I haven't read "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats."
I also sort of wonder if the relationship of current science fiction to current science is more fraught in some way than in the past… this is a very "source: I'm staring at my ceiling" kind of thought. But vis-a-vis the atom bomb, you know, the attitude of most stories is along the lines of Science Good Atom Bomb Bad. And some of my favorite science fiction stories are stories that deliberately embrace a kind of disturbing ending about moving toward posthumanity, because I enjoy the feeling of having my fur brushed the wrong way as it were.
But it seems like right now we're in a weird situation where (1) the faces of technology rn are people who grew up obsessed with old science fiction dreams like "colonizing Mars" and (2) the three way relationship among tech, science, and art has deteriorated into active hostility. Again, these are ceiling thoughts, I could be completely wrong here. But the "two cultures" problem was that people in the humanities felt no need to know about science, and I feel like we're in a much worse situation than that.
Definitely, yeah! I think there is a sense that even as American scientific discoveries have continued apace—the explosion in the complexity and variety of neural networks/Deep Learning technologies since 2020, even before the current LLM invasion, has been phenomenal—they've been increasingly enslaved and monopolized to the demands of corporate engineers rather than being put into public works. And even if discoveries have continued apace, they're still failing to address the elephant of climate. A significant portion of the "hard SF" that's made a ripple in the past decade has been climate fiction—VanderMeer's Hummingbird Salamander, Ned Beaumont's Venomous Lumpsucker, KSR's Ministry for the Future—none of it is particularly hopeful. And this all arguably predates the current AI labor dispute.
I would speculate, if we are going to get a revival in Golden Age forms and attitudes, it'll probably come from outside America. Liu Cixin is the obvious example, Chinese century and so forth. But it's only my intuition.
because my expertise has been invoked twice in the comments I feel the need to say… I'm in the process of acquiring expertise… but I'm not there yet lol. like in a year yes at this time no.
But yeah I think I agree with you. I mean I am sort of out of the loop with current stuff, though trying to get more in it. I think the two most recent things I've read are Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race (which I really liked) and the "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" story (which I thought was hilarious) and one of the Hugo winners this year (I think the one that beat "Omelas Hole"). But "out of the loop with current stuff" is kind of the story of my life.
I do wonder if some of the reasons the clashes are less interesting is that the field is just numerically bigger. There was a point up until which somebody who liked sff could actually read everything and that… is definitely not true anymore. While I don't have enough info to state this with confidence my impression is that at least through the seventies, science fiction had a higher sales floor than mainstream fiction and a lower ceiling. A community in which some reliable percentage is reading the new stuff and knows the old = a community with better arguments. Maybe? I don't know, it probably goes a bit deeper than that.
& yes I agree I feel like contact with actual Golden Age writing—which I like!—is like… number one there is plenty of hand-wavey science, and number two there is no single tone. And number one only gets worse when Campbell becomes obsessed with psionics, though I think we're post "Golden Age" at that point.
"The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats" is in the collection The Voice that Murmurs in the Darkness. I think it's also in The Best of New Dimensions. It might be other places… anyway, it's good.
As an elder, I have seen so many changes in what is regarded as "the canon," it's hard for me to take the idea at all seriously. My most vivid memory is the contrast of reading Tales of Neveryon in the 80s as a shitty glue-bound MMPB and then 20 or so years later seeing an English PhD friend toting it around in a glossy critical edition that she was teaching to her students.
lol… because I went to a "Great Books" college, the thought of teaching anything published after like 1930 in a college still feels bizarre to me. I have to consciously remind myself that people do this!
I like that you're posting regular accounts of the old battles over what was good science fiction. The Slusser treatment of Le Guin strikes me (as you present it) as a conflict where someone who was trying to preserve sf as a genre willfully misread an editor that he rightfully recognized had used the genre as a means to establish a reputation outside of the genre. I'm reminded of this scene from the TV show "Bad News Tour" (basically an English version of Spinal Tap) where the "intellectual" of the band is telling a journalist that he doesn't really consider his band "heavy metal", and the bassist and owner of the band's PA threatens to leave because he only joined the band because they were heavy metal. Le Guin wants sf to be great literature, but Slusser wants to make sure sf is really sf.
