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From: jimb@ISM780B.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: Brin, Sagan, etc.
Message-ID: <27800018@ISM780B.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 23-Sep-85 15:08:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ISM780B.27800018
Posted: Mon Sep 23 15:08:00 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 29-Sep-85 05:08:19 EDT
References: <5703@tekecs.UUCP>
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Nf-ID: #R:tekecs:-570300:ISM780B:27800018:000:2487
Nf-From: ISM780B!jimb    Sep 23 15:08:00 1985


>> I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one who didn't like Startide
>> Rising. Can't figure out why it won the Hugo and Nebula. If this was
>> the best of the year it must have been a very bad year.


>Agreed! Startide Rising was awful, with one of the
>most unconvincing, most cliched, and generally worst depictions of
>aliens I've come across in some time.  Possibly tied for
>"most overrated" with Gene Wulf's (sp?) extremely bad novel
>"Shadow of the Torturer".

Aw, c'mon guys.  Let's start a "Tastes Great" vs. "Less Filling" argument.
It depends on what you read SF for.  Personally, I'm happy to sit down
with a text book when I want to learn science.

For reading SF, I like an engaging plot with plausible characters, and I can
even be convinced by the author to like a story that I knew I'd hate, e.g.,
NEUROMANCER.  Brin and Wolfe render pleasant dreams in mutually different but
fresh ways that allow me to share the dream by that marvelous translating
device, the book.

As far as details of science, which are the more important details to get
right, quark-quark interactions and alien respiratory systems or the
examination of what happens to individuals and cultures as a result of
certain scientific/speculative conditions occuring?

Again, strictly personal opinion, but I prefer absorbing the gestalt of the
forest to the minutiae of the trees -- feels more liberating and expanding,
don't you know?

I happen to agree with you about Greg Bear; he paints nice pictures that have
a high degree of technical verisimilitude.  (I've talked to the man and he
has a manic sense of research and does *not* have a science degree or job.
As far as I know, he's a full time fiction writer, which is a truly
endangered species.)  But as nice (and moving!) as the pictures are, they
haven't (yet) approached the breathtaking grandness of Brin or Wolfe.
Admittedly, STARTIDE is direct descendant of 50's and 60's Heinlein-style SF,
but there is a depth and texture to it that Heinlein acheived but rarely and
most others of the era not at all.  The Wolfe is almost *sui generis* , but
it, too has a richness of plot and character that is hard to match.

To not like something is one thing, but to dismiss it as "bad"....

I wish more people would swallow the idea that it is possible not to like a
good book and to love a mediocre one.


      -- from the bewildered musings of Jim Brunet

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