Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
I suppose if I jump into a thread with heavy political/social thoughts, I should actually participate in the topic, as well. Hmm.
There's a problem with that. I'm horribly undiscriminating when it comes to sci-fi. There are authors I don't read or recommend for political reasons (Card, Norman), and a number whose styles I don't care for but know they're good anyway (Gibson tops the list), but almost nothing I actively *disliked* reading.
There are books written more than about 40 years ago that I don't like or recommend because of the social themes in them, because racism and sexism were commonly accepted when the books were written. They make me wince, and I can't recommend them to people today. But that's not at all the same as "badly written." There are authors I'm avoiding because of the author's political or social beliefs, but again, that doesn't seem to be the kind of non-recommendation going on here.
I suspect I'd think Hubbard's sci-fi was badly written. But I suspect that, if I got it in the right mood, I'd enjoy it just fine. (Okay, I suspect I'd put it down half-written and never get back to it; my reading time these days is limited and I want to spend it on stuff I'll actively enjoy. When I run out of Baen books and 150k-word fanfic novels is plenty soon enough to consider authors I know I'm not going to love.)
I loved everything by Heinlein. Even the stuff I vehemently disagreed with. I loved Dune and the first several sequels; I didn't like Chapterhouse but couldn't say if that was because it had gotten complex in ways I didn't care about. I like the Wheel of Time series; recognizing that they could probably edited to half their wordcount and have the same impact doesn't change that. I liked the Earl Dumarest series by EC Tubbs, and I'm sure they were formulaic tripe.
I like it all. I have trouble wrapping my head around the purpose of this thread.
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I think (what a slippery term), that this thread was started to talk about writers and writing that people found stylistically inferior. Too wordy, didn't hold together, didn't entertain, ect. When you only had so much reading time, what was worth skipping to get to the "good stuff".
What we ended up with was a heavy philosophical discussion on certain writer(s), who some feel shouldn't be read for philosophical reasons. Sort of delivery versus content, with the content discussion drowning out the delivery discussion.
<Shrug> All fiction is a pack of lies. It says so on the label. Much factual information and research may be embedded in the work, but it's still a pack of lies, written to entertain. Every fictional world is unreal, whether we're talking
In Cold Blood or
The Man of Bronze. Many of these worlds are similar to the world at the time they were written, some weren't. But as times and societies change, they become more and more unreal to the world of now. For example,
Tom Sawyer is as alien an environment as
Neuromancer to me, reading today. And as the world portrayed shift further and further away from current mores, they tend to become more and more at odds with the current mores.
I'm minded very much of the ending of Niven and Pournelle's
Oath of Fealty. There's a lot of ways to be human. Part of reading fiction (especially science fiction) is learning to enjoy the differences, and understanding that when you get angry at something you read, it's defining
your mores, and other people and other times had (have) mores that don't match yours. Part of being an adult is learning this fact, and learning how to thrive in a world that doesn't necessarily match your mores.
I think my byline sums it up quite nicely. Please look down and read it.