The Evolution of Science Fiction discussion
Non-Fiction
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Nonfiction books
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson is one of the funniest book of memoirs I have ever read. I loved his perspective on the 50s.
Science fiction is based on science, all of which is non-fiction. It is not based on Future Shock, all of which is 1970s discredited fantasy and megalomania..
Mod
SF is fiction, so it is based on whatever the heck the author wants to base it on. ESP, and faster-than-light travel are common, purely fictional tropes.
Rosemarie wrote: "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson is one of the funniest book of memoirs I have ever read. I loved his perspective on the 50s."I'll have to add this to my TBR pile. Thanks. Bryson is a good writer & I enjoyed A Walk in the Woods.
Dan wrote: "Science fiction is based on science, all of which is non-fiction. It is not based on Future Shock, all of which is 1970s discredited fantasy and megalomania.."
Megalomania? Could you explain that?
I know Future Shock got a lot wrong in the last parts, but I wasn't surprised or disappointed. Futurists rarely get much right. Still, the first section in which he discusses our accelerating tech, was excellent & correct. It is an influential theme that is used in a lot of SF novels. Brunner's The Shockwave Rider got the title from it. Haldeman's The Forever War uses the concept, possibly even the term, with respect to time dilation.
As for SF being based on science, I agree with Ed. Some argue that a lot of SF is fantasy due to FTL & ESP. It's a tough line to define in many cases, especially considering Clarke's Third Law. Look at what Zelazny did with Creatures of Light and Darkness, Lord of Light, or Lord Demon.
Well, I'd explain it to you if I were confident you would be able to read this message in the underwater city you live in. Maybe your teenager can download it on her household spaceship computer when she flies on over here to New Atlantis to buy the newest set of paper clothes so in fashion these days. Our planet's population increase I can agree is unsustainable in the long run, still it's not doubling every eleven years as Toffler predicted. Etc., etc. The Tofflers remain mired in 1970s concerns and had no following after the 1970s except among their niche, Chicken Little cult, a true believer of which I have apparently offended.As for SF being based on science, it is. That's why one of the two words that comprise the genre is "science". Einstein isn't the be-all, end-all of physics. Plenty of scientists believe FTL travel will one day be possible. ESP is today less believed in, but "good science" has never been a criteria for defining science fiction. If it were, we'd be screwed when trying to figure out what genre Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles really belonged to. So much science fiction of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s featured Martians and Venusians we know can't exist. And that type of science fiction is still being written today (i.e. Old Venus).
Fantasy features hobbits, warlocks, lions living in wardrobes, and well-endowed female barbarians wearing chain mail as they hack up men and maintain good moral values such as chastity, but does not feature invading Martians, time machines, Andre Norton's telepathic felines, invisible men, psychohistorians, the feeling of the force, or green-blooded half-Vulcan logicians. Science fiction does. However scientifically implausible, these last still belong to the genre. I proudly claim them all.
Mod
Satire on the internet is hard.... I'll assume you weren't trying to put-down anyone here.
I concede that FTL travel and ESP are possibly true. Even if they weren't, an author can use whatever far-out ideas they want, whether taken from current science or not. The difference between using far-out ideas in Fantasy or in Sci-Fi depends on whether the author posits them as something that exist only because this is a made-up world, vs something that could exist in the real world even if we can't currently prove it.
I still don't agree with either half of your assertion "Science fiction is based on science, all of which is non-fiction." SciFi is based on any idea the author has, which they propose might be justifiable by current or future science. And lots of science turns out to be fiction. (Canals on Mars, "The Ether", Celestial Spheres....)
Anyway, this discussion is for non-fiction books that have some relation to SF. Future Shock qualifies. You are definitely free to say the ideas in it are non-scientific.
I may likewise argue that the ideas of Ray Kurzweil are non-scientific, verging on religious ideas. Definitely inspired some interesting stories, though.
PS: Not everyone is wearing them, but it just so happens that I was admiring some paper clothes yesterday.
