On Tuesday, March 18, 2003, at 09:13 am, G. D. Akin wrote:
William T Goodall wrote:
- 1966 Babel-17
Samuel R.
Delany
- 1968 Einstein Intersection Samuel
R.
Delany
- 1971 A Time of Changes Robert
Silverberg
- 1981 The Claw of the Conciliator Gene Wolfe
I've read all of those...
I have all of these but something keeps jumping past them in my want to read
list. I've been putting off Delany because my one experience with him was
"Dahlgren" -- HATED IT! I'm afraid the two mentioned above will be more of
the same.
They are very different. Delany's writing has several different periods, each stylistically quite different. _Dhalgren_ is a period to itself :)
Actually I only read about 20 *new* novels a year. I do reread a few more, although I couldn't say how many at all.
...and none of those. My fiction reading has been declining steadily for years. Down from > 400 novels a year to ~ 20.
What happened? That is a considerable drop.
That drop has been over 25 years or so. I've pretty much read the complete works of everybody from Poul Anderson to Roger Zelazny that was published before the mid-eighties. My sf/fantasy collection has around 2500 - 3000 books [1]. I also have F&SF and Analog from 1978 to the present[2] which must be about 600 magazines...[3]
So I see less and less stuff that seems original, and more and more that seems like 'read that before, and done better'.
An other thing is reading more non-fiction, and spending time on the computer/internet that once might have been novel reading time. My typical Amazon book parcel now contains 3 O'Reilly titles for each novel...
And finally there is TV. For several years I didn't even own one, since there was nothing worth watching anyway. Now there is Buffy and Angel and Alias and other neat stuff that uses up several hours a week. And the movie channels...
[1] About 15 years since I last tried to count it, and it was > 2000 then.
[2] Years since I read a whole issue from cover to cover.
[3] Plus miscellaneous other chapbooks and old magazines. Like Analog vol. LXXII No. 4 for December 1963 with part 1 of 'Dune World' by Frank Herbert.
--
William T Goodall
Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk
Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/
First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.
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