Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 10:15:10 -0500 To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org> From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com> Subject: [WSFA] Re: Old School Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org> At 01:30 AM 3/31/05 EST, MarkLFischer at aol.com wrote: >In a message dated 3/30/2005 11:59:04 PM Eastern Standard Time, >omni at omniphile.com writes: > >>the Lensman series was 5 if my memory at this hour is still >>working. > >There are six: Ok, memory refresh failed...but was close. ;-) >And a seventh, if you consider "Masters of the Vortex" part of the series. >It's set in the same universe, but is otherwise unrelated. Yeah, that one almost seemed like an encore, not part of the main show. Sort of like Douglas Adam's "So Long and Thanks For All the Fish". >"Doc" Smith was one of the first SF writers I was exposed to in my youth, >and while I acknowledge his shortcomings, his stuff is FUN, which is often >more important to me than literary merit. He wasn't all that near first for me, but I agree, it's fun stuff. There were other series that were like that, though different in other ways. The Blade books, or the Dumarest books for example. A friend once referred to them as "literary popcorn...not all that filling or nutritious, but fun". I'd probably add the Myth books (Little Myth Marker, Myth Conceptions, etc.) to that group. Tastes do vary widely though. I once had a friend recommend the Gormenghast trilogy (by Mervyn Peake) as the best series he'd ever read. I got the books and tried hard to slog through them, but I never managed it. One of the few books I've never finished. I did get through the first book, and after him explaining that the series started slowly but picked up after the first book, about 2/3 of the way through the second, but after that I just couldn't force myself to pick them up again. After well over 1000 pages nothing much had happened yet... To give you an example of the writing style, there's one scene about a baptism at a lake. It starts off with a duck. The duck is disturbed, and takes off. A drop of water on the duck's wing rolls to the edge and falls off, and lands on a leaf. It rolls to the edge of the leaf and hangs there, and reflected in it is the procession of people arriving at the lake. This took 6 pages to describe... The story is about an ancient castle and the family that lives in it. The castle is old, full of tradition and nearly unchanging, as are many of the residents. If the stories are trying to give you a sense of the hundreds of years that have passed with nothing more than the slow growth of ivy on the walls occurring, it succeeds. You certainly have a very personal sense of a great deal of time having gone by with no real change in anything... If you like that sort of thing, this is a great example of it. Otherwise, this book series fits that old reviewer's comment (Dorothy Parker maybe?) very well, "This is not a series to be put down lightly...but rather, hurled with great force." -- Mike B. -- A spokesman for the parrots said he was very glad no parrots were involved.