Discuss a different sf author every day during the Science Fiction Message Board's Author August
Dead Air sez,
At the Science Fiction Message Board we are gearing up for one of the busiest times of our year - our fourth annual Author August! Each Author August we celebrate a different sf writer every day, with reviews, reminiscences, cover scans, and general comments. This is a post-a-thon open to all who wish to contribute, anything you wish to post about the author of the day, we want to have! And boy, have we got a strong roster of authors past and present for you this year:Spend Author August with Science Fiction! (Thanks, DeadAir!)8/1 Arthur C. Clarke
8/2 Vernor Vinge
8/3 Vonda McIntyre
8/4 Robert A. Heinlein
8/5 Roger Zelazny
8/6 Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
8/7 Lloyd Biggle Jr.
8/8 Elizabeth Bear
8/9 Elizabeth Moon
8/10 Edgar Rice Burroughs
8/11 H. Beam Piper
8/12 Keith Laumer
8/13 Joan D. Vinge
8/14 J.T. McIntosh
8/15 Katherine MacLean
8/16 Bruce Sterling
8/17 William Gibson
8/18 Pat Cadigan
8/19 Ursula K. Le Guin
8/20 Storm Constantine
8/21 Rosel George Brown
8/22 Ray Bradbury
8/23 Caitlin Kiernan
8/24 Tanith Lee
8/25 Peter F. Hamilton
8/26 Stanislaw Lem
8/27 Neil Gaiman
8/28 Zenna Henderson
8/29 Michael Moorcock
8/30 Jules Verne
8/31 Iain M. Banks
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Glad to see Iain M. Banks is on there, but no Philip K. Dick? Asimov? I assume they must have been in past discuss-a-thons, and are exempt, but still.
Banksie, but no Stross or MacLeod?
Banksie, but no Stross or MacLeod?
I see at least three days I'll need to pop in
Joan Vinge and Tanith Lee but no Neal Stephenson? Where is Neal Stephenson? Can't help but say that most of this list is milquetoast. Peter F. Hamilton?
Who is Chelsea Quinn Yarbro? Storm Constantine? Caitlin Kiernan?
Oh. Vampire romance novels.
Look, I'm all for flying the freak flag of "science fiction" over all our favorite genre geekery, but come on. A line has to be drawn.
There's lots of folks that I miss there, but someone that I REALLY miss is Bob Adams. Great Room Parties, Bob!
I have a lot of fondness for Edgar Rice Burroughs (even though some of the Tarzan books are super-racist), so I'm always glad to see him get attention.
Then there's the small problem that Burroughs, besides being a racist, couldn't write for shit.
"Then there's the small problem that Burroughs, besides being a racist, couldn't write for shit."
I've never seen anyone make claims for ERB being a giant of literature. Writing quality isn't the point in pulp fiction, character and story is. Tarzan, like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, is one of those rare characters who travel far beyond their place of origin.
As far as his racism goes, there was plenty around in the high literary world at the time he was writing. Modernism is full of it, from TS Eliot's anti-semitism to Ezra Pound's fascism. I'm not excusing it, just pointing out the tenor of the time. I've been re-reading Joyce's Ulysses recently and even that's tainted by black stereotypes. Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray includes a nasty caricature of a Jewish theatre owner, etc. It was a different age; deal with it.
Hey thanks for all the great comments everyone! I'm pleased to see how emphatic you all are about your favorite authors.
Of course there are only 31 days in the month, but we've done this for four years now counting this one. So the author you love and think is missing, was quite likely covered in the past, and even more likely to be covered in the future (we're all future thinkers here, right??)
The list was created by an open nomination process and we didn't pick apart whether a given author has written primarily in other genres as long as they write SOME science fiction. The idea was to mix the giants with the up-and-comers, and this isn't supposed to be a list of the best ever or any such. Just a celebration of people who write science fiction across the gamut.
Now that Cory has been kind enough to post us in Boing Boing, maybe next year we can get the nomination process posted too and get more input in the list. If the nomination process next year isn't worthy of Boing Boing, you'll still know where to find us now though!
