All this and no Jack Vance?
... Perhaps there is a difference between being well read and reading well.
If the crap they made me read in High School was any example (”The Dollmaker”, “Siddhartha”...) They can keep it.
Now a little James Schmitz, or Heinlein, I can do with some of that.
:)
What’s your favourite Heinlein book? We might as well talk about good literature rather then the list that Ebert spewed.
Jack Vance is just fantastic. Nobody writes dialogue like Vance. He stopped reading any speculative/sci-fi fiction about 60 years ago. He was there in mexico with Frank Herbert when Herbert came up with the idea that would become Dune; Vance thought the idea was so-so, and never read the book to this day, although Herbert was a good friend. I think the sci-fi aspects of Vance hid him from a lot of the literari who seem to only dig writing about self loathing people trapped in modern boring lives.
Here’s an hour long interview done with Vance last year (he’s in his early 90’s):
For me it’s Jack Vance and the equally wonderful Gene Wolfe neck and neck, everybody else is somewhere behind those two.
Freegards