A lot of us have probably had this kind of experience: church flower festival; cakes and teas; second-hand bookstall; paperbacks, including sf by Iain M. Banks, Piers Anthony or whoever; back cover blurbs - a character with a military background pursued by a hostile sect travels between planets in an imaginary planetary system; a character travels from his interstellar civilization to a fabulously wealthy empire... Am I persuaded to purchase? No way. I am already reading or rereading enough at home. Besides, these blurbs offer nothing new. Certain sf ideas have become genre cliches:
faster then light interstellar spaceships;
inhabited or colonized extra-solar planets;
an interstellar civilization;
characters for whom all of the above is commonplace so why should we go there?
See a poem by CS Lewis here.
Wells and Lewis were pre-genre science fiction authors. Some authors, notably Poul Anderson and James Blish, have worked well with the cliches but that should not make us want to perpetuate such cliches indefinitely.
Greg Bear wrote in the SFWA Bulletin:
"And give me no spaceships in feudal settings...unless, of course, you are Poul Anderson, but you are most likely not."
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Some blurbs do work--the very first of Stirling's books I read was because of a blurb contributed by Anderson to a paperback edition of UNDER THE YOKE in 1988 or 1999.
And well written opening paragraphs can persuade readers to read the whole story. Two favorite examples being the first paragraphs of A CIRCUS OF HELLS and HUNTERS OF THE SKY CAVE.
Ad astra! Sean
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