Posted on 09/08/2003 10:49:45 AM PDT by anymouse
Science requires intellectual effort and costs money.
Fantasy costs little or nothing, and it requires no intellectual effort whatsoever.
Science requires intellectual effort and costs money.
Fantasy costs little or nothing, and it requires no intellectual effort whatsoever.
Of course Spider Robinson should complain. From what I've seen, he's a social liberal and they currendly exceed just about any other group in their hostility towards science and spending on things like space travel. All those feminists reading fantasy novels about unicorns and warrior women are not Republicans.
You too?
In all honesty, I got through 5 of the 6 books, started the last one, opened it..........and then never read it! THAT is the sum total of my enthusiasm for the thing.
My impression was that Donaldson got togeather with a bunch of friends and they all dropped LSD and went on a marathon session of Dungeons & Dragons; the 'catch' being that the weeklong trip/game was audio taped and afterward he transcribed the story from the tapes. It was incoherent; I hated the hero; I hated the plot; I hated the characters; I hated the premises; it meandered; the hero was an 'anti-hero', which I can no longer stand; and after awhile, I just DIDN'T care anymore.
This book is an abysmally bad piece of crap. I learned nothing from it and took nothing away, except for a bad taste in my mouth (mind). I kept waiting for the 'payoff' and finally gave up! I can't say enough bad things about this book since I was (as noted before) a BIG SciFi buff before reading this rotten aimless drek.
If SciFi wants to save itself, destroying ALL copies of this book would go a long way in redeeming itself.
I beg to differ. I believe the reason for this decline is that most of the people who write fantastic fiction -- and all but one or two of the people in publishing houses who buy it -- are liberal arts majors who are very good at writing and editing stories about human characters and their relationships, and very, very bad at math, engineering, or having any understanding of how real science is done.
The few writers I know who have some real background in the sciences -- Michael Crichton, David Brin, Greg Bear, and Bob Metzger come to mind -- never seem to have trouble coming up with new ideas.
As for the rest of the dreck out there: blame Clarion.
Right. Sci-Fi has always been social fiction. Change the backdrop so the social issues stand out clearly.
You're going to want to try some Gregory Benford - a working physicist, writing about the politics of science as actually practiced. He also has some nonfiction articles periodically in "Reason".
Since our science is better than in the 30' or 50's, it is no longer possible to even fantasize that Mars and Venus are double earths they way Heinlen or Bradbury could. Venus is not a warm, rainy earth (The Illustrated Man) and there are no ancient Martian cities to explore (The Martian Chronicles).
Space is vast and emtpy and takes huge amounts of resources just to get a little way. In an age of chemical rockets and bound by a speed of light barrier, space it not the source of infinite possibilities like Star Trek made it seem(which is hardly a good example of hard science fiction).
I cut my teeth on SF too. I think I read "Childhood's End" by Arthur C. Clark when I was 9. I bit off a little more than I could chew.
I recently picked up Farmer's "Riverworld" series and was astounded at just how awful it was. While some of the theories were interesting, the secular humanisim made the book stink like yesterday's diapers. I find a lot of that rubbish in books written during the 60's and 70's. What is WITH those authors?
As for SCIFI, I blocked it on my dish since they canned Farscape. They can take their "Tremors" worm and shove it up Vivendi's collective rump.
I am a bit optimistic. If NBC buys Universal, which includes SCIFI, then they need to be reminded that in the 60's they launched a little science fiction series that only lasted three years. Perhaps you've heard of it? ::wink wink!::
There are a handful of authors I read regularly -- David Duncan, Lois McMaster Bujold (ANYTHING Miles, ALL THE TIME!), Julie Czerneda (her Web Shifters is wonderful) and Terry Pratchett. Pratchett's humor in this day and age is priceless.
The whole point of a hard sf is to develop NOVEL takes on space exploration and science. Each book or series needs a new 'mcguffin'.
Good point. It was strange to see how the centuries of technological research and of adventure ended up with the "holodeck" in the Star Trek cosmos. In other words, future man has nothing better to do than pursue the kinds of fantasy that we now indulge in via movies, video, computer games, the Internet, and the beginnings of virtual reality.
Technological progress comes over us very quickly nowadays, but what comes has so often been predicted and examined by SF writers generations ago. Our capacity for imagination seems to have run far beyond real technological developments. Looking at the failures of world's fairs in recent decades, someone commented that the Internet is already a permanent kind of "world's fair" of information, novelty, and amusement. If SF is in a malaise, the reasons are similar.
Fantasy is hard-wired in humanity, but space exploration will require a major external stimulus to justify spending the money necessary, especially since we already have been making those journeys for a long time in virtual media.
But other than that, and despite that, I really liked a heap of what he wrote. I even remember a short story I read when I was a kid, And He Built a Crooked House written by him.
I think Stranger in a Strange Land was his best, though. Mainly because it was just a really good literary idea: "What if a human came into our culture as a complete psychological alien?"
Did he write one about 10-15 years back about hippies in Canada and time-travel?
Well, in THAT case, I hope I was diplomatic enough in my appraisal of this tome.
;-)
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