People who read Harry Potter and nothing else (kinda lame)

The BBQ Pit
101

I actually read and have read a lot of both science fiction and fantasy, which was exactly why I said it was “mostly junk,” which comment excited people into verbal abuse faster than you can say “L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth.” I think Lem, for instance, is as good as anyone now writing.

It seems like everything I posted is accurate – I read it in the biopic on a book by Lem. I appreciate getting more info on it. I don’t see why it’s necessary to say “Please don’t post about things that you don’t know much about,” but it seems that the habit here is just to be a complete fucker to anyone for any reason at the drop of a hat.

102

No, you were not accurate. Lem was not “kicked out of the Science Fiction/Fantasy writer’s guild.” (Why didn’t you know the proper name of the group? You heard a third-hand version of this story. Why didn’t you bother to check it out before you posted about it?) His honorary membership was withdrawn and he was invited to become a regular member. Nor was this because he made a “harangue at a conference.” He had been saying that he thought a lot of science fiction was bad for several years, but so had a lot of other people. A blurb on a book is not a good source for telling a story like that.

Prove to us that you know a lot about science fiction and fantasy. What books have you read? Which ones do you think are good? Which ones do you think are bad?

103

Fine, I wasn’t accurate. Why didn’t I bother to look it up, because I didn’t fucking think it was a priority when I was making a few posts before work. It was an aside, anyway. It was hardly worth providing footnotes like it was notes for my dissertation.

As for the second bit, I didn’t say I “knew a lot,” I said I’d “read quite a bit,” which seems to be a different ball of wax. Harlan Ellison, William Gibson, Orson Scott Card, Isaac Asimov, William Tenn, Stanislaw Lem, Phillip K. Dick, Jack L. Chalker, Philip Jose Farmer, Roger Zelazny, to name a few. I wouldn’t pretend for one second its canonical.

104

I’m going to defend Skutir here just a little bit because I know him very well IRL. I will say that he can sometimes come as condescending but he’s really not as much of a snob as he sounds like. He can be as low brow as anyone in his tastes. He watches South Park and listens to alt-country and reads all the Harry Potter books the day they come out. He’s not a genre snob, he really is pretty dismissive of 90% of any genre.

When backed into a corner he becomes more churlish and insulting but he is not, as a rule, overly fuckerly.

He is also quite a good writer in his own right, is intelligent, capable of wit and has a great deal to offer a board like this.

Don’t run him out of here quite yet. He is Doper material, he just got off on the wrong foot in this thread.

Why am I making such a grand defense of skutir, you ask?

Well, I feel a little defensive because he happens to be my little brother. Don’t worry, though. I’m pretty sure I’m a bigger asshole than he is.

105

Wizard of Earthsea…

106

Hmm

I believe that is not the point of the thread. As far as I have gathered, the origin intent of the poster is that “those who think hippogriffs are invented by JRK are not well-read”.

Other posters have pointed out that they came across people who only have read Harry Potters.

It’s about people who have not read, not about what people have been reading.

At any rate, I don’t like much of the fantasy books on the market (I have only found three attractive enough - Lord of the Rings, Wizard of Earthsea and Her Majesty’s Wizard series).

107

hands up
Question!

In your first sentence, you are saying that you have called fantasy ‘junk’. And you went on to say “it is”. And then you say you have good friends from writing clubs who are writing fantasy and are sick of all the junk. Aren’t they sick of their own junk as you have say all fantasy is junk? Read your first sentence again.

And again, does those “most” fantasy writers who believes that most fantasy work are junk write junk? Did they write their own junk, or did they read each other’s junk and come to that conclusion?

And last question, is JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings junk, IYHO? How about Chronicles of Narina?

“All fantasy is junk.” Sheesh. Aim that fireball with more precision, please. There are junky fantasy out there, true, but “all”?

108

I don’t think you achieve that kind of success on luck alone. If I knew how Rowling did it then I’d go ahead and do it myself, but if I had to guess I might say that being “pretty well standard” may have helped the Harry Potter books. I read a lot of YA fantasy and science fiction in my younger days, and plenty of it was IMHO better than the Harry Potter series. Plenty of it was much, much worse. Perhaps Rowling managed to hit the golden mean between “too challenging/unique” and “too stupid/dull”.

Of course, one the books started to become really popular than the success fed upon itself. My mother, who as far as I know had never before read a fantasy novel in her life, was actually the first in my family to become interested in Harry Potter. Why? Because her Master’s thesis dealt with children who read for pleasure vs. children who don’t, and she was dying to read the books that had moved so many children from the latter group into the former.

109

This is a very good point. All these staples of literature, mythology and legend are staples for a reason, namely that they work. Putting them all together in the easy-to-read form of a truly classic tale is as good a recipe for success as any you’ll ever see. You can see the exact same thing at work in Star Wars. Is Star Wars original? Obviously not. Like Rowling, Lucas took lots of classic staples, put them together and wrote a version of a story that’s been told a million times in every civilization humanity has ever seen. And it worked, just like Harry Potter works.

110

I never said ALL. Go back and read the thread from the beginning.

111

Hell, read the quote in your own mesage, Lost Cause. It says “most.” Most being maybe 90%.

112

Let me look at what he actually said. “waste much time on the fantasy genre, which is (with a few notable exceptions), mostly junk.” This seems clearly to imply that fantasy has MORE junk than other genres, as it’s being used as an argument for reading other stuff instead. OTOH, he does mention ‘notable exceptions’ which I assume covers most series anyone’s been mentioning as coutnerexamples.

