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About me and the site | Twenty-something male who likes text. Obsessed with things such as books, reality, communication, and one or two tv-shows.

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e-mail | J. Nicklas Andersson

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2002-03-21

I was reading through Follow Me Here when I saw something frightening. To my great shame I must admitt that I had missed it totally. Spike Milligan is dead. Not so surprising that he was of a rather high age, but still. Why has this not been given more cover than it did? Had Mr Milligan not been an old comedian but a young musician instead; lets say 23 years old, couldn’t play the A-chord on guitar to save his life and who died because of a speedball OD than they would have given him a worldwide cover and huge headlines on the front of every paper. People who knows what they’re doing gets nothing, and this makes me sad. All this means that the chances of a new series of the Goon Show is even less than the chances of a new Monty Python season. After all, The Pythons are all alive minus one, but all the Goons are gone period. Damn.

I found the following piece in my scrapfile and since it reasemle a somewhat coherent thought in the midst of it, I though I might just as well post it here.

A while ago on a mailinglist there were a wild discussion about the acceptance of science fiction in the literary world. This is a topic that some people have very strong views about, mostly of them stand on the side of those who feel that the genre is marginalised.

I have been giving this some thought and come to the conclusion that both sides are right. Science fiction is at the same time both marginalised and accepted. Some authors move seamlessly in and out of the genre without being torn to pieces., while others are simply being ignored. This has its reasons. Most hard science fiction is thrown aside because from a literary point of view it isn’t interesting. A story where the science is more important than both plot and characters isn’t going to attract a wide audience outside those who really are interested in the science bit. Those which focuses upon the characters and plot are going to get more readers and much more acceptance outside the genre.

I think this is a fair trade off. It is not the whole world and I can’t understand why people whine about why the literary cabal never includes Isaac Asimov or (Sir) Arthur C. Clarke, aka The Boring As Hell Twins, into their canon. Strictly speaking, most hard sf is just manic masturbation over a glossy NASA-manual.

The ilk of Lewis Shiner, Iain Banks and Jonathan Lethem on the other hand, are storytellers. They write about people with more than one dimension and they dare to experiment without being afraid of total stylistic failure. They get credit where credit is due because they’ve earned it from a literary point of view. That is the important bit, because if you do not care about producing solid literature with depth, there is no way in hell to gain acceptance in the literary circles. This should be elementary knowledge.

(For the record: I like some hard sf, but I feel this obsession with plausible physics and God know what is a bit misdirected. Literature should be about more than a shiny object that with plausible physics can lift a car fifteen inches above the ground.)