Word: sf
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...fairer estimate lies somewhere between drinks. Although writers from Poe and Hawthorne to William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess and Doris Lessing have written what could be called science fiction, professional science-fiction writers have rarely been encouraged to be good stylists as well. This is partly because SF publishing and marketing methods make little distinction between the kind of star-schlock in which intergalactic cops battle hypothyroid blobs, and a well-wrought literary work in which far-reaching concepts and social problems are dramatized with intelligence, wit and verbal skill. Even the better SF writers often find it necessary to clutter...
...Self-oppression: As gay liberation grows. we will find out up tight brothers and sisters, particularly those who are making a buck off our ghetto, coming on strong to defend the?status quo. This is self-oppression: "Things in SF are OK": "gay people just aren't together...
...DIFFICULT to say what happened to the science fiction I knew and loved and why it happened. Very few of the top SF writers now concern themselves with galactic empires, and struggles between human life and other life forms, and with the infinite shapes and forms that a human social system may take and what--in the logical extreme--those different social systems can mean to the individuals in them...
...science fiction isn't what it used to be. Or maybe I'm not what I used to be. Or maybe Kurt Vonnegut has spoiled all other science fiction (if that's really what it is he writes) for me. In any case, the "best" of last year's "SF" didn't particularly move...
...Latin America, he observes, students who threaten violence to the school are shot--and expect to be shot. Recent events in Barzun's native France would not confirm that observation, and he probably would not really call in the firing squad anyway. But a tougher stance like that of SF State's Hayakawa might have saved Columbia--that is, if it were worth saving...