Quote:
Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
I agree it's more useful to make distinctions in classification than quality or inferred attitudes.
However, I wonder how mainstream Calvino intended to be when he wrote Cosmicomics and T Zero. And I also wonder whether perceptible modesty is the most important quality with which an ambitious writer should be concerned no matter what their classification. There's a certain enshrined ostentation in science fiction -- a look-at-me inventiveness -- which I don't mind at all. I think it's a positive attribute in books like Anathem. I also don't mind it when Pound interrupts the Cantos to say "I shall have to learn more Greek, but so shall you [the reader], drat you." Pound thought he was trying to save civilization when he wrote that. I'm glad he cared about civilization in the first place.
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I have to say this paragraph is confounding me. I don't disagree with anything you're saying, but neither do I see how any of it constitutes a "However" to the line above. Calvino almost certainly gave no consideration to producing mainstream work, and if anything I suspect his aims for his early works were even more experimental than the end result. Still, there's little argument that his works are experimental in a manner that defies convention, in keeping with my characterization of literary fiction. Yes, science fiction authors are expected to employ inventive premises, but if easily recognizable archetypes don't trace predictable orbits around those premises, we cease to see the work as sci-fi, the easy example being Vonnegut.