Erik Nelson@132: A character called Morris Minor (commonly known as Mini) appears in The Case of the Silver Egg by Desmond Skirrow.
Epacris@125: same as Joel; I was first aware of HHGG through the radio series (and still get quite annoyed when people treat the books as the first point of reference for the series), but I have never been very car-conscious. I think I finally grasped the point when I saw the TV version; at this point a number of car names come up on the screen.
abi@113: Despite being in Britain, I didn't know that either when I first heard it. My initial interpretation of 'Ford Prefect' was that it meant an official in charge of a ford (across a river), though the narrative didn't seem to support that.
Strangely, I associate 'dark and and stormy night' with the three men who sat in a cave. ('It was a dark and stormy night. Three men sat in a cave. And one said to another, "Bill, tell us a story". And Bill began: "It was a dark and stormy night...."') I am sure I first heard the sentence as part of this story; it was some time later that I discovered Snoopy, and long after that that I heard of Bulwer-Lytton.
The names of the vowels are equivalent to their long sounds (more or less: long U is only sometimes pronounced Yoo, since at other times it is Oo; and long A is sometimes Ay, sometimes Ah. And so on.) But yes, when I was forced to identify the letters by sound, we used the short sounds.
This of course raises a fundamental problem for the plan of identifying letters by sound; many of them have more than one sound.
Terry Karney: I think the idea was that it was too difficult to learn the sounds of the letters and their names at once, so they would teach children the sounds first. (My situation was not typical, or at least was not expected to be; they were working on the assumption that entrants normally did not know their alphabet.)
When I started infants' school (age 5), I already knew the letters of the alphabet, by their proper names (Ay, Bee, Cee, etc.). However, at infants' school this was thought too sophisticated, and we had to call them A, Buh, Cuh, etc. I remember being made to recite my alphabet on arrival at the school (I suppose to check I relly knew it and was not making it up); I got as far as Uh, Vuh, Wuh, but then got stuck pronouncing the letter that comes after that. 'X-, Xu-'
'Ecks', said the teacher.
Relieved by this but somewhat bemused, I called it Ecks.
(Later the real names of the letters were revealed to other children when I was off sick; so for a while I was going around the school saying A, Buh, Cuh when everyone else had stopped.)
Zelda@77: possibly you were raising your hand the wrong way. Yes, I know this doesn't make sense, but it seems to happen. I am quite often passed over when I raise my hand in seminars; but on one occasion the chair actually said to me 'Do you have a question, or are you just waving your hand in the air?' Why, I wondered, would I be waving my hand in the air if I didn't have a question - but obviously he had real difficuly interpreting it.
There is, I think, a quite widespread use of 'pleasure', to mean not just 'everything pleasant', but something more restricted, the precise nature of which I find it hard to define. There are some things we do 'for pleasure' - i.e. because we find them pleasant, and for no other reason - and there are other things we do for other reasons, e.g. because we find them challenging, or because we learn from them, etc. - which we may indeed enjoy, but aren't just doing them 'for pleasure'; the enjoyment is consequent on something else.
So when Roberts et al. are accused of 'privileging difficulty over pleasure' I take it the point is not that they think we shouldn't enjoy what we read; it's that they think that mere enjoyability by itself isn't a good reason for reading something. There seems to be some truth in this accusation.
(That said, 'difficulty' isn't a good word for the thing they privilege - the aren't so absurd as to think that the fact that something is difficult by itself gives us reason to read it. And I agree that 'pleasant but mediocre' doesn't mean that pleasantness is a demerit - rather, it means pleasantness is its only merit, and not a great one - but that still implies he's privileging something else over pleasure.)
One thing that is puzzling me a bit about this discussion is that a lot of people seem to be writing as if fiction were divided into literary and genre - genre, therefore, just being whatever does not have the virtues and/or faults of literary writing. But this is not so; there is a vast amount of 'mainstream' fiction that is not literary by any ordinary criterion.