Am I right in thinking that the issue of science fiction writers breaking into the mainstream is a battle that is well and truly over, given that most writers these days have plenty of experience with reading science fiction, and it's not unusual for a writer who doesn't normally write science fiction to use elements from science fiction? Slusser was reacting to the situation of writers like Le Guin, or Vonnegut, or Philip Dick, where someone who had the intellectual resources to write conventional novels, but lacked the social resources to find a place in the literary world, would use science fiction to establish themselves as a writer of ideas. I don't know that that's something later writers have done as much, and this may just reflect that literary fiction was not what it was in the thirty years or so after WW2 ended. In retrospect, it's amusing that Slusser treated those authors as the enemy, since science fiction continues to have a large audience that hasn't been coopted in any way by the values of literary fiction.
On the large numbers of sf anthologies, your observation raises the question of the place of the sf short story in literary culture in general. I would love to know how similar the audiences for the short stories and the audiences for the multi-volume sagas are. To what degree are sf short stories still being produced because they can be anthologized for use in different kinds of high school and university literature classes? If you run into a history of science fiction that goes into how the readership and sales strategies have changed over time, I would love to know about it.
Well, I sort of disagree that Le Guin used science fiction the way you describe… I think it and fantasy really were just what she wanted to write. I think when offered off-ramps into a more Margaret Atwood kind of position, where she distanced herself from the genre while continuing to write speculative work, she didn't take it (and she got cranky about writers who did).
But other than that… I basically agree, the battle's over. The only genre that feels like it's really stayed in a narrow lane (to me) is romance, and that's probably partly because the Romance Writers' Association exercises pretty strict control over what is counted as such. I don't think there's any big barrier to being a writer of genre fiction who is taken seriously by the literary press these days. Maybe I'll feel differently when the book comes out… but for now, these do feel like yesterday's battles. You do still run across grants and such that exclude genre work, but that doesn't really bother me.
Mike Ashley has a four volume history of the science fiction magazine that I've dipped into but not read top to bottom. If I run across something that's less of a doorstop, though, I'll let you know.
I defer to your expertise on Le Guin. I was partly drawing on the remarks you mentioned about her views on great literature and the canon, so I'd be interested to learn more about her dealing with offers to distance herself from genre writing. I don't know nearly enough about her career - I was mainly aware of her writing from the '60s and '70s when I was reading as a kid, and her later books seemed to be exploring the outer limits of world-building, to the point where it seemed a little exhausting.
Maybe, based on her academic background and interest in world-building, the best comparison is Tolkien? Large quantities of intellectual firepower brought to bear on genres that don't normally ask for it.
I think an example would be the beginning of this review: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/sep/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.fiction She could have chosen just to avoid that point, but she didn't. That said, I'm not really in the Le Guin intense phase of research yet, so she no doubt holds many surprises for me.
And yes I think Tolkien is a good comparison!
One of the things bothering me more and more as I age is the impossibility of anthologies and canons and various collections and retrospectives capturing "what it was like" to be in the audience for a particular type of art at a particular time. There's so much stuff out there that's considered mediocre now that was someone's first inkling that the sort of thing they liked could actually be good.
These sorts of things are also kinda terrible introductions for people who might turn out to be interested in stuff. "Here's fifteen or twenty really good things. Oh, do you like this kind of stuff? Well, there's more of it to discover, and all of it is worse (in many different off-putting ways) than what you just enjoyed!"
Anyway, I might have talked myself into believing that anthologies should be more of a representative cross-section of the works of the time (i.e. 85% garbage, 10% mediocrity, and 5% genius) than a rigorous culling of the best works, the reading of which doesn't represent anyone's actual experience of being a fan at that time. Future generations will only listen to "Cruel Summer" and not have to find ways to talk themselves into enjoying the rest of _Lover_. (Is that the right analogy?)
actually future generations will have to pass a ten page examination on Lover, administered by me, before they are allowed to listen to "Cruel Summer"…
There were Sad Puppies even in 1993, I see!
always a sad puppy, never a melancholic dog
I have a copy of The Norton Book of Science Fiction and I admit I thought she (they) chose 1960 as a cutoff date because The Science Fiction Hall of Fame covered from Wells to Zelazny -- that is, about 1895 to 1964.
It's funny about Slusser (a critic I have never trusted) not mentioning Attebery and Fowler. The first time I met Brian Attebery was at a World Fantasy Convention at which Fowler was the Guest of Honor. (2017) And Brian talked to me about the Library of America editions of Le Guin's work, which he edited, and which were in the process of appearing at that time. He also talked about Fowler's work on the Norton book, and he said she was a full collaborator with he and Le Guin, but Norton had some rule about number of names on the title page, or something. Le Guin was obviously the more famous writer, and Attebery had the academic credits that I think Norton also liked, so Fowler was relegated to a lesser credit.
