Gray, Wolfe, Heinlein

Malco:

But Nastler intended Lanark to fail...you might recall that Nastler described the sort of success which Lanark fantasised about when he accepted the gig - people listen to him at the council, his speech sets profound reforms in place, he returns in triumph to a saved Unthank and is reunited with a chastened and finally appreciative Rima...and then says that he is not going to provide Lanark with anything of the sort, because "[i]f I give you an ending like that I will be like ten thousand other cheap illusionists! I would be as bad as the late H. G. Wells! I would be worse than Goethe. Nobody who knows a thing about life or politics will believe me for a minute." (p. 492)

That's right...and it clarifies one of the commonalities I would point out between the fictions of Mr. Gray and Mr. Wolfe; their 'heros' fail, blunder, are confused and fail to understand important things. Perhaps this humanity is a part of their attraction...

...glad I'm not the only one who sees it that way...we just call him Sludden in my family... Allan:

I wonder...is it actually possible to ascribe a world-view to either author when both have produced such diverse works? If you mean politico-religious outlooks, well certainly they're different, but not necessarily as vastly as some might think.

Jonathan Carroll? I wonder...I have the greatest admiration for Mr. Carroll's work, but if we are to draw a dichotomy between character and idea I'd have to say that I've always thought of him as a novelist of ideas rather than character.

I can't judge the recent short stories, but ever since reading someone's statement on this list that Mr. Wolfe is not at his best in the short story format, I've been winding up to take mild exception, mostly on the strength of 'Forlesen', which I personally think is one of the most memorable 'SF' short stories I've read...it's actually one of the few that I do remember at all. I don't think that Mr. Wolfe obfuscates for the mere love of mystery, or at least right up to the Short Sun series, which is the last I've read. And I believe that some of the enjoyment of reading him comes from the mysteries and ambiguities...which are a decided incentive to re-reading...and speculation...and, as the discussions on this list show, the mysteries seem to have a purpose, and sometimes even admit of explanation... Blattid:

...precisely...caught and reprogrammed according to the best information available at the time, which was the movies and/or the books of the 20th Century...of which perhaps a handful survived in the Library...they took the people from one source, and the fauna from another...millions of years have passed since then, even the continents have changed...how are they gonna know what went where?

Well...the autarchy plays pretty rough as it is...and one presumes that the exhibits have their meals supplied regularly...which doesn't always happen in Nessus proper...

Every SF/F writer? Ballard? LeGuin? Burroughs? etc.

..not to mention having one of his supposedly 'sexually liberated' characters declare, in 'Stranger in a Strange Land', "[n]ine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's partly her fault." (p. 281, NEL pbk, 1976) I was trying to read the book with all due sympathy after quarreling severely with my mother-in-law, who takes the work as gospel, but it fell from my hands at this point, never to rise again... ...presumably Mr. Heinlein has never been raped himself...I daresay he would feel quite differently about the matter if so...but at least I now understand why Charles Manson adapted the book as his bible...he even called his son Michael Valentine Manson... (ducks to avoid return fire from water-brethren...) Chris:

...see above...perhaps it (sometimes) takes a female writer to present rape as a disgusting and humiliating experience with no symbolic or redemptive value...Le Guin does it rather well... * What a gloomy note to end on...how about this, instead: Happy Easter to those who believe! ->Zx<-

Edgar Rice Burroughs was dead and buried by 1951. William burroughs i really wouldn't consider as a science fiction writer... Best, MEH Mark Hall markhall at gol.com

I wrote and Deacon Mushrat responded:

Yes, yes, yes, sort of, and yes. I say "sort of" for Burroughs because he's writing outside the SF genre, using tropes from the SF/F toolbox ... In fact, his SF owes more to Edgar Rice Burroughs than to modern SF, but even he uses the strategic- deployment-of-details riffs Heinlein pioneered (especially, but not solely, in NOVA EXPRESS). Of the three you mention, Le Guin is actually the easiest to demonstrate the point for; read the first few pages of THE DISPOSSESSED. The technique used there, to establish the border and contrast between two worlds, is pure Heinlein; what's pure Le Guin is the repurposing of that technique to put the two societies in a meaningful [juxta|op]position. Ballard is the toughest one, because so much of his SF is in a deliberate rejection of Campbell-Heinlein SF/F; of the New Worlds "movement" that, in the late '60s, sought to radically recreate the storytelling style of SF, Ballard is perhaps the only one who succeeded to any significant degree. (The next candidate would be Aldiss, but even work like BAREFOOT IN THE HEAD and CRYPTOZOIC depend heavily on the use of Campbell-Heinlein rhetorical devices and deployments.) Some years ago I suggested in a review that THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION, CRASH, etc., are what happens if you write "hard SF," but do your speculating in abnormal psychology instead of physics or chemistry. The result is an SF where the alienation takes place at the level of character rather than landscape; this work does not use much-or-any of the rhetorical devices developed under Campbell, by Heinlein and the others, and required a raft of new techniques. But if you go and (re-)read his earlier novels -- his "cozy catastrophe" quartet and a number of short stories -- you find a lot of those techniques in play. Played by a writer rather than a storyteller, to be sure; played in ways and in ranges Heinlein could never on his best days have come near; but those same techniques. Enough.

Which isn't about sex at all (as the feminist movement spent many years informing us), but is nonetheless boneheaded.

Unfortunately for your understanding, the whole business about Manson basing his religion on STRANGER turns out to be a sort of STFnal urban legend; he had never even read the book before going to jail. Oh well, it's a good story anyway.