Re: Are the Hugo Award Winners Boring Examples of SF?

On Aug 10, 1:48 am, Eric Walker <webmas...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:43:58 -0700, William Hyde wrote:
On Aug 6, 6:55 am, Eric Walker <webmas...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Clarke's "ideas" are chiefly mechanical ones, not human ones; those
fall into the category I have often called "Gus's Garage in Outer
Space".

I find this to be utterly false, and I was going to type a list of his
works which don't fall under this category, but frankly, the list is too
long to type.  And since it includes some of his major novels, which you
must know, there seems to be no point in it.

Perhaps "mechanical" was not the best word, but his characters seem, at
least to me, much more plot devices than living, breathing people; the
crux of a Clarke novel is always "What happens next?" rather than "How
are these people feeling, what are they learning?"  I don't say he
doesn't at times tell us what they are supposedly feeling and learning,

I offer "Hate", "Death and the Senator", "The Road to the Sea" and
"The Star" as counterexamples, and the list could easily be extended.

In "Before Eden" the learning and the feeling occur only after the
story is over, which is the right way to do it. No description of
what the protagonists feel after they discover what they have done
could do anything other than weaken the story. But the impact is
there.

I like M. John Harrison as much as you do (well, perhaps not quite as
much) and E. R. Eddison and J. G. Ballard and so forth, but it seems
to me that in your enthusiasm for the above, you are grievously
underrating those authors who actually have first names.

I don't recognize Clarke or Asimov (except in their early years) as
the writers you describe.


William Hyde
.

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