Posted on 03/07/2002 10:28:59 AM PST by PJ-Comix
Exactly. Of course there's never been agreement on what "real" SF is. A lot of writers like de Camp and Kuttner could easily change hats from "hard" science to sword and sorcery at a penny a word (at 80 wpm) to put food on the table. And in the 40s and 50s a lot of fantasy posed as SF. I recall the endless debates about it in the letters columns.
I began to lose interest in magazine SF about the time Ben Bova became editor of "Analog" back in the late 60s. I became aware of a liberal agenda and didn't subscribe to the magazine again until Schmidt became editor sometime in the 70s. I guess I've always preferred "Analog's" hard science extrapolative approach. The two best stories I've ever read combining hard science and powerful human themes were "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin and "Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes. I think it's still possible to write stories of that kind but no one is doing it that I'm aware of.
Henry Kuttner and his wife C.L. Moore, who often collaborated, should never be left out of any list of SF "greats." Some of Kuttner's pen names were Lawrence O'Donnell, Kelvin Kent, Lewis Padgett, Keith Hammond, Hudson Hastings, Woodrow Wilson Smith and C.H. Liddell. He produced an enormous amount of high quality material before his untimely death at age 44 in 1958. I loved his robot stories with Gallegher, the alcoholic genius, who got blitzed at his "liquor organ" and invented crazy stuff that he couldn't remember and had to untangle the next morning while suffering from a terrible hangover. The robot was never any help. Classics.
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Oh well, I did not intend that list to be exhaustive- but it does show my preference for "SCIENCE" fiction, with only a small percentage of outright fantasy (such as "Lest Darkness Fall", or a couple of Heinlein's efforts in this direction -"MAGIC, INC", for instance...)
Not quite everybody. I used to know a slightly ditzy woman who wanted to improve her literacy. Of course I recommended Kilgore Trout and his "Venus On The Half-Shell." I explained that it is considered the greatest science fiction novel of all time. She read it and seemed to be quite moved by the book. Never did tell her it was all a put-on. Hee! Hee!
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Very interesting... Castaneda had a dog too named Mescalito.
What's all this nonsense about Kilgore Trout being Kurt Vonnegut? This was all just a very clever ploy by Vonnegut to make people think he was an invented character such as Harrison Bergeron. Kilgore used to live just down the road from me but finally moved after it started getting too crowded around here (got up to almost 1 house per square mile). I have read many of his short stories that were indeed published in porno magazines. He still writes and still uses a manual typewriter. It's OK with Kilgore that I say this now because, as he put it, "nobody thinks I'm real anyway."
John W. Campbell was probably the greatest science fiction writer. There are many, many excellent SF writers that are better than Heinlein. Even Asimov is better. Ray Bradbury might even be better. Heinlein is a fag and fags disgust me.
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