DigitalDjigit
Honky Tonk Woman
The true s.f. form is the short story. It's really about the concept and there are a few characters and situations to wrap around it.
Sci-Fi novels
- Thread starter satanmcnugget
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k-punk
Spectres of Mark
confucius said:
For me, Calvino and Borges are marked by two qualities which Rushdie embarrassingly lacks: impersonality (Rushdie's convoluted narcissistic tangles are self-regarding and ostentatiously egotistical [Salman doesn't want us to forget, even for a moment, that is HIM writing) and a certain economy and understatement (by contrast with Rushdie's floridly over-written indulgences [never write one sentence where twenty hyperbolic paragraphs will do]). Rushdie is unreadable not in the sense that he is 'difficult', just that he defeats the will to carry on reading. It's postmodernism as taught by a Creative Writing course, every trick hamfistedly telegraphed, magic realism at its worst (and, let's face it, even at its worst, it's not too great).
jenks
thread death
k-punk said:
i think your criticisms may well hold true for recent rushdie but i think we forget too easily how striking and fresh midnight's children felt when it came out. He is a tremendously self-conscious writer and unnecessarly prolix and orotund writer at his worst (fury) but when he was not 'Rushdie' but merely rushdie i think he really could sing - parts of midnight's children and satanic verse are still readable(in yr terms) and would not frighten people off through what he has become (that awful beneath her feet for example).
also are we not damning him for his self-regarding media profile - all that turing up on stage with u2 and gossip column fodder (glam wife and smoozing the glitterati). he loves himself and becomes more unloveable in the process
luka
Well-known member
calvinos probably even worse than rushdie mark, i'm suprised you toleerate him. pretty much everythying i'ver liked has been mentioned, except i remember likeing tom o bedlam as a teenager and i'm coming towards the end of the the trans(something)of timothy archer and really enjoying it, not very sci-fi but good. and the book i read that was thingy
traffic island, ha, no thingy
gets stuck on a traffic island, pretty queeasy, really good though, ballard, not sf either really thoyugh. none of the cyber stuff does it for me. i think delaney is overrated too. just by the by
traffic island, ha, no thingy
gets stuck on a traffic island, pretty queeasy, really good though, ballard, not sf either really thoyugh. none of the cyber stuff does it for me. i think delaney is overrated too. just by the by
blissblogger
Well-known member
Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz -- really good novel about post-nuclear return to the Dark Ages, monks keeping science alive (without understanding it) by doing illuminated manuscripts of circuit diagrams, and so forth
Earth Abides, George R. Stewart -- good post-acolalypse novell, can't remember much specific
Pavane --by Keith Roberts -- set in world where the Reformation never happened, the Roman church has suppressed science -- much superior to Kingsley Amis' the Alteration based on same premise
the cyberpunk stuff gave me quite a rush when i read it (quite belatedly) but it hasn't left the same ideep mpression as the earlier New Wave of s.f. -- and with gibson and all that lot the characterisation and especially the dialogue are even worse than normal s.f. ... also struck my gibson's inability to imagine the music of the future (dub still playing in the satellite station; in that other book name i forgot the future rock star is basically grunge/reznor-like..)
Earth Abides, George R. Stewart -- good post-acolalypse novell, can't remember much specific
Pavane --by Keith Roberts -- set in world where the Reformation never happened, the Roman church has suppressed science -- much superior to Kingsley Amis' the Alteration based on same premise
the cyberpunk stuff gave me quite a rush when i read it (quite belatedly) but it hasn't left the same ideep mpression as the earlier New Wave of s.f. -- and with gibson and all that lot the characterisation and especially the dialogue are even worse than normal s.f. ... also struck my gibson's inability to imagine the music of the future (dub still playing in the satellite station; in that other book name i forgot the future rock star is basically grunge/reznor-like..)
blissblogger said:
Without venturing any opinon on G's characterization & dialogue, I don't think that producing worse c&d than ordinary SF is even possible. I mean come on. The writing skills displayed in most SF (excluding most stuff on this thread) are completely hideous. I think it would be hard to top--in the badness competition--the wooden prose and plastic 2-D characters of almost any 'hard SF' writer.
