In article <01BD0A38.E9437340@>, Dave Barlow <Dave.Barlow@> wrote:
Simon said :-
In article <01BD0A25.4D424BA0@>, Dave Barlow <Dave.Barlow@> wrote:
[...]
"Footfall" was quite recent, no? Or "The Moat Around Murcheson's Eye"?
Footfall was published in 1985. Moat (Mote) around Murchenson's Eye is
cetainly recent but only follows on from his earlier work. I recently got
[...]
Or Greg Bear's "The Forge of God"?
Written 1987, Bear seems to have a book a year published since 1990, not
[...]
Or I could mention Joe Haldeman: the Worlds triology; "The Forever War"
[...]
Don't know The Worlds series, the Forever War is brilliant and is over 20
years old.
I could even open a can of worms and mention that whole William Gibson
thing.
Gibson is old news, Neuromancer and it's sequel where written between
1984-1988. I notice there was a new book published by Gibson in 1996,
hardly a huge output of fiction though.
Or are you talking about more recent stuff than that?
Yes! I mean in the last, oh, about 5-8 years.
Oh. I tend to think of "new SF authors" as anyone younger than, say, Wells,
Verne, Wyndham, Asimov, Clarke, Anderson, Heinlein et al. I guess this
reflects the fact that my peak SF-reading years were about age 10 to 12: in
other words sometime around the mid '70's.
If you are looking at the 1990's ... I dunno. I tend to read my SF based on
recommendation - and if there isn't anything out there to recommend, it
would explain why I haven't seen it, I guess.
Asimov edited a collection of SF short stories called "Before the Golden
Age", which he considered to be stuff that predated the peak of the genre.
He considers SF's "vintage years" to be the early 1950's - which is strange,
because I would have thought of them as about 1965-1975. This could be a
phenomenom based on the calendar year in which one first started to read SF.
In other words, something about "modern" SF not matching up to the initial
impressions left over from when it was all new. But yes, it does seem to me
that the "F&SF" genre is now heavily biased to the "F" end.
Another cause of this may be that modern readers expect some human interest,
and the combination of human experience and scientific background necessary
to write good SF is probably quite rare. "The Forever War", for instance,
is a Vietnam novel, and borne out of Haldeman's experiences of being the
only survivor of his squad (read "Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds" for an
excellent essay that explains all this.) Reading the potted histories on
the back of SF books seems to suggest that the ones who live "interesting"
lives are the ones who write the best material. (Harry Harrison and Terry
Pratchett come to mind, as does the late Heinlein.) The problem is finding
those that have a good enough science background to write plausible SF,
rather than retreating into the Fantasy realm.
All in my oh-so-humble opinion, of course.
[...]
So I stand by my original statement, there is little new SF anymore. It's
all films and made for TV stuff.
Of course. They follow the money. But at least someone like Harlan Ellison
is actually helping them get the science on B5 mostly believeable. And
things like B5 are now reaching a much wider audience.
Dave "feeling a RWAV article coming on" Barlow
I shall look forward to reading it.
Simon
---
"This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind" -Ecclesiastes 4:16
simon@ | Not affiliated to any religion
simon@ | Not affiliated to any politics
H (+44/0)1784 431998 | Not affiliated to any ideology
W (+44/0)1784 434568 (GMT/BST) | What does that make me?
"I have been asked to point out, as if you couldn't guess, that my rantings
are not the opinions of One Chip Solutions. So now you know, don't you..?"