You are correct. I had no intention of making fun of you. What I was making fun of was a few of the many Toffler predictions that haven't panned out. I thought I had read somewhere that Toffler came across as egotistical in his interviews. I went looking (long and hard) for evidence of that on the Internet when you questioned me and could find none whatsoever. In fairness to Mr. Toffler I must retract my megalomania comment in regards to him and say that I really regret having written it. That will teach me to research first rather than rely on what I am now sure is faulty memory.
I continue to disagree with you about science being a necessary part of science fiction in that I believe it is. I can't believe you're seriously trying to challenge that since, again, it's one of the two words that name the genre, the other being "fiction" which you brought this entire thread up to challenge, apparently. It's not only my assertion that it obviously defines the genre, it's Wikipedia's, or even more starkly, part of GoodReads' definition as well:
Wikipedia: "a genre of speculative fiction, typically dealing with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life."
GoodReads: "a broad genre of fiction that often involves speculations based on current or future science or technology."
Is my lack of the word "future" in front of science the problem? I guess I question the accuracy of including the term because not all science fiction's science is necessarily future. For example, in The Time Machine, the machine is contemporary Edwardian. Almost all of Chrichton's science fiction work, for example Jurassic Park, is set contemporarily. I also doubt ESP will ever be treated by science seriously again (as it once was) any more than the study of Venusians can be. So, how can that be "future science"? I'd coin the term "extrapolative science" if the type of science being referred to really needed to be further distinguished at all instead of obvious from context.
Dan, I still don't understand what you meant by "Future Shock" being discredited fantasy & megalomania. The fantasy part I can understand, not the megalomania part. You might try to explain without the sarcasm. That doesn't help.You haven't offended a true believer of Toffler. I really liked the way he framed & presented the past in the first part of the book. I already said I wasn't impressed by his predictions, although it's been too long since I've read it for me to remember them. Futurists are philosophers & they tend to run their theories out into idiocies eventually. That doesn't mean they don't start off with good ideas, though. I like a lot of the early & base works of many philosophers that I believe wound up being full of crap later on.
The definition of SF certainly seems to be a personal one. In another group, a person was celebrating 200th birthday of SF which he said started with the publishing of "Frankenstein". I mentioned Voltaire's "Micromegas", but now that I've listened to some of How Great Science Fiction Works, I've decided it's not worth arguing about. It's too personal. Wolfe makes a great case for "Frankenstein" being the first while mentioning some other stories that predate "Micromegas". His list of books that are or have been considered SF & why is similarly all encompassing & often relies on hair splitting. I'm really enjoying his lecture series since he doesn't insist that he's right.
Jim wrote: "Rosemarie wrote: "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson is one of the funniest book of memoirs I have ever read. I loved his perspective on the 50s."I'l..."
This book is just as good as a Walk in the Woods. We learn more about the friend he took the walk with too.
Jim wrote: "Dan, I still don't understand what you meant by "Future Shock" being discredited fantasy & megalomania. The fantasy part I can understand, not the megalomania part. You might try to explain without sarcasm..."Thanks for the suggestion in your message #10. My time machine took me back in time to write message #9 to correspond.
There is not an ounce of sarcasm in #9. In #9 I also explained (and apologized for) the megalomania remark.
I don't take astrology seriously. In the same vein, futurist literature bores me because it's mostly very flawed people making flawed guesses usually to satisfy personal political, religious, or social agendas. In Toffler's case, social. I am bowing out of the futurist discussion to leave it to those with greater interest in the genre.
I think it silly to say my definition of science fiction is a personal one when the only two I provided are not my own, but quotes from two of the most widely accepted most general sources possible. Are you reading what I write for content at all? Because it looks to me like you're picking an argument over something that is exactly the opposite of what I'm writing just for the sake of having an argument.
I agree that Frankenstein is science fiction. Most science fiction historians state that it can be considered the first. Micromegas is usually considered proto-science fiction. That's because it is missing some key element that would make it true science fiction. You may have another view on the matter. I just know what the consensus view is. I looked into it once a long time ago and agreed with the consensus.
Dan wrote: "JThanks for the suggestion in your message #10. My time machine took me back in time to write message #9 to correspond. "I guess we cross posted. I hadn't seen #9 when I responded to #7. I think I started reading & then got interrupted & forgot to refresh. The cold temps & stray animals are a bit of a chore since the only unfrozen water in the area is what we keep clear for ours. We had visitors last night, a pack of coyotes I had to chase off.