I would refer anyone who argues that Burroughs "couldn't write for shit" to Richard A. Lupoff's excellent [i]Master of Adventure: The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs[/i].
JOHNCOULTHART,
Don't tell me to ''deal with it,'' in that snotty professorial voice. I'm quite aware that history didn't begin at a Sex Pistols' concert. The ''racist'' acknowledgment was a parenthetical aside; my main point was that ERB was a lousy writer. Now I'll get all professorial on you: ''Writing quality'' is ALWAYS the point, unless you've got a tin ear or are just learning to read. I remind you that Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and Raymond Chandler, among many other ''quality'' writers, wrote for pulp magazines. And of course I thank the creators of Tarzan, The Shadow, Flash Gordon et al , but I sure ain't going to read very much of them.
The day quality writing doesn't matter is the day those barbarian-besieged walls we live behind come tumbling down.
''deal with it,'' indeed....
@#12 Mingross,
Thank you, but I can read well enough to recognize good writing from bad writing. I don't need a biographer/critic's assessment of his subject's abilities.
The best thing about Tarzan was those old MGM movies, and I don't think they met with ERB's approval; Tarzan wasn't lord enough to be his "Lord of The Jungle."
Um, the "deal with it" comment was appended to the point about racism, not the remark about quality.
As to that point, if prose quality was the sole criteria by which I had to judge writers I'd be throwing out many favourites such as HG Wells (who struggles in his early work to compete with another favourite, Robert Louis Stevenson), William Hope Hodgson, lots of the Weird Tales writers. Maybe even HP Lovecraft who now receives the accolade of being a Penguin Classic but has been routinely dismissed by the Edmund Wilsons of the world for being a "bad" writer.
I value vision and imagination as much as I value decent prose; sf and fantasy very often have far more of the former over the latter, hence the snobbery which prevails in literary circles towards the genres. The same applies in other forms of art: I wouldn't dream of judging, say, The Cramps next to Bartok yet I value both for entirely different reasons. Or one of Andre Tarkovsky's films against something like Django, Kill. Art functions on a variety of levels and one measure of its success can be found in the effect it has on the wider world. HP Lovecraft has had far more of an impact on the culture of his century than his vaunted contemporary John Dos Passos. Quality comes in the substance and durability of the thing imagined, as well as in the structuring of the words which convey the authorial imagination.
Points taken, JC. You are a reasonable man.
I was raised on ''Weird Tales'' and Lovecraft. I must admit there are times when I miss the pulps and their undemanding fare. I knew there would be a price to pay for a formal education and the study of Literature, but....
Ah, a full moon!
I hate to be late to the "where's my favourite author?" party, but none of the 2007 nominees for the Best Novel Nebula Award are on this list. And none of the 2008 nominees for the Best Novel Hugo Award are on this list.
Jardine - appreciated, but again, this doesn't purport itself to be any sort of "best of" list. There are plenty of those out there and you mention a couple very good ones.
This is a set of authors, old and new, who were nominated by people who made no claim to be an panel of experts. What's more we tried NOT to put up the same authors we'd done in the past 3 years (though if somebody wandered in and asked for one, we went for it).
I do hope we can have a wider pool of people nominating next year, and I'd love to use Boing Boing as a vehicle for it if possible. However, this is still a list of 31 authors who write or wrote science fiction, and I personally find many of them to be great.
We do have a wide open message board for people to post about other science fiction topics (including other authors) too. So feel free to hop over and post about the Hugo and Nebula nominees too. Nobody is excluded!
What, no Isaac Asimov? No Frank Herbert?
No Neal Stephenson?
No Harry Turtledove?
Moon - I do hate to repeat myself, but all of those authors have been included in the past 3 years leading up to this one.
This isn't a "best of" list, and you are certainly more than welcome to come over to the board and post about all four of those authors and more any day that you like. Please do!
We also hope you'll come around next year for the nomination phase so you won't feel left out if somebody else didn't suggest your favorite author for you.
