Had Adams lived long enough to comfortably adopt in his fiction the style he used in Last Chance to See, I’d disagree with you. Or had he been brave enough: the first Dirk Gently book was much more enjoyable than the HHGTTG, but the second retracted.
Exapno, you are demonstrating exactly the reason I am losing interest in science fiction: there is today an emphasis on style of writing rather than brilliant ideas. I dare to say that more than half of the writers you mention will no longer be read in 20 years, but that despite his poor dialogue, and sometimes inane characterization, Asimov will be.
I’m sorry, it must have been some other person who said the Foundation series was “quite literally unreadable” and suggested it had “no literary value whatsoever” and said that reading Asimov was “punishment”.
Both camps are equally valid, my ass.
I think you must be mixing up threads, because I didn’t see anyone in this thread telling you there’s only one approach to writing.
That’s OK though, you’re a professional SF writer, I’m sure you’ve put out much better stuff than Asimiov. It’s not like his body of work is anything special.
Thanks for a wonderful example of what I call the fan’s fallacy.
The idea that the only possible definition of good is “what I like” is a cherished notion of fans. With the corollary that “literary value” = “sentimental wanking” and that good by that definition is some sort of nasty-tasting medicine forced upon you by English teachers and pretentious snobs.
But anyone who wants a career in the field soon has to learn that it is not only possible but necessary to identify a writer’s strong points and weak points, and that these can be considered objectively and totally aside from whether you personally like the work or not.
Professional editors can do so with unbelievable dispatch, often from the very first paragraph. All those tricks that would-be writers play to seek whether an editor reads a submission all the way through (from turning a page upside down to leaving a twenty dollar bill inside a manuscript) are irrelevant. Professional agents and professional critics/reviewers have to do the same thing. Professional writers are very good judges of writing, not surprisingly. Even, I suppose, English teachers and professors can do this if they read enough genre to understand what the rules of that game are.
Most professionals (including the critics) have long understood that what is good, what I like, and what sells are three totally different, though somewhat overlapping, categories. You may be surprised to learn that an ornate prose style is not always prized by the professionals. To paraphrase Joanna Russ, a book is not a watch: you cannot take it apart piece by piece and judge the workmanship of each separately. It’s a gestalt that has to function well in all aspects of writing without any one predominating. That’s one reason many writers who are acclaimed for short fiction never make it at novel length. Jeffrey Ford and Paul Di Filippo are two modern examples. (Though Ford just wrote a non-sf novel that’s getting good reviews.) Kate Wilhelm and R. A. Lafferty, though they wrote good novels, never broke through with the great work everyone expected of them. Ray Bradbury’s novels are often collections of short stories. Harlan Ellison never wrote a novel in his mature style, though he’s claimed for 40 years to be working on them.
Nobody is going to write Asimov - or Heinlein or Clarke or Burroughs or Smith - out of the canon. They’ll always be fan favorites, as well as sentimental favorites on the part of many professionals. And the “gosh wow” factor, even if it results in a hypertrophied work, is too firmly a part of sf to be eradicated from the field.
I just have to ask one thing: the next time you come across some book that sells millions and is being read by everyone and you can’t stand at all - and you will, guaranteed - what are you going to use as your criticism?
You are the one who declared Asimov’s work of “no literary value” and “unreadable”. If that isn’t making a definitive statement of the work’s value then I don’t know what is. You declared that the work is garbage, yet claim that others are shoving their opinions down your throat?
Exano, Asimov, even at a young age, had a goal of selling to the best market at the time, which was Astounding. He achieved that goal, sold his stories for a lot of money, and did real well on AnLab. I’ve read all the Astoundings from 1939 - 1945, and his writing was very appropriate for that market. Bradbury’s wasn’t - he sold to Planet Stories.
I’m not sure if you’re mad at Asimov for writing the stuff or at his readers for enjoying it when you clearly feel we have no right to like it. It’s not like Asimov ever claimed to be a great writer, especially back then. His autobiography and notes to the early stories in The Early Asimov and the like are full of his struggles. He even mentions learning how to write transitions from reading an early Simak story.