I agree with you on astrology & futurists. I'm either amused or enraged when people talk about how great the predictions were for X depending on the circumstances. I've yet to read a case where they didn't have to waffle a lot & ignore far more incorrect predictions. However, again, that's not why I liked Toffler's book. I liked it for the way he framed the past. It's something Harari does well, too. Their conclusions are an entirely different matter - completely speculative, either good or bad fiction.
Dan, if you listen to lectures or audio books, I'd highly recommend listening to Wolfe's How Great Science Fiction Works. Ed turned me on to it & it's very good. Wolfe is very well read in the field & has plenty of points to ponder with great examples. It hasn't helped me define SF any better, but it is an interesting trip.Definitions of SF seem intensely personal whether shared by others or not & are often contextual. For instance, Wolfe picks a time when science is established, a novel (Frankenstein) using the science of the time is written, & then anything after that which is about the future or has a speck of science in it is SF. Before that, it is fantasy or proto-SF. This is a guy that has made it his life's study & is defining the genre yet he doesn't insist on his definition. He offers another interesting one about writing for the market later on.
That's why I think the science in SF is debatable. If we define it by the science of the time then Verne's moon rocket is SF (Fired out of a canon!) while Wells' isn't really. He simply had some magic metal lift his, not much different than A Voyage to the Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac apparently. (I haven't read Cyrano's novel, I'm using Wolfe's example.) So if we hold to a line that science must be part of science fiction, then Wells would fail to make the cut in several books that are classics of SF. Apparently Verne & Wells both agreed on this point, although Verne said it disparagingly while Wells said he wasn't all that interested in it. He had a different purpose in mind.
Wells was more interested in social commentary, just like many of the 'SF' writers of utopias & distopias both before & after SF became a genre. They use very little science & what is there often isn't up to the standards of the time, just relies on an unknown & unknowable tech. (Unknowable tech = magic, IMO) That seems to be true even to this day. For instance, To Say Nothing of the Dog's time travel isn't really any different than earlier works he references or so he contends. I haven't read it or some of his examples which were a thousand years old or more. Again, the definition seems to depend more on timing than the science of the time.
I do know a lot of SF has little science or very magical science, especially in the early days when it was growing out of other genres. ERB's Barsoom series starts off with A Princess of Mars & it's a western for the first chapter. Westerns were big then & it found a ready audience. It doesn't rise much above that for all the radium, 9th rays, & other magical tech. It's an unabashed fantasy adventure very similar to Almuric. Even the method of interplanetary travel is the same. Most shelve the Barsoom books as SF & Almuric as fantasy, though.
I think SF is more the way the story is framed. ERB uses extremely magical tech, but it's still tech. It's awful with Dejah Thoris laying eggs & astral journeys, but it makes a nod to tech where Almuric just lands Cairn in a fantasy S&S world no different than Conan's.
I just don't feel right putting Mickey Spillane's The Erection Set in with SF, even though an antigravity material is what everyone is after (They don't know that, just that it's worth a lot of money.) since it's primarily a thriller like most of his novels. I came to the conclusion that it's too fine a line for me years ago & primarily shelve my books by fiction, nonfiction, & sort-of-nonfiction in the real world. Here on GR, I can use multiples which makes it much easier.
I agree. There is a lot of room for debate around the edges for what constitutes science fiction and what does not. I think that's how the term speculative fiction became popular at one point. It encompasses all the fictions eliminating the debate. Thanks for mentioning Gary K. Wolfe's book. I was unfamiliar with it.
You're welcome. Speculative fiction is accurate & I should embrace it, but have never used it, although I don't really know why. It certainly encompasses them all far more neatly & even handles alternate histories & time travel better. It's kind of flavorless, I guess. Maybe redundant. What really distinguishes plain old fiction from speculative fiction? Some say fantasy has worlds while SF has planets, the idea being we don't think of a fantasy like The Hobbit as taking place on a planet. That doesn't really cover fantasies like Perelandra or The Worm Ouroboros from SF, though. I've always felt The Martian Chronicles were more of a fantasy than SF, even though it has spaceships in some stories. It's really more of a social statement about the US.
