The Literary Ghetto

Why did a book like Dinosaur Beach receive such extravagant but clearly undeserved praise? See DINOSAUR BEACH. Sf became a literary ghetto where it was thought that ordinary literary criteria did not apply. Panels at sf cons used to debate whether a story could be good as sf even it wasn't good as anything else. Maybe they still do? Christopher Priest argued that it was pointless to claim that EE Smith could not write good prose because he was writing in the Stone Age. Priest pointed out that Jane Austen knew how to write a novel. I was told that a particular sf mag (I forget which) did not publish literary criticism. 

Can a text be badly written with poor descriptions and characterization yet still develop interesting and entertaining sf ideas? Maybe. Any examples? In any case, a writer of any kind of fiction should still know how to write fiction. The point of this blog is that Poul Anderson's texts are well written with good descriptions and characterization and also present original and entertaining sf ideas and I cannot help thinking that there is a connection between good writing and good ideas. Wells and Anderson do not just tell us that a character has travelled to another time, past or future. They describe that other time with the same wealth of detail as in a historical novel.

In any case, other criteria apart, Dinosaur Beach makes a text book hash of presenting time travel paradoxes. It is a pleasure to turn back to Anderson's "Star of the Sea" where locations are described in multisensory detail and paradoxicality is nothing if not subtle:

"They dared not charge blind into what might well be the source of the instability..."

-see here. (Scroll down.)