There are far more groups who sound like the Rolling Stones than sound like the Beatles. But you can’t say that the Beatles weren’t influential. They were just too individual to be directly copied.
Blish in The Issues at Hand condemns several writers for trying to sound like Bradbury. They all failed. You can’t sound like Bradbury. But everyone who wanted to write well wanted to write as well as he did. He’s ubiquitous in the literary sf community as an influence. That’s my side of the fence. People I know and have talked to since the 60s. Of course nobody imitates him. Nobody imitates Ellison, or Lafferty, or Bester, or Delany, or Zelazny, or the million others with distinctive styles. That’s much of their appeal. You can write like the Big Three, though, and many do. Which is perfectly fine as long as their other virtues are brought along for the ride. And let me make the point that style alone is nowhere near sufficient; Bradbury made you feel and think with his words and that’s what made him great. And made others want to write.
Bradbury certainly made me feel with his words. Specifically, he made me feel terrible.
Which is, of course, what he was setting out to do. If art is all about conveying emotion, then one who conveys emotion as effectively as Bradbury must be a very great artist indeed.
But I still don’t like it.
Edit for another thought:
If Bradbury counts as a “great science fiction author” because he was influential, and he was influential in the sense that many other SF writers aspired to his quality of his writing, what does that say about, say, Shakespeare? I expect that most science fiction writers are inspired by him in the same way, but I don’t think anyone would call Shakespeare a science fiction writer.
Herbert died relatively young, when the Grandmasterships were still being given to people who had been writing well before Herbert. I strongly suspect that had he lived a decade longer, he would have been named a Grandmaster. Another name that is notably missing is PK Dick, who also died young.
Really, you can settle the Bradbury debate by looking at the list of awards he was given: double Grandmasters for fantasy and horror, a number of general literature honors including a special Pulitzer, an Emmy, and a slew of personal-recognition honors including a Hollywood Star of Fame. One (1) relatively minor sf award (I’m discounting the Prometheus, which is niche-political more than a literary award).
Not one Hugo, Nebula, Locus or other recognized sf major… is there another SFWA GM who lacks those supporting awards?
See, I would have said it was because Herbert was a writer who came up with one not-original idea and then ran it into the ground at a high rate of speed.
Niven, OTOH, totally deserves the award.
On the Gripping Hand, there are a lot of people and only one award. But the fact that I said “Gripping Hand” is enough to get Larry in, IMO.
I’m with the “great writer whose works I do not care for at all” camp, except … I just can’t get my lips to form the words “great writer” with any degree of sincerity. It’s not that I doubt the man’s skill as a writer, I just can’t get behind the idea of calling a man a “great writer” whose works I experienced as “mostly boring with a side dish of mildly disgusting.” I don’t believe I have ever completed anything of his I started reading.
You can put Phillip K. Dick in the same boat with Delaney as well, and sail them over the cliffs at the edge of the world, for all I care. I mean, I’m not angry that Delaney got a grandmaster award, I recognize that others have different tastes than me and are entitled to them. But saying someone is a “great writer” when you can’t even honestly call him a “good writer” just does not work for me.
Sure - Van Vogt, de Camp, del Rey, and Norton for example (deCamp did get a Hugo for a non-fiction work). DeCamp and Norton were also fantasy Grandmasters.
One of the goals of the SFWA Grandmaster was recognize people who had done a lot of work before Nebulas existed, wasn’t it?
On a technicality, Bradbury won a Hugo for FAHRENHEIT 451 after racking up Hugo nominations for THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES and IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE and THE ILLUSTRATED MAN and THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS.
Okay, but I’ll maintain that all the other SFGMs have indisputable sf chops that greatly exceed Bradbury’s.
Retro Hugos are a ridiculous conceit. Anyone can give an award to a work proven over decades.
As for the others, Just Being Nominated and all that, as I well know. A lot of rather borderline material gets nominated and doesn’t necessarily confirm it as sf-sf over sf-fantasy or sf-mainstream.
We’re all entitled to our idiosyncratic opinions - I’ve needed to rent storage lockers for all of mine - but at some point you have to back them up. Stranger was written as sf, published as sf, and accepted by everyone in the field as sf. I can’t think of any contemporary opinion that disagreed. For Pete’s sake, look at James Blish, who may have loonier on the subject of “real” science fiction than Damon Knight. He wrote in 1961: “The book is science fiction, as the opening sentence establishes firmly.” I don’t even believe that Heinlein didn’t consider it sf. I’d like to see the cite and the context for it.
This is just silly and multiple people have already corrected you. I’ll go further. The Grand Master names aren’t a listing of who has hit the most homers; it’s not objective in any way. It’s a list of admired people recognized by the people that they have affected. As with any list of admired people there are idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies but you can’t attack it from the angle you’re doing.
Andy L gave the list. Heinlein was still an active writer, but he had never won the Nebula and it was obvious he never would. They still gave him the first award because that’s how he was considered. Jack Williamson was beloved by everybody and he got the second, even though he had never been nominated for a Nebula. (Literally nobody forecasted that he would win one 26 years later!) Clifford Simak. Was nominated and would win one just three years later. A fine but mid-level writer. But everybody loved him. L. Sprague de Camp. No nominations. And wait. Isn’t he really a fantasy writer? How much of his large pile of fiction would you call “real” science fiction? And he got the award a decade before Bradbury. Then there’s A. E. van Vogt. Did he write “real” science fiction? Some would argue that placing any of his work next to the label “real” was oxymoronic. Damon Knight hated him. Damon got his Grand Master in 1995. (Can anyone name a major story he wrote?) A group led by Harlan Ellison campaigned to get an old and ill van Vogt a Grand Master before he died. They succeeded the year after Damon got his. Remarkable coincidence. And so on.