Our discussion & his point brought to mind many books that straddle the line. He mentions Heinlein a lot & one book of his that I have has 2 novellas Waldo and Magic, Inc. "Waldo" is about a guy who has to live in zero gee because he has no muscle. He winds up (view spoiler) who says we're drawing power from another dimension, but he uses chalk drawings to change the channel, IIRC. I guess I'd put it in the SF camp.
"Magic, Inc." has a hardware store owner plagued by a curse through what is basically a Mafia protection racket. Magic is handled on such a mundane level that it almost doesn't feel like a fantasy, at least from this author in this case. It is, though.
Tone seems to have a lot to do with it. Lord of Light is definitely SF, but it reads like a fantasy, especially the end. Zelazny, like Bradbury, detested being pigeon-holed into one or the other & seems to have gone out of his way to blur the lines. Donnerjack takes place in a virtual world that leaks into ours in fantastic ways. This Immortal can be read either way, although I favor the more obvious SF interpretation. Still, reading Conrad as Pan makes a great story, too. The Amber series & Creatures of Light and Darkness are definitely open to interpretation. Isle of the Dead & To Die in Italbar certainly seem like SF except for channeling gods.
Well, I'm not worried about it, but it is interesting to think about. I think books, like the humans that write them, are a little too complex for easy pigeon-holes.
Mod
And I don't. I'll accept the definitions you gave as being good enough, but I'd change the emphasis:
Wikipedia: "a genre of speculative fiction, typically dealing with imaginative concepts such as futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, faster than light travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life."
GoodReads: "a broad genre of fiction that often involves speculations based on current or future science or technology."
..."
I don't really want to get into a debate about definitions. It is interesting to think about, but not to debate. The works with an ambiguous relationship to established forms are often the ones that are the most interesting to me, personally.
I use the term "SF" rather than "Sci Fi" or "Speculative Fiction", and let the "S" be ambiguous. Even the "F" is ambiguous sometimes.
Jim wrote ."Here on GR, I can use multiples which makes it much easier."
Yeah, I like that too. A couple of my recent reads need to be tagged with both "non-fiction" and "novel", although that feels like a contradiction.
Getting back to A Short History of Nearly Everything, one of the chapters deals with categorization of life forms into the genus and species. He says something to the effect that it all looks calm and orderly to the outsider, but to insiders taxonomy is war. There is constant arguing over the definitions. Every plant or animal has at most 2 parents, and we still find it hard to categorize them (though in theory it is possible). (Fungi and bacteria are more complicated.) Every human-created story has 100s or 1000s of inspirations, so the difficulty becomes much larger.
Mod
Ability to publish, and reputation. For the last 200 years or so in the West, most fiction that was not 100% realist was considered beneath serious consideration, suitable only for children. That is really only a recent phenomenon. Older fiction from all cultures doesn't seem to care whether the stories were fully realistic. I'm no scholar on this subject, but I'd suspect that the rise of science and rationality in the western world led to the rejection of non-realist fiction.
Mod
It is from that book that I first learned of Cyrano de Bergerac's A Voyage to the Moon. It was one of several works from that time involving a voyage to the moon. I forget which one of them it was that had people get there by spreading duck fat on their bodies. [correction below] But apparently that was the one closest to sci-fi, because at that time it was perfectly reasonable scientific idea that the moon was attracted to duck fat. How else could ducks migrate there?
Many stories in the 18th century were making fun of scientists for being interested in things that seemed to have no practical value. For example, the Laputans in Gulliver's Travels.
Correction:
I've looked back through my old comments and find this:
In The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin, the trip is made using the power of geese, which habitually migrate there.
In A Voyage to the Moon also know as The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Worlds of the Moon and Sun by Cyrano de Bergerac, the trip is made by rubbing the body with beef marrow! This seems silly now, but was relatively scientific for its time as "it was widely believed that the waning moon sucked the marrow out of animals."
