that I’m loathe to even bring up, lest I be banished from the board forever…
but really: what is the appeal of fantasy/science fiction books?
I’ve never enjoyed one of them. Not Hitchhikers Guide, not Vonnegut, not Brother Cadfael. None. The ‘humor’ is so pretentious I fall out of my chair. I read these books and I feel like the author is rolling his/her eyes at me saying “I’m forty thousand times smarter and more clever than you could ever conceive of, I can’t believe you’d even venture to understand this book”.
I was reading over some girl’s shoulder on the el this morning. She had some five feet thick paperback with a wizard and a dragon on the cover. After I read this sentence, I quit and barely contained my desire to bitchslap her:
“She slitted her eyes at the powerful, elven cat, who had promised her the powers to free herself from the grip of the evil warlock.”
Yes. Oh lord how I can relate. How many times has the elven cat denied me what he promised!!! It just seemed ridiculous, and they take it all so seriously.
I may have not read enough good Sci Fi/Fantasy to judge, but in reading the ‘what’s your favorite book’ threads, that’s all anybody’s listing! I’m in a tiny, ugly minority.
What’s going on? Am I not smart or funny or clever if I don’t read Sci Fi?
You’ve obviously never read the Bill the Galactic Hero series. Bill loses his left arm in one of the stories (as well as a foot, but that’s a whole other series of gags) and it is replaced with another right arm. From his drill sergeant. The arm, of course, has a mind of its own, a drill sergeant’s mind. Campy? Sure. Funny? Aboslutely.
sigh I have not…although the concept of Alien Hand Syndrome thrills me. I’m writing a play about it. Set in present day Chicago, incidentally, where everyone can understand the surroundings.
And I suppose to understand the ‘humor’ in a “galactic” book, I’ll have to have taken physics and know what ‘wormholes’ are and things like that. I think you DO have to be extra extra smart to understand sci fi.
All the arguement over ‘parsecs’ in Star Wars was enough to convince me that even though I loved that movie, I obviously wasn’t ‘understanding’ it.
jarbaby
I’m a big fan of fantasy books, not so much sci-fi.
There’s just some appeal about a land where everyone is beautiful and magic can happen…
I recommend Marion Zimmer Bradley. She’s the best. And if you want a book totally free of “elven cats”, read the Mists of Avalon series. Yes, that is considered fantasy.
It could be that current general fiction sucks, placing style and gimmickry over stories and respect for the reader.
This has driven most readers to genre fiction. Sure, most of it is crap but you get much less navel gazing crap than you get in general fiction ("wouldn’t it be so reductive if I wrote a full length novel about putting gel in my hair; further I’ll put exactly two commas in every sentence, and if you take the first letter of each paragraph it will be a treatise on the evils of shade-grown espresso beans).
Damn, have to go to a meeting. I’ll finish this thought later.
Hey, I’m a huge Star Wars fan. I know loads of trivia because I’ve watched them so many times. But I’ve watched them so many times because I love the characters. If the parsecs are the point, then I don’t “understand” either.
Hmm… maybe this was what you are asking. Sci-fi/fantasy is just like other books, except in different settings. I find today’s world mundane and boring, so I read for the characters, plot etc. in an exciting world. I don’t read it for the world itself.
Sounds like she was reading ‘Extruded Fantasy Product’ to me.
There is good and bad work in every genre. Bad SF/F, however, tends to be more obviously bad than most others. The appeal of F/SF is that the author is only limited by their imagination. The scope can be far grander than a mainstream novel, and within the wide setting, you can tell any sort of story (mystery, romance, etc)
Let me recommend a few books that have literary merit as well as being darned good stories.
You might enjoy:
Urusla K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed for stunningly good characterization
Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods (for humor)
Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber for swashbuckling good fun, and beautiful prose
Johnathon Carroll’s The Land of Laughs for a mix of magical realism with horror. And fantastically good prose.
Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Misteress for a good adventure story with some interesting prose devices.
What I’ve tried to do with the above list is to give a wide range of the range and depth of the genre. A science background is nice, but not required for any of them. There are hundreds of other books I could list, but the above list, by most people’s standards would cover some of the best work in the field. I don’t deny that there are stinkers, and I abhor the current trend towards “Tree Killer” fantasy novels, but I think it’s silly to dismiss a 100+ year old genere.
Fenris
I guess maybe this is what bothers me. I admire writers like John Irving who have to deal with the boundaries of reality.
Reading a whole book and having a character be able to teleport himself between centuries in an instant ‘just because he can’ is ridiculous to me. And yet, I don’t want to read 55 pages of WHY he can either…
Thanks for the list. I’ll see what I can do to check them out.
I don’t really like ‘mainstream’ fiction either. I actually like, old classics. I was enthralled with the unabridged Les Miserables. But I also love John Fowles and like I said, John Irving. I loved Hugh Laurie’s book “The Gunseller”. I like Eric Bogosian recently. And the sort of fiction that I write is present day with real people with real problems and yet (I think) manages not to be ‘navel gazing’
please. when there are fifty five people crammed into a six foot square space and the one standing on my head has a book open, I’m going to glance over at it. It’s not like I was following the words with my finger.
We don’t read them because we can relate to them, jarbaby.
I read them because it’s not something I relate to.
The Amber Chronicles are among my favorite books, but I in no way relate to a bunch of beautiful, godlike people (though being able to think someone out of existance has appealed to me many times).
You want humor that anyone can get? Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon series.
I realize you probably didn’t want reading suggestions, but it’s for your own good. Really.
I Spent many years crammed onto the Metro in Montreal. Learned most of my french from reading other peoples’ copies of “Allo Police” (a local tabloid) and La Presse (a local newspaper).