I'm wondering why this escapes notice. One reason may be that genre people were often forced to read literary fiction at school, and literary people quite often read genre fiction for relaxation, so they register on one another's radar in a way that the great mass of popular fiction doesn't. But reflecting on some of Nick Mamatas' comments, I think it may also be the case that SF/F just has more in common with literary fiction than the mass of popular fiction has with either - both present a kind of challenge; with both it often makes sense to ask 'What is the big idea of this work?'.
ajay@550: not quite. The plain Greek for 'rock' is petra (feminine): the name is Petros (masculine). Perhaps it should be translated Rocky?
Tim Walters @ 164, et al.
(Sorry for the delayed response; I've been away.)
I agree on the shared sensibility; but sometimes 'fantasy' seems to be used in a way that is much narrower than that, as when people say that fantasy is all about battles and kings and rightful heirs and so on. (I'm not suggesting this is a fair description even of the kind of works people have in mind - it's rather like the claim that all literary fiction is about English professors who seduce their students - but clearly it is a particular group of books that people are thinking of when they make it.) So I think there is a strange dissonance between what comes to mind when people say 'fantasy', and what the most successful fantasy - even that which is acknowledged as such - is actually like.
As for Helprin: I'm not sure what his other works are like. One reason why what might be thought of as science fiction and fantasy works often end up on the mainstream shelves is a desire to keep an author's work together.
B. Durbin@150:
This is as opposed to a fantasy author whose work I rather liked up until I read his award-winning trilogy which was a thinly-disguised Lord of the Rings. I mean, they even had an escape through a dwarf mine with a kraken at the door.
If we're thinking of the same person, I believe there is a reason for this. He had written some sequels to LOTR - professional fanfic, as it were - and the Tolkien estate, oddly enough, refused him permission to publish them. So he did a rewrite of LOTR, so that he could publish his other works as sequels to that.
most of the world seems to think that fantasy is ONLY Tolkien-esque, and therefore you have books such as Mark Helprin's A Winter's Tale shelved with Literature, because, well, that's not fantasy, is it?
I wonder how true this is. Certainly when the word 'fantasy' is uttered, people tend to think first of the Tolkienesque stuff. But when you think about who the most prominent fantasy authors are, they would include J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, none of whom write that sort of thing. Admittedly I'm looking at it from a British perspective, and all these writers are British - perhaps the American situation is different - but there again prominent fantasy writers would include, say, Naomi Novik, who doesn't write Tolkienesque stuff. I think all these people would be widely accepted as writing fantasy. So if some fantasy is ending up on the literature shelves - which no doubt it is, just as some science fiction does - the reasons must be more complicated than that.
Xopher: Many religions are, at least partly, about their founders. In that case, if their founders were con-men, it would be a problem for the religion. Perhaps the fact that Gardner insisted he was not the founder of Wicca makes it easier to make the separation in this case.
I just searched for 'register a blimp'. It said there were approximately 31,000 results, but when I went through them there turned out to be only 12. (Not 12,000: 12.) This is a weird problem that Google has sometimes. There is a reason for it, but I forget the details.
Watson's marriages: I think in canon it's reasonably clear; he married Mary Morstan; she died; some time later he married someone else, about whom we get no details.
However, while who he married is clear enough, the dates of his marriages cause a lot of problems, which has led fans to invent other marriages for him in order to make the stories consistent. So the 'which wife' thing may be not so much a direct joke on canon but a joke on fannish speculation.
Patrick@19
If so, he's being remarkably unclear about it
Well, yes, but if he means it the other way, he's being unclear about it as well. I still don't think 'scientifically unsupported near futures' needs to mean that all near futures are scientifically unsupported, any more than 'pink elephants' means that all elephants are pink.
I agree with 'Non fanatici, sed lectores'. My first instinctive reading of 'Fanatici non sunt, lectitant', before I had grasped the context, was 'Fans don't exist, they read'. (Which one can almost get to make sense - being a fan isn't just a state of being, it involves doing something, namely reading - but not the sense required.)
Everyone here seems to be reading Jeffries as saying 'near futures (which are scientifically unsupported, of course)'. It's not clear to me that he is saying this. Can't he just mean that American SF tends to be both near-future and scientifically unsupported?
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| 2009 | 36 |
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