From: utzoo!decvax!cca!hplabs!hplabsb!soreff
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Title: Re: SF attacked in December Harper"s magazine
Article-I.D.: hplabsb.1222
Posted: Thu Dec 16 12:37:53 1982
Received: Sun Dec 19 11:25:34 1982
References: sri-arpa.111

About half of the articles in Harper's are usually flames, and I believe
that Arnold Klein's article falls into that category. Frankly, I think
Klein states his complaints with far too few qualifiers. Consider
" Professors Joe De Bolt and John R. Pfeiffer, in a critical guide to modern
sci-fi, have managed to reduce the inconsequence of the bookshelves to 
eight basic categories: stories of utopias and distopias, human destiny,
alternative and lost worlds, alein life, travels by spaceship and time
machine to inaccessible places (sic), new technology, new beliefs, and new
mental and physical capabilities. Of course, you don't need Occam's razor
(a favorite sci-fi preindustrial artifact, misunderstood to mean 'simplify
everything') to see that these genera have been multiplied without 
necessity; uncharitable souls might even consider all eight categories as
forming one irrelevant mess." As far as I can see, in dismissing all utopias
and distopias, Klein has dismissed most of the popular modes of expressing
political thought except for editorializing about transient events.
Dismissing new technology and new beliefs dismisses almost all the forces of
change except for demographic ones. From the tone of the article Klein
sounds like he wants to deal with a world he knows he can understand:
"the complexities of real life" and "the hurble-burble of ground rent and
class struggle". He sounds like he would be at home a century or two ago,
but rather uncomfortable with this century. -Jeffrey Soreff (hplabs!soreff)