Author | Title | Rating | Latest |
|
A book recommendation, and brief notes On the advice of a friend, I'm reading Sheri Tepper's Grass. It's excellent, halfway through; hopefully the second half is as good. Grass is world-building at its best; its society reminds me of Joan D. Vinge's The Snow Queen (though the story is more interesting), and its ecology reminds me of Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, if you can imagine such a mix. Fair warning, though: plenty of books start out great like this (Vinge's is an example), and then fall flat through horrendous endings. Fortunately, the friend who recommended this book maintains that it's one of his favorite science-fiction novels, so I have high hopes. I am just not interested in them because they are conventional. That's why people like them. They want the same thing, the same characters. Great writing to me is, you open the book and you are surprised each time out.This might be true of a tried-and-true genre like romance (although even there there's a significant amount of play around the joints). But this is almost definitely not true of speculative fiction, except, perhaps, for the "genre convention" that there is some element of unreality in almost all SF. Of course, the solution to this problem is that all good genre fiction just gets reclassified as "literature," a fate that has befallen such classics as George Orwell's 1984 and Richard Adams's delightful Watership Down. But if you classify willy-nilly like that, then you're begging the question: of course all genre writing is conventional, if everything conventional is genre writing. |
Steven Wu's Book Reviews |