Says Philip Ball:
"While Cyrano did not necessarily consider it a genuinely efficacious way to rise into the heavens, neither is it obvious that he is merely joking. Rather, like the authors of science-fiction narratives today, he wants only to clear a certain threshold of plausibility so that the reader will not just throw the book down in disgust."
Jim wrote: " I'd highly recommend listening to Wolfe's How Great Science Fiction Works. Ed turned me on to it & it's very good. Wolfe is very well ..."I found the audio books of Wolfe's lectures on Hoopla, through my library. There is a television show of it too. I also stumbled across The Future of Utopia and Dystopia by Pamela Bedore. Both of these lecture series have the imprint "The Great Courses"
Ed wrote: "...He says something to the effect that it all looks calm and orderly to the outsider, but to insiders taxonomy is war. There is constant arguing over the definitions..."And just when you think you've got them figured out, they change the system on you. I had no idea there were so many different systems of taxonomy nor that there were arguments about which one to use for what. I've noticed on Wikipedia that while animals are still using the one I learned (with a few additions like domains, infra, & sub categories) some plants are now in 'clades' rather than phylum & class, I think. I haven't really figured it out yet.
I've been struggling to remember & pronounce the names for years & now this. Oh well, I'm never bored & live in a constant state of ignorance. It really messes with my reference books, though. Of course, I've got more than a few where trees have been moved around in the taxonomic order. My reprint of Hough's Encyclopaedia Of American Woods has quite a few since he wrote & gathered samples for it over a century ago. The originals actually have real wood samples. Mine just has gorgeous pictures of each tree's wood.
That's great you found it on Hoopla, Buck. I've never used that, but we don't have high speed Internet here. It really sucks.
In lecture 17, "Science fiction and Environmental Issues" Wolfe mentions Rachel Carson's first chapter in Silent Spring reads like an SF novel with the way she describes the setting of a poisoned world. I thought the same myself & was horrified to learn it was pretty much true. The gov't used to kill mosquitoes by spraying DDT from planes over towns. I guess most know it was one of the early works that kicked off the modern environmental movement & it is nonfiction. I read it again just a few years ago & found it even better than when I first read it in the 70s. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.
"Jim wrote: "What really distinguishes plain old fiction from speculative fiction?""Ed wrote: "Ability to publish, and reputation. For the last 200 years or so in the West, most fiction that was not 100% real..."
For me the difference between speculative fiction and fiction is not a political power conspiracy theory one like Ed's. Rather, the difference is that a fiction story could conceivably happen in reality on our world and the speculative fiction story is one that can't. Speculative fiction requires the suspension of disbelief of at least one order more.
Sometimes the simple explanation really can be the right one. Ockham's Razor.
Jim wrote: "That's great you found it on Hoopla, Buck. I've never used that, but we don't have high speed Internet here. It really sucks."Our library has Ovedrive and Hoopla. I can download audio books, kindle books, and non-kindle ebooks through the apps. They used to have a third service that I really liked, but they dropped it - budgetary constraints I guess. With Hoopla, you can stream or download. I always download to my phone and listen via bluetooth earbuds. Broadband internet connection not required.
Say, didn't that technology used to be science fiction?
Mod
That is an extreme misinterpretation of what I said. It feels rude.
I didn't posit anything about political power or conspiracies. At some point in the recent past in the west, stories that are pure realist stories started being treated by critics and the reading public as more worthy of respect than non-realist stories. Readers of SF have been looked down on as immature.
In other places, at other times, nobody bothered to separate fiction into realist vs speculative.
SFs getting more respect now, but it took a while.
Dan wrote: "For me the difference between speculative fiction and fiction is not a political power conspiracy theory one like Ed's. Rather, the difference is that a fiction story could conceivably happen in reality on our world and the speculative fiction story is one that can't. Speculative fiction requires the suspension of disbelief of at least one order more. ..."I don't recall Ed writing anything about 'political power conspiracy theory'. He was pointing out, correctly IMO, that there wasn't a ready outlet to sell SF. It wasn't even published in novel form very often until the 1950s. One of the beginnings of SF was Gernsbeck's Amazing Stories where SF authors finally had a venue to sell their works directly.
