On Fri, Mar 30, 2012 at 7:37 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian <[email protected]>wrote:
> > After this very epic Christopher Priest rant that udupa pointed me to > elsewhere .. > http://www.christopher-priest.co.uk/journal/1077/hull-0-scunthorpe-3/ > > Charlie Stross' twitter feed has a cute puppy display pic and there are > tshirts too. https://twitter.com/#!/cstross/status/185353259169488897 The whole thing promises to be fun. Here is Priest, an excellent author and reigning grandfather of British SF, firing slimeballs at three younger authors who I think are the best in the business today - Mieville, Adam Roberts, and Charlie Stross. (Greg Bear does not belong.) I planned to order enough popcorn and sit back and watch the action unfold, but Stross is being more of a kitten than a puppy, refusing to play along. (But yes, Stross's reaction was excellent, probably the best thing he could have done. In my personal brownie points register, I have moved some from Priest's account to Stross's) > > > Sad / funny thing is I don't quite disagree with Priest - at least because > he appears to share my taste for "old style" SF .. Poul Anderson, Frederick > Pohl, various of the older Baen authors etc, and the few bits of Stross > I've skimmed through aren't as much to my taste as they probably should be. > > Here's hundred rupees that says Priest hates the Baen school of SF. Have we lived and fought in vain, and so on. Most Baen books are ordinary hackneyed pulp fiction cliches, but SET IN SPACE!![more exclamation marks] Stross is a genius. He is one of the few SF authors whose understanding of how computer science works is closer to how it actually works, and that results in the right kind of geekery in his books. I can see how a book like Accelerando can piss people off with its singleminded goal of mindfuckery - but to me that book was one of the finest examples of 'literature of ideas'. It was like an Olaf Stapledon book, but in a language that was much less tedious, and hence a pleasure to read. While he is more famous for this kind of SF, that's not all there is to him. The Eschaton books, Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, were excellent hard sci-fi/ space opera. Little Brother read like a Heinlein juvenile updated for the Internet age. I'm fine with rants, and anything that breaks the circlejerk that the world of SF writers tends to be. But Priest's rant seemed to be for all the wrong reasons and just painted him as an old sourpuss. > -- > Suresh Ramasubramanian ([email protected]) > >
