(urth) Book of the New Sun won the contest!
Lane Haygood
lhaygood at gmail.com
Tue Aug 2 16:33:03 PDT 2011
I've read Harry Potter. Entertaining pop stuff. Well-crafted, but LeGuin's work is transcendent. Even her Earthsea novels (which are pale shadows of her SF) are better than Rowling on her best day.
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On Aug 2, 2011, at 6:01 PM, Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
>
>
> [women SF writers of the 70s feeling dated]
>
>> A whole lot of 70s SF feels dated, from the artistic efforts of Samuel Delany
>> on down, in the same way modernism seems a bit musty lately, or those socially
>> conscious novels of the late 19th and early 20th century that are many things,
>> but are probably not artistic in the final analysis.
>>
>> I don't know, I always felt like the previously mentioned Atwood was not doing
>> exciting things in the way that more mainstream female writers like Flannery
>> O'Connor or Acker or even Byatt were, I felt like I'd read 1984 and other
>> similar dystopian stuff over and over and over before when I read some of her
>> stuff, or LeGuin's for that matter, so tired of that weak lowest common
>> denominator left slanting. Their SF in general IS too closely tied to a
>> didactic, pragmatic, realistic purpose, instead of the quite possibly teenage
>> boy aimed wow rocket ships explosions impossible science human villains cool
>> plot twist kind of stuff men seem to write in SF ... .
>>
>
> I'd say a lot of the most admired male authors before the 70s--Heinlein, Asimov,
> Van Vogt (who I don't like), Anderson, Bradbury, Pohl, Kornbluth--were extremely
> didactic, with pragmatic, realistic purposes. Clarke might be an exception.
> And I don't think women writers had or have any kind of monopoly on weak
> lowest-common-denominator left, right, or libertarian slanting (though this does
> bring up Ayn Rand...), certainly not considering the shoot-em-ups that you
> rightly note are aimed at teenage boys.
>
>> I think there is a better case for quality fantasy female authors than actual
>> SF for some reason (Hobb, Tanith lee, Susanah Clark, some of the gothic
>> (southern or otherwise) stuff, etc).
>>
>
> And, of course, Le Guin, author of the best YA fantasy ever (and I say this
> without having read Harry Potter).
>
> Lee's Flat Earth books are one of my guilty pleasures.
>
>> but some of the works that were selected seem like they are just recent and in
>> people's memories now, something that is not true of New Sun, which I would
>> like to think deserved to win.
>
> I'll go along with that, unsurprisingly.
>
> Jerry Friedman
>
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