I do think some of the selections are eccentric. "Kirinyaga"??? And there are many cases where the particular story chosen seems not the right one. (For Russ -- why not "When It Changed"? Or my too favorites among her work, "Nobody's Home" or "The Second Inquisition". For Le Guin, why not "Nine Lives"? For Tiptree, why not "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain" or "And I Awoke and Found me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" or "The Milk of Paradise".) But you can always do that. As an anthologist myself, I can say that sometimes we choose less famous stories simply because the better known ones are already readily available. (Though I lost the battle with my collaborators concerning the "philosophical" Le Guin story to use for our upcoming book of philsophical SF -- they said we just HAVE to use "Omelas" while I said, more or less, every human being on Earth has read that story already, why don't we choose "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" ...)
That whole question of canon is pretty fraught. I like multiple canons. (I make my own lists all the time, after all!) But I don't like rejecting the idea completely. And I don't like discarding the older canon entirely.
He does mention Atteberry and Fowler very briefly but only to dismiss their influence because Atteberry isn't a science fiction writer and… he doesn't actually give a reason for writing off Fowler now that I look back at it, he just does it.
For Russ I think I would have picked "The Barbarian" because I love the line where Alyx says something like "create the world? you haven't the imagination." But yes, it's quite eccentric and some of the eighties stories are imho just not worth including. But what I like about the eccentricity is that it's not going to overlap much with basically any other book, because, like you say, everybody has read "Omelas."
I am definitely pro-canon, personally, but I think to be useful a canon is always going to be a mix of the great and the significant. "Significance" is a very easily abused category for shutting writers out but if you go too far the other way you end up with a list of things that may not seem like they have much to do with each other, or which are so dominated by somebody's personal taste that you aren't getting a sense of anything wider. But I feel like when I read Le Guin talking about this I can see her imagining something better and beyond what exists… as opposed to people just sort of refusing to think they should have read things that were written before they were born (which is a position people are happy to hold online whether or not they actually believe it).
Also, science fiction has a long tradition of those quasi-academic, neither feast nor fowl, journals, in great part because true academic journals refused to treat it at all for a long time.
yes, it's a personal problem I need to get over. To me it reads as very condescending but ofc it's not meant to. Well, in this case, maybe it's meant to.
Very nice. In one day you went from a post that "I can't read it (I don't like it)" to a post "I can't read it (I'm not cued in enough)". That's a spectrum. I'm going to put it in my special application so I can read it slowly again.
but last Eva is coming this weekend unless we have to fumigate the house again =)
This sounds almost like an insult! :> "Worry not, weeb, your stories are coming!"
no no I just feel bad it's taking longer!! we're all weebs here…
Speed has a value when you need to shit really badly, in other pursuits it's but one factor. Better late then never, better good then bad!
range is really our only promise here at BDM Industries
And this is great, it's why I read basically everything despite being of opinion that perfume is liquid Satan or Swift is a liquid Satan that harden in human shape. It shows that you're a person in the world, not a brand (unless it's a brand, "I'm so varied and authentic!", then good job on selling it!).
I recently sent a video of a quick tiny game I coded to a girl I love (a neat writing trick for you, "a girl I love" plants an idea she loves me, too.) and she wrote back saying, "Didn't know you code games?", to that I said, "I don't, it's my mission to be bad at multiple things, it's still better than doing nothing". My other offline pastime is football hooliganism.
So, I get the "variety is spice of life" thing.
I'm kinda surprised she didn't like my bro Stanley Weinbaum ("Tweel" is a very Le Guinian alien in that he's not bad, just diff'r'nt)
oh I didn't delete it but I guess I should have said all her mentions in that survey are favorable though she's a little mean about Jules Verne
fair enough, he can be A Lot (I liked Center of the Earth and 80 Days but I haven't gotten through 20,000 Leagues yet because of the parts that are so obviously just "I retyped a cetology textbook and added Ned Land saying 'sacre bleu!' and 'I'll be blowed!' every two or three paragraphs")
this what she says about Weinbaum: "Until Stanley Weinbaum’s 'A Martian Odyssey' came out, the only good aliens were dead ones. That vivid and charming story (first published in 1934) opened the door to a great domain of science fiction, replacing tentacled horrors with fully imagined non-human physiologies and societies."
She's favorable about him in her overview of pre-1960 fiction but I might have deleted that footnote (much reshuffling had to happen in here to keep it in the email limit lol). I think she just didn't want to have this fight.