Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2007 22:39:52 -0500 (EST)
From: dicconf <dicconf at radix.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
cc: wsfa-forum at yahoogroups.com
Subject: [WSFA] Re: The Unfunny Pages
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

On Thu, 27 Dec 2007, Stan wrote:

> I can't help but wonder how much of SciFi and Fantasy suffers
> from the same sort of treatment by the 'literary' crowd?
>
> http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/11757

Do you mean the apparently deliberate attempt to make something
incredibly dull and stuffy out of a genre they don't understand?

I haven't read most of the current attempts to write SF by
mainstream writers, so I really can't say whether they are
actually dull, or writing bad SF, or writing stuff that would
have been decent SF fifty years ago but is sadly outdated now.
(Now I wonder why I think I feel a subtle pressure to make such
judgements.  There's no such indication in what you wrote or
what the article contained.)

Or do you mean the more common assumption that the original genre
wasn't worth bothering with, so anything the literary crowd do with
the bits they ripped off would have to be better?  (An assumption
that I didn't see in the article, by the way, though I think one
or two commenters were leaning that way.)

At a quick read-through the original article seemed to be decrying
the way the literary crowd made stfnal ideas dull.  It reminded me
(just a little) of a killer review I once read, about how the
magazine "Heavy Metal" was a static travesty of what a graphic
novel ought to be.

=Tamar