John Norman
[sub]maybe I should be over in the fetish thread[/sub]
I like one of the worst, Jules Verne
I say worst, because if you’ve ever read “Journey To The Center of The Earth” without laughing at the “science”, you must have been 10 at the time.
Now, now Cal, I took pains to mention that I wasn’t placing Bixby in the same category as the others. I don’t think his stuff is bad at all, but I do consider it run-of-the-mill, with an occasional standout.
I probably should have started a second thread called “Your Favorite Average SF Writer,” so as not to have Bixby’s name near that of Longyear.
For the record, I also enjoy the rather average (with occasional standout) work of your own creator, Raymond F. Jones. For non-SF fans who don’t know what I mean, they can look it up, eh?
Sir
**
I realize this is not a debate thread. But I have just finished reading Journey to The Center of the Earth (well okay, I’ve got a chapter left, but it’s all over but the shouting) and can’t let this go unchallenged. I have been quite impressed with the science therein. It was written in 1871, mind you, but it is still clear from the text that
-
Verne knew a hell of a lot about geology. He describes vulcanism in expert detail, and his characters identify the strata they pass through in their descent in great detail.
-
He writes about the crust of the Earth being plastic and constantly renewing itself. How he picked this up, decades before plate tectonics were the order of the day, is utterly mystifying to me.
-
He was well-schooled in the contemporary fossil record.
-
He hints at an understanding of evolution, merely twelve years after the publication of The Origin of Species.
-
This isn’t strictly about science, but his description of Iceland and its culture is so meticulous you’d think he’d visited there himself (as perhaps he did; I don’t know his biography).
Verne clearly did his homework, whether or not you think his books are great fiction. Or maybe you’re referring to all the “bad science” implied by a luminous world of mammoths and sea monsters deep below the surface of the Earth? Well, then please look up the terms “science fiction” and “suspension of disbelief” and then get back to us. We’ll be here.
(Edited to fix coding)
[Edited by TVeblen on 04-09-2001 at 10:09 PM]
I said I liked him. He’s my favorite.
The fiction was good. The science wasn’t convincing at all.
One simple example is that he treated the exercise like an expedition up a mountain, not a few thousand times farther.
A lake at the center. Fine for fantasy, not something any modern SF writer would do.
Try to get into the spirit of the topic, please, this is not a debate it’s IMHO.
IANAModerator, but…
I posted this for fun, In the grand scheme of things it’s less than zero. CalMeacham earlier disagreed with me, and took me to task in a humorous manner. I explained my position, and I hope Cal and I are good Sci-Fi buddies.
I don’t want this thread to deteriorate into mean-spiritedness. Fiver you disagree with Ma Parrot. That’s fine and good, however, I really do think we could have done without the last paragraph, your pointing out the definition of “science fiction,” asking her to get back with us, whatever. I truly enjoyed your rebuttal until then.
FWIW, I think Jules Verne is a GIANT, one whose work still thrills, entertains, and enlightens me, and exactly not what I was looking for in my definition of “bad.”
Again, I’m not a mod, nor do I play one on TV.
Sir Rhosis
And to reply to an earlier post, Eando Binder was the pseudonym of Earl and Otto Binder. I have a late 60s/early 70s collection of the Adam Link stories. They are bad in that great way.
As a matter of fact, if you’ve read this far in the thread, substitute the word CHEESY for BAD in my thread title.
Sir
Here’s where we disagree.
Verne was using the best science of his day. In the 1870s, The Hollow Earth was still an accepted (if fringe) scientific theory. I don’t think that Science Fiction stops being Science Fiction simply because the real world overtakes it.
Case in point: Larry Niven, a Science Fiction writer by anyone’s definition wrote a brilliant little story in the mid '60s called “The Coldest Place”. He used bleeding-edge, up-to-the-minute science for the “gimmick” of the story. Within about two weeks of it being published, the gimmick was disproven conclusively. (I’m not going to say what the gimmick was so as not to spoil the story for those who haven’r read it.) As far as I’m concerned, “The Coldest Place” is still Science Fiction despite the fact that the science became wrong after the fact.
Fenris
Heinlein. Had some terrific early work, and a tremendous influence on the genre, but in later years pretty much melted down into a dirty old man with no interesting ideas. (And I’m poly friendly, but still find his later work pathetic.)
I apologize to Ma Parrot for the last paragraph in my earlier post. It was late and I was tired, but that’s no excuse.
I stand by my contention that the science in Verne’s works is the last thing anyone should criticize him for.
Muffin, I don’t understand what you’re saying about Heinlein. When did he write about parrots?
I haven’t read much Heinlein myself, but I submit his novel Glory Road as a perfect example of what this thread’s about. Utterly unimportant, but also utterly fun.
All of you seem to be stuck in your teens.
Most of those writers don’t even appear in the adult
sections of the library.