Yeah true. But dub will live on though right?
And that future wasn't so far off if memory serves.mister matthew
Active member
blissblogger said:
dunno if it was what Gibson intended, but whilst reading 'Idoru' i always pictured Rez as looking exactly like Bono, sat there in his sun glasses spewing platitudes..
k-punk
Spectres of Mark
francesco said:NO WAY, SACRILEGE!!!!!
No, just silly. 'Invisible Cities' surely one of the most powerful works of the last half of the twentieth century.
But I've never found much to like in Delaney either; just seems like bog standard SF to me... distant planets, spaceships, with this faint patina of uniteresting post60s rock schtick....
k-punk said:
have not been able to finish any Delaney- but i do have a soft spot for "distant planets and spaceships"- which is why Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling may be my favorite SF novel. this book is packed with so many ideas, in a way very reminiscent of Bester (Aldiss called Bester's two SF masterpieces "widescreen baroque"- which could also apply to Schismatrix) but updated to the late 80s "cyberpunk" era. unlike Gibson, and possibly because of the far-future setting, this book doesn't seem as stuck in the 80s as some of the other cyberpunk books.
a novel similar to Schismatrix is "Vacuum Flowers" by Michael Swanwick
i think i just prefer SF when it still clings to the pulp origins of the genre- but still tries to transcend them in some way.
another good SF novel done in a space opera style is "The Centauri Device" by M. John Harrison- anybody ever read that?
k-punk
Spectres of Mark
Gibson seems to be getting a bit of a bashing on this thread.... Well, he only has one masterpiece (Neuromancer) but that is surely a masterpiece... I think Nick Land is one of the few to have really understood the appeal of Neuromancer lay not in its eighties hipness but in its highly Gothic qualities... a rotting incestuous family with a zombie-vampire patriarch so cloned and fucked up that it has devolved into bacterial hivedom, the melancholy of the technologically disinterred Dixie Flatline, a ROM construct, the insidious diabolic spider stratagems of an AI building its escape route from anthropol capture by the Turing Heat...
I think Gibson went wrong precisely when he tried to go literary and develop, yawn, plot and character... the adrenal hit of Neuromancer gets dissolved into tedious ramifying plots... (Sad that Nick's declined even more spectacularly than Gibson, and is reduced to producing drooling right wing propaganda...)
I think Gibson went wrong precisely when he tried to go literary and develop, yawn, plot and character... the adrenal hit of Neuromancer gets dissolved into tedious ramifying plots... (Sad that Nick's declined even more spectacularly than Gibson, and is reduced to producing drooling right wing propaganda...)
k-punk
Spectres of Mark
oliver craner said:
There are some marvellous passages in that book, especially at the start, where Calvino writes about the reproach of your bookshelves... all those books that will never be read....
But Invisible Cities is something else again... a haunting series of parables that is also a meditation on Venice...
Gibson's Neuromancer is indeed good- as are his early short stories. even Count Zero has its moments. i was unable to finish Mona Lisa Overdrive and haven't read anything he's done since.
now that k-punk mentions "gothic" and "cyberpunk" i remembered Lucius Shepard's "Green Eyes"- voodoo, zombies, vampires...
now that k-punk mentions "gothic" and "cyberpunk" i remembered Lucius Shepard's "Green Eyes"- voodoo, zombies, vampires...
craner
Beast of Burden
I'm shocked, Mark, that that book didn't make you cringe...
I read it right through, just for the sheer sick joy of cringing, which I'm not proud of.
You really rate that book? I hated it. Just like I hate Umbero Eco's novels and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
But like, I suppose, Pierre Guyotat and Renata Adler.
Oh, I don't know!
I read it right through, just for the sheer sick joy of cringing, which I'm not proud of.
You really rate that book? I hated it. Just like I hate Umbero Eco's novels and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
But like, I suppose, Pierre Guyotat and Renata Adler.
Oh, I don't know!