Vonnegut gets labeled him as Literary Fiction and I complain that the same is often done of Margaret Atwood's work. It seems to me that if one writes using the conventions of a genre then then the product is of that genre, dispite the tastes of the author or how well written it may be. However, it seems all too often well written science fiction must be something else while poorly written stories using the convention of science fiction are merely science fiction. Science fiction has come a long way I suppose, but it seems a matter of degrees.
I've read the first thirty pages of a tremendous amount of science fiction. One thing I've found is that, no matter how good the ideas are, a lot of it is terribly written. Years ago I read Asimov's Foundation trilogy. The ideas were captivating , but the writing! I wouldn't employ him to write junk mail! I loved the film 2001, saw it six times and read the book twice. And then I read a book called The Lost Worlds of 2001 in which Clarke chronicles the disagreements between himself and Kubrick - he goes through all his ideas left by the wayside, 'Look at this idea he left out, and this idea!' and at the end of the book one has an intense admiration of Kubrick. I read 2010 when it came out, and it was like all the stuff that Kubrick had been sensible enough to leave out of 2002.
What's good? Vonnegut. He's great, but he's not an SF writer. People criticise him for saying it, but it's true. He started with one or two ideas he wanted to convey and happened to find some conventions of SF that suited his purpose.
I thought 'The Sirens of Titan' was close in many ways to 'Hitchhiker's'. The Chrono-synclastic infundibulum, for example, if I've got that right.
That's right, yes. It's funny, people make this comparison, and I'm always incredibly flattered because I don't think it's a fair comparison. It's unfair to Vonnegut, apart from anything else, because when you are talking about the best books (I'm not talking about his later books, where i can't understand how he gets the enthusiasm to get in front of the typewriter and actually write the stuff. It's like going through the motions of his own stylistic tricks), those first three were deeply serious books. My boks aren't serious at that level - they are on some level - but there's clear disparity between them. Read a Vonnegut book next to one of mine and it's clear they're utterly different. People are tempted to compare them for three reasons. Firstly, they are both funny in some ways, and secondly, they've got sapceships and robots in them. [No third way was mentioned]. It's the labelling. A much, much stronger influence on my writing is P.G. Wodehouse; he didn't write about robots and spaceships, though, so people don't spot it. They are looking for labels.* * * * * *
As regards good SF books, well A Canticle for Leibowitz [Walter Miller Jr] is a wonderful book. There also someone I came across because of Hitchhiker's - people kept saying, 'if you write this stuff you must know the work of Robert Sheckley?"
I assume you must have read Sheckley's 'Dimensions of Miracles'.
People kept saying that, so I finally sat down and read it, and it was quite creepy. The guy who constructed the earth . . . it was completely fortuitous. Those are the coincidences, and after all there are only a small number of ideas. I felt what i did was more akin to Sheckley than Vonnegut.
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