Moments of Permanence - Seriously, if anyone spoils me in the next two hours I will cut them

From: piranha Date: May 19th, 2009 11:19 pm (UTC) SF writers old and new (Link)

delany (note spelling :) is brilliant. difficult, but brilliant.

niven is among that group of oldtimer SF writers who're widely seen in print fandom as having had their brain eaten, leaving only crank ideas where once there was amazing imagination. pournelle is libertarian, and niven (who collaborated with him on some major works) used to share his politics (dunno about now), so a lot of the crank ideas were likely present before his brain got eaten.

shit!rly is actually not a bad writer, surprisingly enough. i'm keeping dogland on my shelves despite never wanting to talk to him again.

elizabeth bear is quite good, and really tries in her fiction. so does monette. *sigh*. man, racefail has been so disappointing from the point of view of having found new writers who seem to be doing a much better job of writing diverse characters than most of the old guard, and then realizing that their insight goes only skin deep.

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From: sami Date: May 21st, 2009 03:04 am (UTC) Re: SF writers old and new (Link)

Niven always at least had limits to his libertarian-ness - stories like "Cloak of Anarchy" at least throw in some suggestion that, without any kind of intervention/control, people do not tend to handle situations in ideal ways.

Pournelle has always bugged me for two reasons:

1) I don't like his style. Niven and Pournelle is not as good as Niven alone; therefore, I don't want to read Pournelle alone.

2) He is responsible for a sentence in The Mote In God's Eye that, in N Space (I think), Niven singles out as having been written by Pournelle and being an awesome enough sentence that they changed some cosmology to make it work.

Whereas that is the one sentence in the book, that, when I read it *before* reading the commentary, leapt out at me as being jarringly, memorably awful. So Pournelle produces a really cringeworthy moment in an otherwise very interesting book.

As for Shetterly, I just don't think I would enjoy his books at all. Not least because I did an entire university course that was more or less about exactly this, I habitually analyse the subtextual sociopolitical content of a book or story, and I just can't imagine him writing anything I wouldn't find infuriating.

*googles*

Dogland, by the reviews I'm looking at, is magical realism around history and race relations.

You know, without knowing anything about the compatibility of our reading tastes, I have to say: enjoy, but I'm not touching that without gloves in case I catch something. I just don't think Shetterly could touch any of those topics without pissing me off really a lot.

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