ONE of the oldest, I would agree. Though some of the “New Wave” SF writing of the 60s & 70s is starting to feel a bit dated nowdays, wouldn’t you think?
The “new wave” is not so new anymore.
Very true. Like ‘New Wave’ in music just after the punk era. Every revolution has a backlash depicting itself as taking the New Ideas but melding the best of them with the old traditions.
Not necessarily a bad thing, of course.
Not at all. Hersey’s Hiroshima made the effects of the bomb well known indeed, and if you read the many sf stories from that time about a final war you’ll see the effects were well understood. I was born about then, and I can assure you that even if I didn’t know the technical details of the impact of the bomb, I sure knew not to go into radioactive zones.
Bradbury was not one to let scientific accuracy get in the way of poetic truth. He probably did better that way.
People are weird. I remember how shocked I was to learn that most of the survivors of Shackelton’s expedition, after surviving 2 years on the ice, enlisted to fight in WW1.
Once you know you’re immortal, why not? The Somme sounds like paradise compared to what they’d just endured.
Besides, being a red-shirt on Shackleton’s expedition didn’t pay very well. They needed work and the Army was hiring.
Either a sort of Fantasy or Speculative Fiction is closer. Not really Science Fiction. What bugged the hell out of me is that is school, Bradbury was always the example given for reading 'science fiction" altho it really isnt. For example Fahrenheit 451- often required reading and not a bad story- but NOT Science Fiction- altho closer than many Martian stories.
Bradbury himself said
Bradbury was once described as a “Midwest surrealist” and is often labeled a science-fiction writer. He resisted that categorization, however, defining science fiction as “the art of the possible.”[37][38]
First of all, I don’t write science fiction. I’ve only done one science fiction book and that’s Fahrenheit 451, based on reality. Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it’s fantasy. It couldn’t happen, you see? That’s the reason it’s going to be around a long time—because it’s a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.[39]
Interesting point.
Yes, as I said: English teachers loved him. Because, I guess, his language was so ‘poetic’ as opposed to those other clunky writers like Asimov who didn’t use an adjective or adverb in every phrase and just told the story.
There IS a place for poetic science fantasy: Cordwainer Smith is unparalleled. His work has a flavor unlike anything else, IMHO. But it’s a different place.
When I was buying his books in the late 1960s-early 1970s the covers read “The Dean of Science Fiction”, which isn’t really true. Besides, Heinlein’s paperbacks called HIM the “Dean of Science Fiction”.
I mean, science fiction literature is literature, just like any other genre. It needs to be well-written - it doesn’t get to be graded on a curve because the writer happens to know physics. Prose, characters, themes, story: these things are perquisites, not bonuses.
I guess that’s why New Wave has always been my jam. The only pre-1963 writer I can still bear to read is Jack Vance, who was never really one of them (although this thread is making me want to look into Cordwainer Smith, too).
But Martin replaced Bradbury with Bester - a wonderful writer, but hardly a hard-sf guy. He was more proto-New-Wave than nostalgic Bradbury ever was. Martin just has his preferences, no more based on principles than anyone else’s (except for me - my preferences are purely objective!)
The local public middle school goes straight from Steinbeck to Bradbury. I sort of wonder if they’re trying to drive up the teen suicide rate.
And yes, I know that not all of Bradbury is depressing, but the ones they picked for school reading sure are, and when Bradbury does depressing, he really does it.
Wait, didn’t he say “Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein”? In the original Latin-American Spanish at least, I seem to remember him saying that.
IMHO the way literature is taught in schools (the world over it seems) it’s wrong wrong wrong.
You take a barely literate child and force feed him Bradbury, Steinbeck, Garcia Marquez, Borges, etc… when they should be reading Harry Potter or Dungeon Crawler Carl, things that are easy to read so they get hooked on reading, then you can start them on more difficult works.
The way it’s currently done children are convinced at an early age that reading is a boring, difficult chore.
Nope - Asimov, Bester, Clarke - whom he calls the A, B, Cs of science fiction - which leads to the question about Ray
I’ve always thought so.
Yeah, we didn’t do Bradbury but had far too much exposure to Steinbeck’s worst exercises in depression. Literature in grade school was a pretty mixed bag for me. On the one To Kill a Mockingbird was a little grim but captivating - an excellent book for HS students to get exposure to. On the other I never saw the point of forcing me to slog through Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Also Thomas “It-Can-Always-Get-Worse” Hardy can fuck right off.
They made us read Crime and Punishment, the Stranger and 1984 in the same year in high school. It’s a wonder any of us survived.
Yeah, To Kill a Mockingbird is the greatest work of American literature, and should definitely be taught in schools.
Thankfully I never had to read Milton or Hardy, but I did have to read Hemmingway.
I rewatched the latin-american version, in it Martin says “Asimov!, Master! (not Bester), Clarke!”, so probably a mistake by the voice actors or a translator that did not know about Alfred Bester.
And nothing about an “ABC” either.
I must have mentally replaced “Master” with Heinlein in the years since I saw that episode.