It did sound snide. But skutir apparently doesn’t really hate fantasy or anything. And I think we mostly agree on how much of fantasy is junk, just not how to descirbe that :slight_smile: Let’s kiss and make up :slight_smile: (And also, IME we all read and enjoy some junk, but DIFFERENT junk.)

113

No, it’s about people not having read book with flobber worms. If you read the entire thread, you will see my objection to the OP is that peope can be very well read and never encounter a hippogriff, a fire-breathing dragon, or a flobber worm, because many well read people dispense with the entire genre. Sure, it might be theire loss, but getting worked up because they don’t know what a hippogriff is (as a literary/mythological device, i.e., they don’t know that Rowling didn’t invent it), is more a literary judgment, one I find extremely picayunish, given that even reading Tolkien and Lewis and Chalker and Zelazny and Farmer and LeGuinn and dozens of other fantasy books, you won’t find a hippogriff.

I guess the question should be asked… and should have been asked long ago, of Priceguy… exactly what hippogriff-featuring book should I have read before Harry Potter? What should these kids have read that Priceguy wants them to have read as preparation for HP? It’s not like these kids (and we are talking about children here, right?) think Rowling invented Wizards and dragons. She DOES have creatures (like flobber worms) that she invented. So having never seen a hippogriff before, they think it’s one of those. If this is indication they haven’t read “anything else,” I would like to know what “else” there is… name a few books from the last century with hippogriffs that any well-read person should have read by age 12. Or should these kids have all read and memorized Bullfinch’s Mythology?

114

I think it would be interesting to ask, “Why Rowling?” because I hear that asked, esp. by writer friends who are frustrated by her success. It’s not their own work they think is better, but they invariably mention Philip Pullman as much better (I agree at least regarding the first novel in His Dark Materials) and other fantasy writers they admire as more original.

I think it’s accessibility. Rowling is a very non-intimidating writer. Much fantasy has a kind of elevated style and a the characters are remote and hard to identify with. Rowling integrates the fantasy with realism kids can identify with – Harry struggles with being misunderstood by his peers, at times, and worries about which girls like him, hates school, loves sports, and despises his step family. He’s a normal kid.

But it’s not just about characters, its also about the style. Rowling is not on a higher plane than her readers. It’s considered bad form to explain too much in fantasy, since intelligent readers will figure it out, but Rowling set herself well up to explain everything since Harry was new to the fantasy world himself, and that makes it easier for kids.

There is definitely hype/snowballe effect in play, but in sum, Rowling is much easier for the non-fantasy reader to enjoy. She isn’t writing for fantasy fans, just for kids. Indeed, she doesn’t read fantasy herself much (she must have read some), and it so she’s an outsider, connecting more with non-fans of the genre and bugging the shit out of many people who follow it closely.

Ironically, I’m in the middle of my own MG fantasy novel (writing, I mean), which sort of happened by accident (it’s fantasy in the broader sense of meaning “not conforming to the rules of the natural world as we know them,” and not in the more limited sense where one encounters dragons and hippogriffs). When you set out to write a novel, you learn to appreciate that its hard work even to write a bad novel, and bad genre fiction is more demanding than bad literary fiction, since you have to know and conform to rules of the genre and basic rules of fiction writing.

115

skutir writes:

> As for the second bit, I didn’t say I “knew a lot,” I said I’d “read quite a bit,”
> which seems to be a different ball of wax. Harlan Ellison, William Gibson, Orson
> Scott Card, Isaac Asimov, William Tenn, Stanislaw Lem, Phillip K. Dick, Jack L.
> Chalker, Philip Jose Farmer, Roger Zelazny, to name a few. I wouldn’t pretend
> for one second its canonical.

So answer my second question and rate how good you think each of these writers or books are. I would expect that anyone who offers the opinion that science fiction and fantasy are mostly junk should know a lot about these fields. That’s more than just having read a lot, since the books that you’ve read might not be the better books in the field. You should also have read some critical material about the field so that you know what’s generally considered the best books in the field. Only someone who’s relatively well read in a genre, including a little bit in the criticism of the field, is qualified to say that a genre consists of mostly junk.

116

Nonsense. I can spend four minutes flipping through the paperbacks in the “Romance” section of a bookstore and tell that it’s mostly (if not totally) formulaic crap.

117

Let me drop everything and get on that annotated bibliography. :wink:

118

What he said. My impression is formed by the noise/signal ratio in the fantasy section. Would it mollify you if I said, “most fantasy is not interesting at all to the casual fan of the genre?” It would be a nice way to have put my response to the OP, which is simply, “why do you suppose that people who don’t know the history of the hippogriff not to be well read?” I’d like to put this whole “Skutir sucks” subthread away and get back on the more interesting topic of Rowling Fans vs. Hardocre Fantasy Fans.

119

Yes, something like an annotated bibliography is necessary if you’re to going to claim that most science fiction and fantasy is junk. A sweeping statement like that requires some serious research. This is why I never make such statements about most genres of literature or of any other field of art. If you don’t know much about a genre, admit that you don’t know much about it and don’t make huge, general statements about it.

120

Surely there is a shade of gray between “not knowing much,” and presenting credentials like the ones you require for a discussion board. I’m not trying to get a teaching position at a University to teach the stuff. I have an opinion. It is an informed opinion, but I don’t see anything in the SDMB rules that says I have to do the kind of pointless busy work you require to have the right to post my opinion. You are a classic example of the humorless Sci Fi crank, Wendell.