I also rather suspect Asimov knew exactly what he was doing. He was the first (and still the best) self-marketing sf writer, carefully building up the jovial Dr. A persona. He was able to pull off something totally different from his normal writing in The Gods Themselves, but he clearly chose not to go in that direction again.
I don’t think anyone is trying to define good as “I like it.” It’s good in the sense it was well received when first written, and has continued to be popular 60 years later in a very different world.
Yikes. Just because I hate Asimov doesn’t mean I agree with Expno, in case anyone’s wondering :). He musters some good facts in favor of a terrible and condescending argument, IMO.
The Asimov book I read immediately before Foundation was The Stars, Like Dust. It did have a female character, to its credit. However, there’s no way on god’s green earth that that book can be considered to have brilliant ideas. The central conceit is that, millennia in the future, a tyranny rules the galaxy, and someone has found the mythical “first planet” from which humanity originated. They’ve followed clues back to this mythical first planet because it’s rumored that in ancient ruins there are plans for a weapon that toppled a previous tyranny, a weapon against which no tyrant can hope to stand. This much is revealed in the first few pages, and the book breathlessly follows the hero’s adventures to obtain these weapon plans, until the weapon’s nature is revealed in the book’s last line:
When in the course of human events…
And if that’s what you guessed, if that’s what you hoped it wouldn’t be, if that made you cringe to read, I’m right there with you. I was astonished that he thought this lame fifth-grade idea was sufficient to carry an entire novel.
So my perception of Asimov as a writer with lame characters and brilliant ideas is just a wee bit tarnished :).
For all those saying that Asimov had flat characters, for the most part, I agree with you (and I like his works despite that fact, not because of it). But I do feel obliged to step up in defense of the extensively-developed Dr. Susan Calvin, Asimov’s best character. And a woman, to boot!
So maybe he was only able to develop one, or a small number, of characters. Or maybe he just gave character development a relatively low priority. But he was at least capable of it.
I think part of the thing about Asimov was that he never really was a novelist…he wrote for the pulp magazines, and the novels he’s famous for…the Foundation trilogy and I, Robot, were thematic collections of short stories he had written. And the skills it takes to write short stories are different than the skills it takes to write novels.
Very interesting–thanks! Maybe I should give Asimov another chance; the one-two punch of this and then my dislike for Foundation have made me write him off, but maybe I’d enjoy his robot books. I certainly liked them when I was a teenager.
Never heard that story, but I believe it. Gold was well known for meddling with stories, endings, and even titles.
It wasn’t just Gold, of course. The reason that there are no aliens in the Foundation series was that Campbell wanted humans to be superior. Asimov, objecting to that, found it easier to just leave them out. He explained it, if you remember, in one of the later books.
Galaxy was never a pulp. And I don’t think it is quite true that he never was a novelist. The Foundation series was based on stories, since hardly anyone published sf novels back then, but starting with Pebble in the Sky he wrote lots. The Stars Like Dust is a novel - serialized as was common back then.
Asimov’s getting trashed in this thread, and I think quite unfairly and short-sightedly. Admittedly, I was never able to get into the Foundation trilogy–though I still hope to at some point–but Asimov’s strength as a writer of fiction is more than evident in his short stories and novellas. There are numerous, marvelous examples to be found in his short fiction of stories with real literary value, which I would argue successfully transcends the genre. I contemplated making a list of his great short fiction, but even in my head the list is much too long and unwieldy.
As far as his novels go, I still offer The Gods Themselves as a piece of fiction that deserves to endure.
I think not mine. At any rate, your point has not been that the Foundation series sucks, but that Asimov sucks, or more correctly, that he has no literary value. I disagree.
Certainly, he has written stuff that stinks on ice. I defy you to state one writer of your posted list of whom every work will be read in the future. Every writer produces work that is horrible.
It’s a culling process. There are certain books that will continue to be read, even if the author has produced dross along with brilliance. (Compare Connie Willis, for example.) I submit that any author whose work (even if it is a limited scope of their work) continues to be read for decades has literary value.