Many of the 'novels' we now read from that period were originally serialized or were discrete short stories that were stitched together later on into novel form. Publishers weren't willing to do SF novels until the Ballentines tried & did it successfully.
As for Occam's Razor, I don't think it applies here. As our long discussion has proven, there's nothing simple about pinning down what SF is or isn't. It's also important to remember that a label, a shortcut as Gregg put it one time, is supposed to foster communication. I objected to the label in that conversation because I thought it confusing & I find myself in the same position in this case.
Few use the label 'speculative' to shelve books here. I suppose we all sort of know what it means, but I don't think it has enough meaning or people would use it more. Instead, they tend to default to plain fiction. Case in point, Lord of Light is shelved by about 1000 people here as SF, 655 as fantasy with 327 just shelving it as fiction. It's definitely SF since a space ship came from Earth to colonize, but the tone just screams fantasy. Again, I wind up thinking that the tone of the story often distinguishes the category as much as the content.
Speculative should cover SF & one of the defining differences I often read separating SF & fantasy is that SF is possible while fantasy isn't. I don't fully agree with that since so much of the early SF was so magical as to cross the line, but a lot of others seem to like it & we are dealing with (trying, anyway) a general, popular categorizations.
I don't consider A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court to be SF since the way Hank time travels is never explained, but I don't consider it to be a fantasy, either. 'Speculative' fits admirably in that case as it does in many time travel books & other early SF books including many that are considered proto-SF. Unfortunately, it covers too much other territory to be a truly useful label, IMO. It's lack of use here on GR seems to bear this out.
Mod
Consider it a byway, a slight deviation from the course of discussing nonfiction books.Another takeaway from Wolf's lecture series is during the Cyberpunk era, tech started changing people. Before that FOR THE MOST PART people stayed people. A lot of them were cowboys riding spaceships instead of broncs, but the characters were still a cowboy. But now the tech started changing the character as their realities changed. Interesting idea. I'm not sure I'd pin it to one era, but it has become more prevalent.
I also disagreed with him that the blend of SF-fantasy is a 1990s into the 21st century phenomena. Even if I discount the fantastic elements of earlier SF (hard to do) I'd put the mix as something the New Wave of the 1960s started to do deliberately. Of course, my favorite author, Zelazny, led the pack in this regard, although Delany certainly did it with The Einstein Intersection. He even mentions that book, but not in this regard.
I gave How Great Science Fiction Works a 4 star review here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I really enjoyed the first 10 lectures or so, but I think SF grew beyond the constraints after that. For instance, his discussion of sex, gender, & feminism was incomplete & muddled since they're squished into one 30 minute lecture. Each could have easily filled their own. Still, it was quite a trip. Highly recommended.
Mod
That's a pretty thorough review!
I've only watched 4 or 5 chapters based on topics I found interesting, including the ones on religion and on sex and on new wave. Of course they are incomplete, but they were still interesting and I found a few stories I didn't already know.
If you want to hear lots more by Gary Wolfe, he has a podcast with Jonathan Strahan about SFF called "The Coode Street Podcast".
He certainly does not break new ground, I mean go beyond anything easily found in Wikipedia, but someone has to be the standard bearer.
Good to know about the podcast, Ed. Thanks. I'll see if I can download a few. The Religion lecture was good as were the early lectures on the start & growth of SF. Yes, it's all Wikipedia stuff, but it's well presented & he gives a good feel for its rise.
Incomplete isn't great, but his lecture on New Wave made me think it was boring & it's one of my favorites. Not good if he's a standard bearer as Dan suggests. The Gender & Feminism was horribly muddled & far too short, IMO.
I did get some reading material out of the lectures & had a lot of fond memories. It was nice to Murray Leinster shown in a good light. I like a lot of his stuff, although it degenerated into "The Land of the Giants" & such schlock.
It was also interesting to compare our conversation with his lecture on war, Starship Troopers, The Forever War, & Ender's Game.
Mod
The most recent podcast wasn't very nice to your deal old Zelazny. They mentioned him in passing as one of the people whose output went downhill in later works. (I don't have enough experience to either agree or disagree.)
