OFF: Reading Material

[M Holmes]

Mark Lee writes:


> I've refrained from joining in the various posts about who likes what
> etc.  As many of us have said it's a matter of personal taste, and I've
> never felt qualified enough to 'critique' any author well enough to post.

I can relate to the view that it's unfair to criticise writing if you
haven't done it, but I figure once you've read a few hundred SF books
then it's fair to criticise some by comparison against the general
standards.

> I think over the years my taste like most peoples has changed, along
> with other members of the group I gave up on Asimov and Clarke years
> ago, I never could get on with most of Heinlen's (sp) work, I hated
> Greg Bear but forced myself to read it having bought it, then gave it
> away to a guy on Fidonet.  I wonder how many of us started off reading
> 'pulp' novellas by the likes of EE Doc Smith and progressed to
> lengthier tomes by the likes of Asimov, then after a few years found
> ourselves reading material which in many cases was a rehash of some
> other authors works, thus we diversified and even moved away from
> mainstream Sci-Fi in an attempt to discover 'new horizons' (pun).

I started out reading Clarke's kids books and some of the Tom Swift
ones, plus any astronomy book I could get my hands on.  Later, by age
10, I'd wangled access to the grownups section of the library and
started making my way through the SF and science books (plus the James
Bond books). That had stuff like Knight, Sheckley, Aldiss, Clement,
Clarke, Disch, Moorcock, Brunner, Heinlein - a good sample of the Golden
Age and 60's authors. I came to the space opera sagas from Doc Smith and
Asimov fairly late in the day at age 14 when I'd started reading other
pulp SF like the Eternal Champion novels and novels from TV series like
Space 1999. By the time I was at uni I'd developed a taste for fairly
hard SF and speculative fiction with the occasional foray into fantasy
where I always preferred novels with a limited and consisten magic
technology.

It is, as you say, largely a matter of taste and age, but I do believe
there's a drift to quality after the first few hundred.

> Mark (Hasbeen)

FoFP