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you were on the L. Cramped, blah, blah, blah. But did anyone whiz on you?
I won’t suggest any books for you in the sci/fi fantasy genre. If you don’t like it, reading it won’t convert you. Sort of like: “I hate spinach.” “Well, if you ate more of it, you might like it.”
I just gotta defend Vonnegut a bit. I don’t think I’d lump him with the others (Piers Anthony, Asimov, et.al.). I consider him more fiction than Sci.fi./fantasy. That’s all I dare say publicly.
[sub]I e-mailed you about how I can’t relate to sci.fi./fantasy either, but I daren’t post that lest we both be ridden out on a rail.[/sub]
But that’s the point, to me. In good SF/F the author sets clearly defined rules. Hence the “limited” part
All good authors set boundaries. Without boundaries, there’s no conflict. There’s a term for stories with characters who don’t have any problems/conflicts ("Mary-Sue"s…I don’t know why) and they are universally held in contempt by SF fans) All good writers set up rules/boundaries/problems for their characters. Some just don’t use our boundries.
**
“Real people with real problems”? Trust me. Read The Dispossessed. Yes. It’s set on an alien solar system. But the problems of the main character are as real as Jean val Jean’s (alienation from family and society, an individual’s responsiblity to society at large, conformity vs non-conformity etc). And again, anything Pratchett does is just purely funny and profound.
What’s weird (and this is not directed at Jarbaby) is that only SF/F get this reaction. You rarely hear people making similar comments about westerns (a younger genre than SF) or mysteries (only about 40 years older than SF as a genre…less if you start with Verne). And fantasy was held in the highest regard until…geeze…the mid-70s. Lookit the popularity of Thorne Smith and James Branch Cabell, etc. The only reason I can think of is that, as I said before: bad SF/F is far more obviously bad than other genre’s schlock.
Fenris
PS: Spritle, to me Jarbaby was saying “I don’t like boiled spinach”, and I (along with others) are saying “Then try spinach cooked in all these other ways”. She said she didn’t like Vonnegut (neither do I) or Doug Adams (I do).But they’re both satirists who write with broadly similar styles and she didn’t find their satire funny. No prob. I suggested books that specifically aren’t satire.
Fenris, point made and taken. I considered this as I wrote the post, but called upon my own experience. I don’t like egg plant. I don’t like it boiled, braised, fried, sauteed, parmesian, in a box, with a fox, I do not like egg plant. It’s not the way it’s cooked; it’s the taste and texture of the egg plant itself. Different recipes won’t change that. I hope my post didn’t come off as being a snap to those suggesting other reading material. I don’t read SF/F, therefore, I can’t suggest anything.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled pit thread.
Well, I’ll have to look into it then. And I want to make it clear that I’m not dismissing the whole genre. I’m honestly asking “What is the appeal?” because I must be missing out. I was so excited to read Eric Idle’s novel…what’s it called? damn it…something about mars…
And I just had to stop reading it. I mean, there was this city completely enclosed in a dome and aliens and all that, and I just couldn’t…relate.
I can’t read a sci fi book and say “oh…yes, the great Three Headed Torso Revolution…just like my aunt used to talk about…” I like to be able to connect to CHARACTERS.
I can’t connect to Mr. Spock. At all.
Yes. I think that’s what I’m saying. i’m glad for suggestions actually…because I’d like to be considered a smart reader.
Why do you consider his books general fiction rather than SF? Many of his works contain a lot of SF themes. Slaughterhouse Five has aliens, the plot of Cat’s Cradle revolves around a scientific invention, and * The Sirens of Titan* has space travel. Those are all SF themes, are they not? In fairness, not all of his books have SF elements (I don’t remember any in Breakfast of Champions, for instance), but it’s certainly possible for a writer to write novels that belong to different genres.
I don’t want to get into a big rant here, but it’s my impression that the reason Vonnegut is often times not considered an SF writer is due to the ghettoization that SF (and Fantasy) has often experienced. When someone like Vonnegut writes an SF novel it’s not published by the usual SF publishers and it’s not placed in the SF section of bookstores, because he’s a “serious writer”, and the book “deserves” to be placed with literature. Which assumes that general fiction is inherently more worthy than genre fiction. Very large amounts of SF and Fantasy are crap (some of it’s very entertaining crap, but it’s still nothing that’s going to be remembered in the long run), but the same is true of any literary genre (and I’m including general fiction as a genre here). But it gets harder to point to SF’s successes when books like Slaughterhouse Five, 1984, and A Clockwork Orange are removed from the genre.
Oh, and since no one else has mentioned it, the book the girl next to jarbabyj was reading was probably one of Kate Forsyth’s Witches of Eileanan series. I’ve read the first two books, and they’re OK, but nothing great. There are certainly more cliched books out there though.
Vonnegut is not an SF writer. I say this as a pretty dedicated SF reader, though I self-limit to only the hardest of hard SF and/or the classics (David Brin, Heinlein, Clark, etc.)
The reason I say that Vonnegut is not a SF writer is that, while many of his stories contain SF elements, he almost exclusively uses them as absurdist plot devices. He has no interest in creating an alternative world.
Similarly, Douglas Adams was not an SF writer. He was a satirist who used SF elements to score his points.
Do you like Jane Austen? If so, check out Connie Willis. I suspect you’d enjoy Bellwether (which purists claim is not SF, but merely fiction with scientists as the main characters. It’s a romantic comedy about a sociologist studying fads and a physicist studying information theory, but you don’t need to know any science to enjoy it).
For something more serious, The Doomsday Book is wonderful, even if it does involve time travel. Warning - I still cry when I read it, even after having read it before five times. Real people with real problems - academic infighting, health service bureaucracy, and the Black Death.
