Sci-fi fans!

[Rock_chick]

Who's your fav author? I'd have to say Iain M. Banks is up there...especially his culture novels. Being able to change your biological sex just by thinking about it? Yes please!

[Sarah B]

My all time favourite authors would be Asimov and Heinlein, Herbert, Bradbury and Clarke just to name a few.  It has been along time since I was able to sit down and read, read and read.  It would be nice to sit down or lie down and read the more contemporary and science fantasy authors.

Kind regards
Sarah B

[Rock_chick]

I Always had a weird thing with Asimov...loved his short stories, but could never manage his novels. Been reading a lot of William Gibson recently as well.

[Fenrir]

Guy N. Smith. Cheesy? Yes. Wierd? Yes. Entertaining? Ho yes. 

[Jester]

Ray Mo-F'in' Bradbury up in the hizzouse.  And can I get a shout out for Philip K. Dick?

I'm sorry I spoke that way....

I'm reading a pulp sci fi series by a modern guy named Jeff Somers.  He wrote The Electric Church, The Digital Plague, and the Eternal Prison, all of which are in a series.  It's good first person narrative gun slinger in the distant future kind of stuff.  It's a bit derivative but it just oozes cool.

[arbon]

Orson Scott Card - his short story collection Maps in a Mirror.

[Arch]

I'm not a big fan of sci fi, but I like science fiction.

[Rock_chick]

True geek. lol

[Arch]

True geek. lol

Why, thank you.

I used to be a big Heinlein nut. I haven't had as much time for pleasure reading as I used to--and I have great trouble reading anything at all these days--so I'm not sure I'm such a big fan anymore. But I have all of his stuff, I think, except Tramp Royale, which isn't sf.

Big fan of Ted Sturgeon--great short story writer. John Varley used to write great short works. I like James Tiptree, Jr. I still like Bob Silverberg very much. I very much enjoy a lot of Victorian-era stuff, especially H.G. Wells. I get a kick out of quite a bit of pre-WWII stuff. I'll admit that some of it is quite awful, but it's also fascinating.

Asimov and Clarke, not so much. I don't like cyberpunk, so Gibson doesn't tickle my fancy. Herbert bores me. I think Orson Scott Card is overvalued--I found Ender's Game to be merely adequate and saw no reason to continue reading the rest of the books. I haven't read much PKD yet, but it's in my pending pile.

I guess I don't read too much recent stuff (as I said, not much sf reading in the past decade or so), but I very much enjoy a lot of Connie Willis' work. I also get a bang out of reading juvenile sf. John Christopher, William Sleator, some Steven Gould, definitely Monica Hughes. I was bummed when Hughes died a little while ago; she wrote some great stuff for young people.

I have a nineteenth-century French work on my academic pile that I really ought to get to. It's pretty thick. It may be the first work ever to use a panspermia device, but I haven't found much about that topic and can't be sure. Anyway, the thing must be well over four hundred pages...pretty scary when I can barely sit still to read much of anything for any length of time.

[Jasmine.m]

Here's another vote for Orson Scott Card! Although I strongly disagree with his political positions.

Of course Azimov and Heinlein are classics and I love them. Bradbury's probably my fav classic. What we need these days are some new sci-fi writers!!

~Jas

[arbon]

Although I strongly disagree with his political positions.

~Jas

Agreed!!!

[tekla]

I always liked Harlan Ellison and Kurt Vonnegut though both went out of their way to say they did not write science fiction.  Ellison called what he wrote 'speculative fiction' (and isn't all fiction speculative on some level?) and Vonnegut said he wrote fiction with some science added in.  I think they felt that way because so much of what is grouped into science fiction is such poor writing, particularly on the character development level.  The science and the story overwhelm the people, and what makes any writing into literature is a deeper understanding of the human condition, which, when characters are not developed, tends to be wanting.

[PanoramaIsland]

Science fiction? I'll take speculative fiction, thanks.

I am a huge fan of old-school cyberpunk - Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Masamune Shirow. Big fan of Katsuhiro Otomo's old work, as well - Akira, Domu and Fireball. Also, let's not forget the old-school writers: Frank Herbert, Asimov, Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke.

As for politics, I'm closer to Ursula K. LeGuin's politics than Orson Scott Card's (or Heinlein's, since his libertarianism is always bandied about so much).

As for the very old-hat and stereotypical idea that most sci fi isn't "literature," whatever that means, because it's not centrally about the emotional lives of characters, that is (a) only sometimes true and (b) all a matter of what you're looking to get out of a book. Just as I don't watch a David Lynch movie hoping for a tight, compelling and fast-moving plot, I don't read hard sci-fi hoping for deep and penetrating psychological narrative. The same people who criticize the reader for being unable to wade through a "high literature" aristocratic slushfest like Anna Karenina will then turn around and criticize the writer if the work they find unappealing is from a "lowbrow" genre.

This is kind of like how many literary critics dismiss the entire medium of comics offhand, but show themselves to be both unschooled in the unique storytelling language of the medium and ignorant of its great authors, movements, styles etc. when they talk on the subject. Even those of them who have now embraced the "graphic novel" idea are not much better: they see the endless hyperbole about Maus (and more recently, Persepolis and the works of Chris Ware) and think that these are somehow special exceptions, works that have "risen above" the "constraints" of the medium. It would be nice if they knew the first thing about it. Art Spiegelman was not the first person in the history of artistkind to tell an effective, deadly serious, and heartwrenching story in the medium of comics.

