Book of the New Sun won the contest!

Lane Haygood · 02 Aug 2011, 23:33 · from 2011-August.txt.gz

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From: lhaygood at gmail.com (Lane Haygood)
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2011 18:33:03 -0500
Subject: (urth) Book of the New Sun won the contest!
In-Reply-To: <1312326094.60046.YahooMailRC at web114702.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
References: <1312314615.38326.YahooMailClassic at web161809.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
	<1312326094.60046.YahooMailRC at web114702.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <D64032CA-1FAD-456F-BE5F-F9F983342328 at gmail.com>

I've read Harry Potter. Entertaining pop stuff. Well-crafted, but LeGuin's work is transcendent. Even her Earthsea novels (which are pale shadows of her SF) are better than Rowling on her best day. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 2, 2011, at 6:01 PM, Jerry Friedman <jerry_friedman at yahoo.com> wrote:

>> From: Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
> 
> 
> [women SF writers of the 70s feeling dated]
> 
>> A whole lot of 70s SF feels dated, from the  artistic efforts of Samuel Delany 
>> on down, in the same way modernism seems a bit  musty lately, or those socially 
>> conscious novels of the late 19th and early 20th  century that are many things, 
>> but are probably not artistic in the final  analysis.
>> 
>> I don't know, I always felt like the previously mentioned  Atwood was not doing 
>> exciting things in the way that more mainstream female  writers like Flannery 
>> O'Connor or Acker or even Byatt were, I felt like I'd read  1984 and other 
>> similar dystopian stuff over and over and over before when I read  some of her 
>> stuff, or LeGuin's for that matter, so tired of that weak lowest  common 
>> denominator left slanting.  Their SF in general IS too closely tied  to a 
>> didactic, pragmatic, realistic purpose, instead of the quite possibly  teenage 
>> boy aimed wow rocket ships explosions impossible science human villains  cool 
>> plot twist kind of stuff men seem to write in SF ... .  
>> 
> 
> I'd say a lot of the most admired male authors before the 70s--Heinlein, Asimov, 
> Van Vogt (who I don't like), Anderson, Bradbury, Pohl, Kornbluth--were extremely 
> didactic, with pragmatic, realistic purposes.  Clarke might be an exception.  
> And I don't think women writers had or have any kind of monopoly on weak 
> lowest-common-denominator left, right, or libertarian slanting (though this does 
> bring up Ayn Rand...), certainly not considering the shoot-em-ups that you 
> rightly note are aimed at teenage boys.
> 
>> I  think there is a better case for quality fantasy female authors than actual 
>> SF  for some reason (Hobb, Tanith lee, Susanah Clark, some of the gothic 
>> (southern  or otherwise) stuff, etc).  
>> 
> 
> And, of course, Le Guin, author of the best YA fantasy ever (and I say this 
> without having read Harry Potter).
> 
> Lee's Flat Earth books are one of my guilty pleasures.
> 
>> but some of the works that were  selected seem like they are just recent and in 
>> people's memories now, something  that is not true of New Sun, which I would 
>> like to think deserved to  win.
> 
> I'll go along with that, unsurprisingly.
> 
> Jerry Friedman
> 
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