I take gentle exception to Muffin’s characterization of later Heinlein. Yes, I know there is a widely popular Politically Correct view that snubs his later work because it consists more of intelligent discussion of issues than space opera action.
Nonetheless, I value it highly as well. (Yes, even “The Number of the Beast,” his talkiest) And for my bucks, “Friday” has as much action as the early stuff and “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” is a triumph of pure storytelling.
YMMV
Poly as in polyamorous. See http://www.polyamory.org or visit alt.polyamory .
Like I said, I’m poly friendly (my preference actually). I also have no touble accepting his position on parent-adult child incest and adult sibling-adult sibling incest, although it is not of interest to me. Thus the politically correct dismissal of Heinlein is not a factor for me. I’m not into the libertarian or patriarchial aspects at all, but can enjoy reading in the area, just as I can enjoy westerns. The thing is, once you take away the shock value of Heinlein, there really is not much meat to his later works. Even the frequent continuation of characters often becomes repetition of pasteboard, rather than exended development.
Be it extended familial nesting and open sexuality, or patriacharial libertarianism, Heinlein’s ideas in the 60s within a space opera background made for great reading. Now I find little fresh coming from him. In short, I find that he has shifted from a cutting critic to a crotchety old man.
I still read his new material, but more out of hope that I will find reflections of his past, rather than out of expectation that I will find something new.
It’s got to the point that when I see something on the shelf at the bookstore by Heinlein, I wait until the library picks it up, and I move on to put my cash down for other authors who are still in their prime. But when the library obtains it, then yes, I certainly do read it, for more often than not it will be a fun read, though unfortunately not a deep read.
Muffin, I suspect you know this, but…just in case…you do know that Heinlein’s dead 
don’t you? (It wasn’t clear from my reading of your post.
Anyway, I understand your objections to later Heinlein, and you’ve articulated them very well (as opposed to the standard “Late Heinlein Sux!”).
Where do you draw the line for late Heinlein? I’d draw it between Time Enough For Love and I Will Fear No Evil.
If you haven’t read all of Heinlein’s later stuff, you might enjoy Job:A Comedy of Justice and, depending on your tastes and familiarity with the Future History short stories (collected in The Past Through Tomorrow), I’d also recommend To Sail Beyond the Sunset (which is Lazerus’s mom’s perspective as she lives through most of the events in his Future History short stories. Seeing some of the events through her eyes is interesting. And the first half of the book gives a facinating portrait of life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Heinlein lived through it, and for me, really captured the flavor, as Ingalls-Wilder did about an earlier period of the the 19th century.) To Sail… for all it’s flaws is still one of my favorite Heinlein books, just for the first half.
heh…I’ve just come up with a new law (like Godwin’s Law or Gaudere’s Law.) Fenris’s Law: Any discussion of Science-Fiction will inevitably end up discussing Heinlein.
Fenris
Sir Rhosis, you are a gentleman and a scholar, and I’m glad you took it in the spirit I intended.
I agree with you on Verne. I have an extensive collection of Verne (who is in the Adult section of the library), whose books are difficult to get hold of. It’s a shame, because his books are far better and cover a broader range than most people realize. The man was the Stephen King of his day, with best sellers coming out practically every year. Most have been translated into English, and even published in paperback. But try and find them. Even worse, until the 1960s most of these translations were appallingly bad, and cut out up to 1/3 of the original! Read (if you can find them) ** The Annotated 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ** and ** The Annotated From the Earth to the Moon**, both annotated by Walter James Miller, who has recently published his own translation of 20,000 Leagues.
Jack Chalker is one of my guilty pleasures, I have to admit, and I have just about every one of his books except for the most recent few. His books are fantasy mind candy, more than SF, but he does manage to ask a few good questions. And when he writes straight history (he used to be a history teacher), as he occasionally does in the midst of his fantasy, his stuff can be VERY good.
A while ago in an earlier post I listed some truly bas SF. I wouldn’t call them my favorites, because I wouldn’t really want to read them again. Besides ** Galaxy 666** they were ** The Null Frequency Impulser ** (I forget the author) and ** Cataclysm!** by Don Pendleton. Awful stuff.
I hate these threads. I always find out somebody hates some of my favorite stuff. I liked Enemy Mine, but maybe that’s just because I saw the movie first. The novella had a dumb ending, though.
A friend of mine is obsessed with Doc Savage. I read a couple, just to humor her, and found them somewhat amusing, purely due to their outrageousness and datedness. Everything is just totally over the top–including the noble savages and mix-breed laborers and Irish cops. If you want bad prose, bad pacing, bad characterization, and bad plot, you can’t go wrong with ol’ Doc, epitome of pulp.
