SF Tidbits for 6/13/08
By John DeNardo |
Friday, June 13th, 2008 at
12:50 am
- Tachyon Publications is promoting the new Nancy Kress novel, Dogs, with a photo contest.
- The website for Marie Brennan’s new book, Midnight Never Come, features book excerpts, a contest with a $500 bookstore gift voucher as the prize,and a super-secret hidden website. (Shhh…you didn’t hear it from me.)
- Blogcritics interviews Scott Bakker, author of Neuropath.
- Graham Sleight’s “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” column from Locus Magazine looks at 8 contemporary SF classics by Greg Bear, Stephen Baxter, Christopher Priest, Greg Egan, Richard Morgan, Dan Simmons, Alastair Reynolds, and Paul J. McAuley.
- Ted Kosmatka has been added to the list of sf/f authors who blog.
- Shadow Unit gets a wiki!
- Writerly Advice from:
- Lynn Viehl: 10 Backstory No-Nos.
- Edward Willett: Advice for young writers.
- Guardian Book Blog asks: Should we care about book reviews? “Reading is a personal act – so why submit to the critical tyranny of the newspaper books pages?”
- John Scalzi is back with another SciFi Scanner article: With SciFi Movies, Classic Does Not Equal Good: “…science fiction films — like science fiction literature — value the idea over the idea’s delivery system.”
- SciFi UK Review shows us War Of The Worlds As It Should Have Been Done.
- Neatorama reprints Fun Facts About Star Wars from The Best of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader.
- There’s a new Theatrical Trailer for Star Wars: The Clone Wars. [via Empire]
Related posts:
- SF Tidbits for 5/25/07 – Special Star Wars Edition!
- SF Tidbits for 5/4/07
- SF Tidbits for 10/4/06
- SF Tidbits for 4/22/08
- SF Tidbits for 6/5/07
Filed under: Tidbits
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By way of an answer, let me first say what every genre of film has in common: Classics. Comedy has Some Like it Hot and The Philadelphia Story (to name but two). Westerns have High Noon and Unforgiven. Suspense and horror? Psycho and The Exorcist. And so on. No matter the category, you end up with a list of films that are not only classics in the genre, but also excellent motion pictures, period.
Science fiction has its classics, too, from Metropolis to 2001 to Blade Runner. But what makes science fiction different than every other genre of film — what makes it unique, for better or worse — is that a strangely high percentage of the classics of the genre are not good films; some are structurally flawed in major ways, while others are just plain awful.
I guess Scalzi has never seen a spaghetti western or any of the Friday the 13th movies…
Or does he honestly think these movies are not classics that had major impacts on their respective genres?
He might get away with saying Sci Fi has a higher portion of “bad” classics then Comedies and maybe even Westerns….but Horror???
I think not.
I don’t have to “submit to the critical tyranny” to find book reviews useful. I read reviews _after_ I read the book. Reading is not only a personal act, but a social one. I notice a lot of book clubs -both online and ftf groups- that testify to the enjoyment people get from sharing their views and listening to others. For me, reading book reviews are part of my listening process.
edit: reading _is_, book reviews _are_. (sigh)