On Thu, 21 Nov 1996 00:14:49 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
On the issue of why many of us don't read as much SF as we once did...
1. I'm a lot older. The stuff that I thought was really great back when I was 14-22, or so, and even "pretty good" until I was about 25 or so, now really looks like dreck. (Not all of it, but more than I thought was dreck at the time.)
Partly this is age and life experience, partly just increased sophistication.
Remember Sturgen's (sp?) law: 90% of everything is crap - I think most of us just take awhile before we agree. The SF genre could be characterized by a couple diamonds buried in a manure pit...
(Vernor V. claimed to a friend of mine that the day he spent talking to several of us was the most fruitful day he'd spent in a long time...I take this as evidence that folks like us are to the new generation of SF writers what folks like members of the British Interplanetary Society were to writers of past generations.)
I'd agree 100%. A community as small as the SF writers *needs* outside influence. Must be neat, though, to read a book and go "I *did* that!"
(Interestingly, Eric Drexler says he cannot enjoy it because Simmons does not give nanotechnology a central enough role. This echoes the point Duncan
nanotech (and other things) can spoil a good story by making things too easy. Take most (all?) of Forward's books - great ideas, but it reads like a press release.
- Orson Scott Card, "Ender's Game." A good fictional exploration of online anony mity. In many ways, Cypherpunks was explicity a kind of combination of "Ender's Game," "True Names," "The Shockwave Rider," and "Atlas Shrugged."
I think those books are partly responsible for getting a great many people interested in this sort of thing...
- and of course Heinlein, though his best stuff is 30-45 years old now
Always a mark of a great SF author: his stuff is still good even if the
science is outdated... Ditto EE smith - it's funny, when you read things
like the lensmen series it seems cliched until you realize it *is* cliched -
because so many others copied him.
# Chris Adams