Ed wrote: "The most recent podcast wasn't very nice to your deal old Zelazny. They mentioned him in passing as one..."I agree with that. He started on an incredibly high note in the early 1960s & wrote well through the 1970s. Then he seemed to be more interested in money than I'd prefer in one of my heroes & perhaps he was just tapped out.
He really disappointed me by never finishing the Changeling Saga (1980 & 1981). It was supposed to be a trilogy, each one dedicated to one of his kids. He never wrote the third & the second wasn't that great, ending on a cliff-hanger. The first Changeling is excellent & should be read as a standalone, IMO.
From about the mid 80s on, his work wasn't nearly as good. His name is on over a dozen novels, but only 2 were up to par, IMO. He followed the wonderful 5 original Amber books of the 1970s with a second 5 that weren't nearly as good starting in 1985. He wrote a bunch of books with other authors, most were mediocre, IMO. The Millenial Trilogy with Sheckley was a disaster all around.
There was the mess with Here There Be Dragons / Way Up High which he did Vaughn Bodé. It's a rare treat, limited to 1000 copies. He & Bodé both wanted 30% of the take & couldn't agree on less so it wasn't published until after Bodé died & Zelazny talked his widow into taking less. Even then, the only publisher that took it on did so as a limited edition boxed set signed by Zelazny. The stories are pretty good & the few illustrations are fantastic, just too few. I'm a fan of both & was disappointed with both.
A Night in the Lonesome October (1993) was superb. Jane Lindskold finished a couple of books with him. Donnerjack was excellent & Lord Demon was ok.
In the early 90's he was diagnosed with colon cancer & he died in 1995. He was separated from his wife & living with Jane Lindskold, but left his work in the hands of his estranged wife so she & his wanna-be author son Trent have made a hash of it. They released The Dead Man's Brother, the only mystery he ever wrote & never seriously tried to have published, posthumously.
So, no, I wouldn't argue with their assessment of his work as going downhill. I'd say his last decade was pretty bad. Still, the 2 bright spots were well worth wading through the rest for. I've got over 20 pages of notes on A Night in the Lonesome October & read it with some group most Octobers, one chapter per day. It's fun every time.
I got some of the podcasts, Ed. Wolfe & I seem to have different tastes in SF, unfortunately. I really noticed that in the newer books. Many that he raves about I found too long & boring. He likes bricks, I don't. Do you remember which one discussed Zelazny? It's dangerous to get me started on him, as you can see. One more factoid, I didn't mention that his last work was Chronomaster a PC game that came out in 1995, the year of his death. I have a copy, but never cared for it much. Not my sort of game. It can still be played on modern computers using DosBox.
Mod
I tend to stay away from bricks as well. Though sometimes they turn out to be worth it.
It was the most recent podcast, the one about what they are looking forward to in 2018, where he briefly mentions Zelazny as someone who went down in quality near the end. No deep discussion of that, it just came up in passing.
I won't be regularly listening to the podcast, but only because I don't need to hear about more books! Too many on my list already.
Science Fiction: The Literature Of The Technological Imagination is interesting, It's a shame that this course is no longer offered, but it only on came on cassette. I ripped my copy to mp3 as soon as I got it since my tape player wasn't reliable due to dirty library tapes. I hate it when books get orphaned. This should be available somewhere.
I see there is an updated version Masterpieces Of The Imaginative Mind: Literature's Most Fantastic Works but it has mixed reviews. He's also written Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology which I'd like to check out. Anyone read it?
Mod
If I'm going to read something by Eric Rabkin, I guess I'm most drawn to the title It's a Gas: A Study of Flatulence. ;)
Looks like you might like to see or vote on this list of Science Fiction Studies.
I may try to read Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature. But, of course, my to-read list is a mile long already.
I think Mary Roach covered the subject of flatulence well enough for me in Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. but the one review does make it look like a hoot. The other by Wolfe looks interesting, too.The list is great. My TBR is too big too, but I may check out Walton's blog on Tor.com. I'm pretty amazed by how people have written entire books on some of the subjects or even just a book/movie Wolfe & Rabkin touched on. Those would certainly be more than I want to know, but it was nice to look them over. Thanks.