People. Recognized by people. “Indisputable sf chops” is a personal opinion, and it should be obvious that for the bulk of its four decades of existence that other factors loom much larger. No one person gets to veto names forever, not even Damon Knight the grand exalted founder of SFWA. No one person’s tastes will be in alignment over 30 names. And “real” sf is what people mean when they point to sf. You can’t calibrate it, put a metric on it, or refine its essence in a lab.
Bradbury was one of the peak greats, even though his later work didn’t live up to that peak. Yep, like Delany. I will defend him as being indispensable to what I think of as science fiction. More than Simak and de Camp and van Vogt and Knight and Blish combined.
There’s idiosyncratic and there’s indefensible. I think you’re climbed the fence on that.
Damon Knight had the good fortune to write a story that became hugely famous inside and outside the genre - he’ll be remembered for “To Serve Man” even though that’s not particularly representative of his work.
Yeah, Damon’s strengths are obviously that he was a major editor, critic, and founder of Milford, Clarion, and SFWA much more than his writing skills.
But I’ve always particularly hated “To Serve Man.” The story requires that an English pun be identical in an alien language. It’s basically a Feghoot. (Look it up, newbies.) It’s like Chuck Berry’s only number one hit being “My Ding a Ling.” That it’s so popular is a sad commentary on the field, in my idiosyncratic opinion.
The third part of your opening sentence is correct, the first part is wrong and the middle passage is only conditionally correct. Heinlein wrote *Stranger *as a flat-out satire for a mainstream publisher and audience; he describes the completed manuscript as a “fairy tale” and a “Cabellesque satire on religion and sex.” (Grumbles from the Grave, p.264) It is a keystone of his strenuous effort to move away from sf and pulps that went on from 1947 until the era where he was free of editorial and publishing constraints (for good or bad - I won’t argue) around 1972. It ended up in the hand of SFBC because no one else would take it, and that imprint is about all that makes it “sf.” (It also sold dismally, even to the sf market, until the hippies discovered it - science fiction buyer/readers had nothing to do with its success.)
Yes, goodness, it has a Martian in it. Do tell. VMS could have been raised by mystic Arabs or Gypsies that taught him his powers and it would not change the story one whit - he is a “Martian” because of the trope about the way a “man from Mars” would see our culture; Heinlein carried the trope right over the threshold rather than mask it.
I assure you the point is beyond argument in current Heinlein studies. I accept that the general sweep of sf fans might not have gotten the message.
I can’t make sense of your next few paragraphs because they don’t really seem to be addressing anything I said. I admire Bradbury’s work extravagantly. If I were to weed the works I dislike out of each of my favorite authors’ collections, I think more of his would remain intact than any other (any prolific writer, at least). I’m not dissing down on him, or his ability, or how highly-regarded he was/is.
I just purely and simply do not think he was entitled to the pinnacle science fiction award to go with his heavy shelf of other pinnacle awards, especially when he failed to ever win a fan- or peer-based sf award for any one work. I do not believe he stood in the same line with the other recipients - and take that as a recognition that he stood in a better one, if you like. If Bradbury qualifies for a GM Nebula, then there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of writers equally worthy who are in no way considered part of the sf genre.
Wait, since when does anyone accept the author’s word for anything?
Just to keep things straight, I have the first edition hardback of Grumbles from the Grave, which discusses Stranger on pp. 222-234. (Your quote is on p. 228.) You blithely skipped over a few statements, like “I believe I have dreamed up a really new S-F idea” on p, 223 or “However, I have no desire to write “mainstream” stories,” on p. 227 and that on p. 238 he was very pleased that Jack Williamson was teaching it in his science fiction course.
If current Heinlein studies put the book in fantasy as you imply, so much for current Heinlein studies. I assure you that in the greater scheme of current science fiction studies, the issue of whether a book has to be “hard” science fiction to be science fiction was kicked out on its ear decades ago.
As for the rest of your comments on Bradbury, we have to agree to disagree - with the understanding that I consider your arguments not even wrong.
That’s not what I said, although the reference might not have been clear. What is undisputed is that *Stranger *was intended to be a mainstream novel having nothing to do with a science fiction publisher, market or readers. Had Heinlein shed that last conceit and made the “Man from Mars” the product of Indian mystics or some such, there would be no remaining question.
I will be the last to argue that a lack of ray guns and rocket ships means a work isn’t sf. But *Stranger *was determinedly NOT sf until publishing circumstances and initial promotion cemented it into that box. I still see it as no more stfnal than any 50 out of 100 current non-genre novels with faintly sf-ish inclusions. And yes, I will take Heinlein’s word on that. (Grumbles is not the only word on the subject.)
I guess I’m the only one who doesn’t keep track of authors all that much and thought this was going to be about chess. I even had a derp moment when I saw the lists and initially thought, “Wow, a lot of famous authors are good at chess!” before figuring it out. :smack:
At the risk of being whooshed, I’ll note that Bradbury wrote about robots and time machines and interplanetary colonization, and we don’t call Shakespeare a science fiction writer because he, y’know, didn’t. Shakespeare wrote about mundanely framing someone for adultery to provoke a homicide; Bradbury was anticipating the holodeck when coming up with a fun new way to kill people.
Now, one could of course argue that the Three Witches are basically just Bradbury’s telepathic aliens. And one could argue that a ghost tasking Hamlet with an important mission is really no different than a clever engineer convincing mankind to engage in interstellar travel. But, well, one would be wrong.
A lot of rather borderline material gets nominated and doesn’t necessarily confirm it as sf-sf over sf-fantasy or sf-mainstream.