[arbon]

I always liked Harlan Ellison.

One of his stories, Sweet Wine, really stuck in my head. Those are the types of stories I like, the ones I can't forget.

[kyril]

Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Card (though his politics make me ill), Niven, Pohl, and Brin.

I always hated cyberpunk. It's depressing! And Herbert, for some reason, puts me to sleep.

[Rock_chick]

This is kind of like how many literary critics dismiss the entire medium of comics offhand, but show themselves to be both unschooled in the unique storytelling language of the medium and ignorant of its great authors, movements, styles etc. when they talk on the subject. Even those of them who have now embraced the "graphic novel" idea are not much better: they see the endless hyperbole about Maus (and more recently, Persepolis and the works of Chris Ware) and think that these are somehow special exceptions, works that have "risen above" the "constraints" of the medium. It would be nice if they knew the first thing about it. Art Spiegelman was not the first person in the history of artistkind to tell an effective, deadly serious, and heartwrenching story in the medium of comics.

This is so true. Neil Gaiman won an award for best short fantasy story with his version of A midsummer night's dream...then following the wails of anguish and general anget, they changed the rules so a mere comic could never win again. It's the story that's important, not the medium it's told in.

[Arch]

This is so true. Neil Gaiman won an award for best short fantasy story with his version of A midsummer night's dream...then following the wails of anguish and general anget, they changed the rules so a mere comic could never win again. It's the story that's important, not the medium it's told in.

This is misleading; maybe comics can't win for short fiction, but they can win in another category. I would not call a comic book short fiction, and I doubt that most people would. I remember this flap. Gaiman's work could easily have been awarded in a different category; I know that there's a category that allows for this, but I'm too lazy to look it up right now.

Granted, maybe they should create a separate category for comics and graphic novels, but comics can win. Just not for short fiction.

IMHO, Gaiman should stick to the comic book format. His fiction is...well, let's just say that I think his efforts are wasted in fiction and better off in comics. But lots of people would apparently disagree with me.

P.S. Considering that the WFA are awarded by genre, the medium is indeed important. Would you give an award for best novel to a short story?

[Rock_chick]

P.S. Considering that the WFA are awarded by genre, the medium is indeed important. Would you give an award for best novel to a short story?

I would stick my pedantic media studies head on and probably say that a short story is a stylistic approach to writing rather than describing it as a medium in the transmissive sense, and it's possible to write things that count as short stories, both in print and comic media.

[PanoramaIsland]

Short stories do exist in comics, of course. Now, given that comics generally read more quickly than prose stories, but the shortest works tend to be very, very short (two, three or four panels), the definition of what exactly is a "short" story and what is not certainly merits investigation.

The idea that comics is a "genre" is fundamentally wrong. It is a medium - a way of communicating. I certainly understand that there are concerns about how this way of communicating fits into existing paradigms of awards recognition - is it "fiction" because it's stories printed in books, or is it not "fiction" because it's made up partially of pictures? - but the fundamental concern, for me and for other comics folks is that great comics somehow be institutionally recognized outside of the comics fandom ghetto. It's important not only that truly great works get the recognition they deserve, but that the public understands that comics is a medium, not a genre, that there is much more out there than Dragonball Z and Batman, and that if what they want isn't out there, it is well within their power to create it.

This battle for the image of comics is very important to me, because all of the media are going through upheavals right now, and we need the public to know that we as an industry can provide the content they want, and can do more than what we've always done. We need to be flexible, and we need to be able to stake out new turf as the old turf falls away under our feet.

I'll stop passionately nerding about my medium now.

[Arch]

I would stick my pedantic media studies head on and probably say that a short story is a stylistic approach to writing rather than describing it as a medium in the transmissive sense, and it's possible to write things that count as short stories, both in print and comic media.

Let's argue about this; it's interesting. I'll admit that perhaps I'm being a bit, er, traditional in sticking with the traditional view of literature/fiction (i.e., it is prose), but your view of short fiction is a bit too transgressive for me.

To me, one constraint of short fiction is that it does not have the advantage of relying on any type of visual medium to convey meaning. Short fiction, as it is usually defined, has to do its job competently and well with words only. Too much description, and the story bogs down. Too much explanation of who is doing what, and the plot stalls. So writers have to be especially terse or at least economical.

Comic books can completely eliminate physical description and much explanation of the action. Comic book authors don't even have to tag their dialog because we can see who is speaking--if the art is any good, we can even see how the speaker is feeling at the moment. The author is spared the necessity of bogging down the story with such details. He or she doesn't need to display the particular skill sets that the prose-only authors must.

Not to mention that the brain responds differently to art than it does to mere print. It's not a level playing field. How can we judge this combination medium according to the same criteria as a print medium? We can't. We must allow a consideration of the artwork in this particular case, but if we do that, we judge such a work by completely different standards than we do straight prose work. It's hard enough to compare prose with prose; we do both art forms (prose and comic books) a disservice if we attempt to put them into the same category. Why shouldn't comic books be accorded the respect of having their own category?

P.S. Heh. If a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps a comic book should be required to be a thousand words shorter than the maximum allowable verbiage for every picture it contains. (Okay, I don't believe that, but there should be some kind of compensating factor for the advantages of the visual component in these works.)

Well, that's my argument. Or some of it.