I finished Rabkin's lectures this evening & will post my review soon. It was good.
Science Fiction: The Literature Of The Technological Imagination by Eric S. Rabkin was pretty good. It's shorter than Wolfe's How Great Science Fiction Works. The roots of & early SF is traced even better, but once he gets into the 1950s, he doesn't do the subject justice at all. Leaves out far too much, although he covers film better than books.I gave it a 4 star review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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Coincidentally, I've just started her book Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. I thought it would be about war machines and would be interesting to compare with the exo-skeleton in, for example, The forever war. But so far it is about other things. Two chapters in a row about genital wounds. I'm glad there are no pictures with that.
"Grunt" isn't my favorite book by her, although "Spook" holds last place, mostly due to the subject matter which is pure twaddle. I think she actually did a better job with the material she had, though. "Stiff", "Gulp", & "Bonk" are my favorites.
My copy of Science Fiction: A Historical Anthology by Eric S. Rabkin arrived today. I don't know when I'll get to it since I'm reading 2 other paper books now. One is an SF novel, The Unknown Soldier by Sean Williams, the other The Woodwright's Guide: Working Wood with Wedge and Edge. The latter should go fairly quickly since some of it is a repeat of his other books, although it's been years since I last read one in full.
Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir is an autobiography by Stan Lee. I listened to it, but it's really a graphic novel. It was fun, but light on details. I gave it a 3 star review here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America by David Hajdu was fantastic. I'm not much of a comic book fan, but it was mostly about the censorship of them in the 40s &50s. Scary & topical! I gave it a 5 star review here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The Long Way Home by David Laskin is about immigrants to the US in the lat 19th & early 20th century that served in WWI. It would have been better if Laskin had any military experience himself & had tied it in to today's issues more. Still, I gave it a 3 star review here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us by Diane Ackerman is about the Anthropocene Age, the one in which we live. She gives a good, balanced account of how we've changed the world as much as any of the other great changes that resulted in major extinctions of species. She looks at it from the perspective of an anthropologist of the future who lives on Mars & is studying our age. Nothing too far out, just enough to lend a better sense of historical perspective. If you like Sue Hubbell or Rachel Carson, you'll probably like this. Ackerman's style is very similar. I gave it a 4 star review here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
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It gathers various essays that were originally published separately, so there is not really any overriding theme. But one thing idea that does hang over the book is the idea that science fiction / horror / fantasy / speculative fiction is by nature always mutating and it is hard to pin down individual works to specific labels.
The final essay was about criticism itself. Part of that was too academic and went over my head. Yet it was interesting to read about John Clute. He wrote "encyclopedias" of SF and Fantasy. Gene Wolfe points out that an "encyclopedia" is normally thought of as a collection of information that is already present elsewhere, but Clute was in many cases putting his own original ideas into his encyclopedias. Partly out of necessity since there was little formal SF criticism around.
I think I'll stop reading this sort of work for a while. I had considered reading In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination by Margaret Atwood, but after listening to a podcast where Gene Wolfe and Ursula Le Guin talk about it, I don't think I want to anymore. They seem confused by the book as it seems Margaret Atwood doesn't know very much about SF, and doesn't seem to want to know much about it, so it is strange that she would try to write about it.
American Military History: From Colonials to Counterinsurgents by General Wesley K. Clark was an excellent find from The Great Courses. It's on sale for only $35 & is a great overview from a different perspective than I'm used to. He knows his trade & its history. Great insights & well balanced. I gave it a 5 star review here:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Mod
It is book 3 in a series. I really should have started with #1, but I can never resist skipping to the end in textbooks! I need to see whether the hard work in the first part is going to be justified by interesting things in later parts. Also, I do have a PhD in chemical physics, so very little of this is completely new to me. None of the math is exactly easy, but when explained competently it can look almost easy. It probably also helps that I recently watched about 8 hours of online videos about tensor calculus, which I was never taught in school.
I'm definitely not saying I fully understood all this stuff, but during the reading of this book I can feel like I'm understanding it, and that is an achievement.
The Evolution of Science Fiction
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