A friend of the blog sent me boxes of books, including (oh, great gift!) fiction I would actually have purchased myself and wished to drop everything and read immediately.
Spider Robinson is a SF writer for whom I have mixed feelings. He’s an easy and enjoyable read, not constantly trying to impress you with his intelligence and Great Learning like all the ‘hard’ scifi guys, but he’s addicted to puns – which I despise – and fills his paragraphs with social references that I almost invariably don’t get but know just enough to detect, which makes them distracting.
I quit buy SF decades ago when they added the extra F and all books became required by law to have dragons on the covers*. I think of him mostly as an anthology editor, and was actually surprised at how many novels he’s cranked out in the interim.
I’m currently reading a book of his I’d never even heard of called The Free Lunch, from which I drew the following quote – which describes me rather too well since I was a skinny white boy…
“A gentleman doesn’t start reading before noon. It’s the first step on the slippery slope to total degeneracy. You wind up sitting in the gutter, unwrapping wet newspaper from a dead fish to get at Continued on Page C-Twelve.”
…a quote I read around seven in the morning while waiting for the eggs to fry…
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*Really. Why can’t fantasy be its own genre? What was gained by corrupting science fiction – key word science – with elves and quests? Is it just because we’re all supposed to kneel at the Altar of Tolkien?
“I quit buy SF decades ago when they added the extra F and all books became required by law to have dragons on the covers*.”
Don’t get me started! Yes, the “dragonization” of SF was a big loss to me also. Dragons, wizards, gnomes and magic have no place in SCIENCE fiction.
To be fair though, we live in a market-based world. Successful authors catch on pretty quickly to what sells and what doesn’t. (That, along with a knack for self-promotion, is what makes them successful.) So dragons must be what the average SF reader wants to read about.
Yeah, I don’t dispute that. My own taste in a lot of things has always been so contrary to what actually ends up selling that I’ve often joked I should get a job in some big corp’s marketing department. Show a new product to Joel and if he likes it, you know it’s a bad idea.
My favorite authors died one by one and – except for Niven and Pournelle, who couldn’t take up the strain alone and anyway are getting pretty long in the tooth themselves – nobody bothered to replace them. So I stopped buying SF.
One suspects that there’s a huge twelve-year-old-girl market for the dragon/elf stuff.
The fourteen-year-olds got Katniss Everdeen.