Lordy, this J. Neil Schulman? (I cannot find Adam Cadre's MSTing of Schulman's review of Showgirls on the Web, but it -- like his Eye of Argon effort -- was painfully funny.)
Bob McManus -- I'm not sure if Lafferty has any real successors, but heavens to Betsy, if anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
It's funny seeing the suggestion that The Atlantic goes after science fiction, because the last time I saw a critical hatchet job published there, it was buried in critical faves Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, and (spectacularly misguidedly, I thought) Don DeLillo. (Here I risk veering off into discussing/attacking Dale Peck, but that's even further off-topic and Teresa's covered that ground.)
What DO people like Martin Amis or Chris Farah say when the Asimo robots come marching into society? Will they pretend that robots do not exist, ignore that robots have a direct precedent -- indeed, direct inspiration -- in SF literature? Then it's they who're living in fantasy land.
As noted, Martin Amis has dabbled in science fiction before; his reaction would almost certainly be to incorporate the marching robots into a novel, one which probably wouldn't be any good. (Aside from Time's Arrow and the wonderful, breathtakingly nasty London Fields, his entire canon that I've run into has ranged from mediocre to jaw-droppingly bad. There are some amusingly mean reviews of his last, Yellow Dog; the one I'm thinking of seems to have been written by someone named Tibor Fischer.)
And to Robert L.'s comment about Ballard and Amis, I'd add Iain Banks (various people on this board can correct me, but I believe he is considered a Serious [Pop] Novelist in England). Various Brits like Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, and Anthony Burgess have crossed over the other way and written genre fiction at one point or another. Other than Richard Powers* and Joyce Carol Oates (and I suppose John Updike's occasional half-hearted dabbling), I'm having trouble thinking of major American writers who did the same.
* Whose Galatea 2.2 is absolutely heartbreaking.
It's hardly germaine to the topic, but hey -- Time's Arrow is a pretty darn good book. You can now go back to dismembering this sentence: "'Max Tivoli' is entertaining and engaging enough to rival any fun, lighthearted fantasy paperback, while also so poetic, and so powerful, that it should please the most particular literary critic."
(Because remember, fun books aren't powerful, and powerful books aren't fun! Make sure to tell a child today, and smother her love of reading!)
How did this particular discussion break out in this thread? I'm so confused.
I'm preemptively trying to prevent Skot's head from bursting like an overripe melon at the mention of Stevie Nicks. You wouldn't want to be responsible for the death of the funniest Estonian on the Internet, would you?
Patrick, I hope my email in response to your Heinlein question made it to you; if not, please drop me a note.
The New York color photographs are great -- early color photograph always throws me, although the gold standard for that is this collection of Tzarist-era Russian photography. I just think of the past in black and white.
If I spoke French, I might understand this 500-word palindrome by Georges Perec. Also note the URL.
And condemnation of Moore outside the blogosphere?
Well, long before he reached new heights of damnfoolishness, Moore got jumped TV Nation-style (quite entertainingly) for being a hypocrite in Might. The Nation asked if his Stupid White Men made Moore a "direct literary descendant" of "over-the-top idea man" Adolph Hitler. And The New Republic beat Moore silly specifically for that comment.
Does Michael Moore still get to appear on MSNBC?
Time's Arrow is very much a conceit that walks like a novel, but I enjoyed it. London Fields was also quite good. The next Amis book I picked up, though (The Information, I believe) was so bad that I was scared away from the rest of his work, quite possibly for good.
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| 2004 | 6 |
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| 2002 | 7 |
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