Re: Dan Simmons on Larry Niven?

On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 21:29:23 +0000 (UTC), phoenix@xxxxxxx (Damien
Sullivan) wrote:
David T. Bilek <davidbilek@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Okay, so the hippopotamus and crayon thing is, indeed, a little bit of
hyperbole. Yeah, _Mote_ is better than, say, Robert Sawyer's Hugo
winner. But that's not a hugely difficult goalpost to make it
through. It doesn't exactly try to push the boundaries of SF in any
way.

Buh? The Aldeson drive? The biology of the Moties? The million-year
history of the Moties, and how that interacted with the physics of the
Aldeson drive, stars, and the force field rules they had? Those don't
push the boundaries in any way?


Push the boundaries in a literary sense. Not in terms of gadgets or
whatever. I suppose this is another illustration of the different
approaches to reading SF.

Even leaving that aside, how does an Alderson drive push the
boundaries? It's just a handwavium drive using wormholes. What makes
it any different on a fundamental level than Doc Smith's ships? As to
the history of the moties doesn't rate on the scale of, say, _Star
Maker_ or even _Last and First Men_ by Stapledon. I'll give you the
biology of the Moties as a bit of an innovation as compared to earlier
Campbellian stuff, though.

How do you feel about the "New Wave" stuff of the 70s rather than the
Niven&Pournelle kind of thing? How about the "New Weird" stuff that's
being published today?

-David
.

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