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Science Fiction and Fantasy
Dec. 14th, 2004 05:13 pmI watched the first hour of Ursula K. LeGuin's Legend of Earthsea on the SciFi channel last night and was disappointed but not surprised that it was a rehashing of tired cliches. I'm sure there is innovation somewhere in this genre that doesn't just plagiarize the ancient Myth of the Hero and use Good Vs. Evil to avoid having to motivate the antagonist. Can someone point it out to me? We aren't kids sitting around the campfire listening to a static oral tradition, folks! How did that old adage go? "There are only seven stories"? Balderdash, there are only seven kinds of unimaginative authors and readers. This brought to mind ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dawnwolfe's recent question to me, "If you met someone who had never, ever read a single SF/Fantasy book in their lives, had not even heard of the genre but was open to trying it out, what is the first book you would introduce to that person." It depends on what they want. Different books are good are for different folks and they can get different purposes from the same book. Mine is just one flavor of preference and I'll offer it as nothing more. My thesis is this: I like science fiction to the degree that it's not a fantasy.( Read more... )
dawnwolfe's recent question to me, "If you met someone who had never, ever read a single SF/Fantasy book in their lives, had not even heard of the genre but was open to trying it out, what is the first book you would introduce to that person." It depends on what they want. Different books are good are for different folks and they can get different purposes from the same book. Mine is just one flavor of preference and I'll offer it as nothing more. My thesis is this: I like science fiction to the degree that it's not a fantasy.( Read more... )
