SF Tidbits for 6/6/06
By John DeNardo |
Tuesday, June 6th, 2006 at
1:45 am
- Today is 6/6/06: Here’s an overly exhaustive list of the devil/evil/demons in sf/f.
- Andrew Wheeler says Nitpickery Is Killing Science Fiction.
- Meme Therapy interviews Matt Cheney.
- SF Revu interviews Jeffrey Ford and Tanya Huff.
- Holtzbrinck’s Podcasts of the Weeks: Crossroads of Twilight by Robert Jordan and Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card. [MP3]
Related posts:
- More SF Podcasts
- SF Tidbits for 6/1/06
- SF Tidbits Part LXVI
- Free Audio Excerpts
- SF Tidbits for 3/14/06
Filed under: Tidbits
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Wheeler’s take on nitpickery is interesting. I haven’t experience such a thing myself, but I’ve been known to tear a book apart for what some view as a minor reason. I found China Mieville’s Perdidio Street Station to be a big disappointment because it starts off as this meticulously constructed world with fascinating characters and a dozen intriguing threads, all of which are abandoned so the story can become about chasing evil monsters. Same goes for Snowcrash, which is a wonderful work of culture-building and populated by colorful entities, but the plot is just piss-poor.
I think, if anything, SF is being “killed” by fans who accept mediocrity and crap out of a sense of coolness.
No matter what the work is, there’s going to be something desperately, horribly wrong with it, and the group that thinks so will scream their anger to the skies. And so we all get the feeling that SF is in the doldrums, that there’s nothing good being done, and that nothing good can be done. We even begin to feel a bit Spinradish, as if SF either died long ago or needs to be shot in the head immediately for our own good.
If you’re one of the people doing this, you are helping to kill SF. Cut it the hell out. If you really think everything sucks, get out of my genre and go piss on mysteries or romances for a while.
absolutly god damn right…Wheeler you are absolutly right.
Jeff, Snowcrash was intended to a work of postmodern cyber punk…thus the lack of a real plot… postmodern works and especially cyber punk works attempted to focus on a particlar american tradition of story telling…i guess the best literary example would be the adventures of Huckeberry Finn in which the character is simply in a world in which things happen to him outside his control.. Darma bums is also intended to be this way…You may not like this type of story telling but please know that it was intentional. (note i did not like snowcrash so much either but not for the same reasons.)