I was ranting about this on my lj (my) last night.
Thinking about it for five seconds brings the realisation that they're prioritising the supposed effect of gender over and above the effects of national differences, dialect differences, differences in the systems used to teach English composition, differences in people's levels of education, whether people regularly use English professionally or not, whether people are native speakers or second/third language speakers AND the effect of their first language on their English constructions, plus, of course, the effects of dyslexia etc.
God forbid I might assume I have more in common with a bloke I went to school with and have shared the same culture with my whole life than, for example, an 85 year old woman from Delhi.
Thanks for the extensive Kevin Baclone suggestions Tom. I'll need to investigate some of those names. You're spot on with Mervyn Peake's influence on fiction but perhaps spec fic even more than fantasy. I understand about not naming living authors as I too deliberately avoided naming my favourite author and favourite author's favourite authors.
Jonathan you're too cryptic for me today. Sometimes my brain catches up after a few days.
Ruskin could be seen as a Baclone in his own right because of his, thankfully often hidden, influence on subsequent culture.
Perhaps one should begin any search for a Kevin Baclone of SF by defining parameters. I was thinking of the person who seems to be connected by a short chain of influence to everyone else.
Apropos of nothing my friends and I were playing six degrees of separation a coupla years ago when we had the bizarre revelation that all 19th & 20th century English culture is closely related in one way or another to Margaret Murray.
Beware the robothoover:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/24/killer_dyson/
I suppose that our individual responses to art are one of the deep mysteries of cognition, and the number of possible variables of style and content in a work of fiction must be almost unquantifiable, but I'm always in hopes of hearing Great Thoughts or adding to my store of inscrutable examples and intriguing questions.
If Rousseau wanted to paint like Ingres (quelle horreur!) and Ingres wanted to paint like... does artistic influence then become a sort of six degrees of Kevin Bacon game? And, if so, who is SF's Kevin Bacon?
Remember the "which SF writer are you" thingy that y'all analysed to within an inch of its life? Well I did it and it said I'm Chip Delaney which I'm not (although I am like some of the other folks who got the same answer...). Anyway, instead of analysing the thing, I went back to put in my ideal-person answers and it told me that I was my favourite SF author. Which makes sense (if you give the quiz any credit at all). Something kept nagging away at me and I realised that it's this:
Why aren't any of my favourite SF author's favourite SF authors in my top ten favourite SF authors?
I enjoyed writing that sentence sooo much more than you're gonna enjoy reading it ;-)
And yes that's favourite author as in favourite read not favourite person. Ideas? Similar mystifying questions? Or am I on my own with this one?
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