I mildly dislike Michael Crichton. I do not understand why he’s such a popular mainstream writer. His characters are 2-dimensional, and his dialog is unbelievable–I just can’t picture two human beings delivering the words he puts in their mouths. Clearly his work is idea-driven, but, in many cases, the ideas just don’t prop up the novel.
I read about five books of Hubbard’s Mission Earth series when I was, like, 14. I thought they were pretty funny at the time, until they started to get really repetitive. Luckily, they weren’t good enough to seduce me. If Heinlein started a religion, I’d be screwed. C.A.W. doesn’t count.
I believe '88 was the last authenticated sighting. That’s as much as I’ll commit to.
Seriously, he pumped out so much (particularly short stories), that I’m still coming across collections and even novels of which I had never previously heard.
I don’t know. I’d suggest that the successful period ended with the sixies (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress being the last of the early works). Then for a while not much seemed to happen as far as novel go. But just when I would be willing to write him off, boom, up popped Time Enough for Love in the early or mid 70s, which I would suggest was his pinacle. Following that there was not too much of signifigance for perhaps a decade, and even then it was more experimental (or at least the short fiction was).
I Will Fear No Evil did absolutely nothing for me. Zippo. Nadda. It is one of the reasons I would have shut him down after The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but then out he came with Time Enough for Love, which in my opinion took the best of his space opera format, his not-yet stale ideas, and relatively deep characterization (for Heinlein that is), and rolled them up into a masterful work. It is this work, and this work alone, that holds me back from saying the dividing line came prior to the end of the 60s.
I guess I have to say I believe that there was a dead period in the 70s, with the stellar exception of Time Enough for Love, and that when he got back into form in the 80s, the material had changed so significantly that it pretty much lost me. I don’t think the change was for the best, but that’s just my opinion.
Sorry, but Job did not do much for me, though I realize that a lot of people loved it. Maybe I’ll take another stab at it someday. I did enjoy To Sail Beyond the Sunset, although the American pioneer mythology/attitude was a bit much for me at times – but then it is a central theme for Heinlein, in space opera mode or down home on the farm, so I should not complain. It just seemed a bit hurky-jerky to me at times, but overall was quite touching. Sortta sad in as much as it looked at a lost time through which the actual Heinlein lived, but then he left us shortly after the novel.
Norman Spinrad is an acclaimed SF writer and author of The Iron Dream, which recently I was finally able to get a secondhand copy of. It contains a novel within a novel which may be the best deliberatly bad SF story ever written. It’s Lord of the Swastika by… Adolph Hitler. Lord of the Swastika is the 1955 Hugo Award winner in an alternate world in which Hitler emigrated to America after WWI, and became a science fiction writer.
This novel is unbelievably bad. Perhaps one brief paragraph in the first chapter can give you an idea:
“Feric Jaggar looked every inch the genotypically pure human that in fact was. It was all that made such prolonged close confinement with the dregs of Borgravia bearable: the quasi-men could not help but recognise his genetic purity. The sight of Feric put mutants and mongrels in their place, and for the most part they kept to it.”
The thing about “The Iron Dream” for me is this–Spinrad did his job too well. He wrote such a good awful book that I can never finish the thing. And there’s just a part of me that is disgusted with the fantasy of Hitler as a hack writer. I love the image that Ellison and everyone else cooks up about their starving poverty-filled days writing ten-thousand word novelettes over the course of one fevered night to make a few buck to pay the rent and buy a molded loaf of bread to subsist on. That’s the image of the hack writer I want, not Hitler.
Nothing really connected to my original OP, but I have always harbored a fantasy of entering one of those “bad Hemingway” contests–the sad part is, I know I’m not good enough to write bad enough to even place.
Sir
And Podkayne, I too “like” Longyear, that’s the point I’m making. The guys I mention have it going for them in their ability to write entertainingly, they just are “godawful,” or “cheesy,” or whatever. But they deliver in one sense of the word. “Guilty pleasures,” as Cal puts it. Guys like Hubbard and the guy who wrote the “Pleistocene” book that RealityChuck once linked too are just bad in a totally non-entertaining way.
And while we’re here, a slight hijack. How is “Podkayne” pronounced, i. e. Pod-kane or kay-ne? I’ve always assumed the former, but was never one hundred percent sure.
[Snoring noise]Ngngngngng…[/Snoring noise]
Wha? Oh, geez, was I snoring again? Sorry.
That was Spinrad?!
I’ve never read Mein Kampf. Was it that heavy-handed and obtuse? Holy shit: A quick Google search indicates that, yes, it certainly is. Who the hell reads the whole damn thing?
I’m gonna go with your guess that the tone was deliberate. Otherwise, I’d lose all respect for the author. Well, okay, not all respect, just respect about this story. I like Spinrad, after all, and this wouldn’t be enough to change my opinion. And Spinrad is too good for this to be accidental. 
I gotta get me a copy of that book. I could use it for nights when I can’t get to sleep.
Jeyen