Yo Dead Air!
Where's Octavia Butler?!?!?!! And, I hope that Harlan Ellison doesn't know where you live. So, I guess you might want to extend this to next month. ANd, I know that Theodore Sturgeon is on that list when I go back and look....RIGHT?
Wow. It's great to hear from all the commenters who are hosting their own author events, but you all forgot to include your URLs.
Thanks for the support Antinous, but mostly, I'm just happy to see that SF readers are still so enthusiastic about their favorite authors!
Of course we did Octavia Butler, Harlan Ellison, and Theodore Sturgeon in past years, just like every other author that people have accused us of not including! So far nobody has mentioned one author that hasn't been in an Author August since we started it in 2005!
And of course, as I keep pointing out, our board is open for people to post about those favorites every day of the year to begin with. Here's a link to the index of authors we already have existing threads for:
http://sciencefiction.yuku.com/topic/408
If you see somebody that's not on there that should be, you can start a thread as well, and we'll add it!
For the authors you wish were on this year's Author August list, well there's always next year, and the year after that, and the year after that...
is the objective to savour and appreciate? Or to bicker over the menu? Garcon! the whine list!
Oh, how delightful! I imagine I'll never actually -participate-, what with the need to finish two book projects and various sundry work before school begins, but- How delightful! I will indeed look over this. Thanks Dead Air, you guys are swell.
Ian Banks, Ian M. Banks - he so good. Glad to see him recognized. I grew up reading all that great stuff from the 60s, and sort of couldn't get into the new SF authors that emerged later on - until Banks.
A few points.
1. Philip K. Dick should be on the list every time, in my opinion.
2. Burroughs was no worse a writer than Lovecraft. Both are unexceptional, but a lot of fun to read. Especially when you're 12.
3. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming are fun to read at any age, and both might be considered racist by today's standards.
4. Seriously. No PKD?
5. I would ask that Finnegans Wake be considered "speculative fiction." If you're going to include multiple vampire romance novelists, can't Joyce have a day?
Takeshi -
Phillip K. Dick's thread, all 11 pages of posts, is right here on our board:
http://sciencefiction.yuku.com/topic/409
We'd love to have you come over and and more posts about him, as we can never get enough.
That said, if we figured out who the very best 31 authors are and featured the same 31 every Author August, it would be a very dull event. We make no claim that this is a "best of" list, it's just a list of great authors who write science fiction, and next year we hope it will be a completely different group. Perhaps if you come around to make nominations PKD will be on the list again.
As for "multiple vampire romance novelists" that's just a false claim. Everybody on our list writes science fiction though some might write other material as well. Seeing as Asimov, Niven, Poul Anderson wrote some Fantasy novels, it's really unfair to overlook the SF that some people better known for other genres may have written. Indeed Octavia Butler, who's almost always characterized as an SF writer, has written vampire novels too!
Where is L. Ron Hubbard ... The 10 book "Mission Earth" series was huge!
Oh, I was just kidding about that. Sorry. Someone had mentioned that a couple of these people were writing "vampire romance," and I saw it as an invitation to mention the most famous work of fiction that no one's ever read.
Except for me and close to a dozen other people throughout the last century.
As for PKD, thanks for the link! I understand why you can't include everyone, every time, but still I must insist that Dick be included. Every day of every year, if possible. Maybe we could start a separate list entirely, where every known author is compared to Philip K. Dick, every day, forever.
That said, there are some excellent choices here. Stanislaw Lem, Heinlein, Gaiman, Bradbury, and Jules Verne! I'll definitely be taking part, if only with my eyes.
@31, the list is for "science fiction", not "steaming piles of poorly written dreck"
''Finnegan's Wake''...
Do you think a dozen people have read it? I've known dozens who've tried to read it. I tried, a dozen times. ''Ulysses'' is ''Dick and Jane'' compared to FW. It's the orneriest book I ever tackled, to quote my favorite literary critic, Master Huckleberry Finn.