(no subject)

[coyotegoth]

A great many people have- quite rightfully- been expressing afresh their problems with Robert Heinlein in the wake of the publishing of the Patterson bio. The infamous letter to FM Busby in which he expresses some rather unguarded feelings toward black people; the extremely harsh tactics he used in attempting to suppress/prevent Alexei Panshin critical examination of his work; the perennial queasiness of the incest theme that runs so strongly in his work... there is, indeed, a great deal to criticize. For my part, I'm glad I came to Heinlein relatively late; that heavily publicized (and heavily problematic) late books such as The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and Job: A Comedy of Justice kept me away until my roommate, in my last year of college, shoved a copy of The Past Through Tomorrow at me. When I first read Heinlein, it was with eyes slightly less impressionable than those of many; it may be that this made me slightly less appalled by his questionable side, simply because I never idolized him quite as much.

In some ways, what's happened to Larry Niven has bothered me more: on a strictly creative level, there's the fact that a writer whose early work showed a dancer's grace with exposition, an urge for playfulness (even the Brennan monster played with his gravity toys), and a joy in the sheer creative process that helped me see how much *fun* building a universe could be. Sure, some of the science is on the hand-wavey side- as could fairly be said of Wells, or Verne (I still remember a colleague of my father's at the math department calculating that the cannon-shot astronauts in From the Earth to the Moon would be pulling about ten *thousand* G's at blastoff- yikes!)- but the stories themselves remained strong... until they didn't. The Burning City- hell, pretty much *anything* after Dream Park- the playfulness and wit had been replaced with sodden, tendentious, endless masses of sodden text, with no joy for the reader whatsoever. Even worse are the OH LARRY NIVEN NO moments such as this. I don't know; I guess I'll just sit down with some Sturgeon, or Delany, or Le Guin, or Ford, and remind myself what science fiction can be.

Comments

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I hate this whole trend of thinking that people who wrote 50 years ago and reflected the cultural mores of their time should somehow have anticipated the cultural realities of the present day. I recently reread Stranger in a Strange Land. There is much to loathe about that book from a woman's point of view. But, you know, it is what it is. And it's an entertaining narrative to read.

My favorite science fiction writers are Cordwainer Smith, Henry Kuttner, C.L.Moore, Connie Willis, Fritz Leiber and William Gibson. Vintage Season is probably my favorite story ever. Oh yeah -- and I majored in Economics at UC Berkeley because they didn't offer Psycho-history. :-)

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

Holy crap. Niven was my first SF love. I devoured the Known Space series. I always knew he was an elitist, but fuuucckk...

He;s been unreadable for over a decade. Even for a devoted fan like me.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

(Sorry, that was me.) It breaks my heart sometimes to revisit old favorites: Clarke's plots are often sketchy (we won't discuss the post- 2010 writing); Asimov's prose...well, it's not the equal of his ideas. Rather comfortingly, though, Fred Pohl remains solid.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I loved DREAM PARK! (Being myself a dungeon master at the time, didn't hurt.)

I gave up after OATH OF FEALTY, which by my standards wasn't even SF. Some token future stuff, but the story was watered down to soap opera best-seller standards, like anything you'd get from Arthur Haley. Which apparently was in the plan when Niven started co-authoring, as later he said "our advances keep going up and up."

[agentanderson.livejournal.com]

I liked Niven well enough but was never that fannish for it. Similarly, for Heinlein, I went straight from 'Starship Troopers' to 'Cat Who Walked Through Walls' so I never had any illusions that he was a good human being. Guess I can just go back to Charles Stross who, in his old age, has gone from telling us that we'll be eaten by Cthulhu, to telling us that Cthulhu is really climate change and 10 Downing Street is R'lyeh.