books of honor
Jul. 22nd, 2008 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacOK, I'll talk about it. Potlatch 18 has announced its Books of Honor. Yes, books, plural.
Both Always Coming Home and Growing Up Weightless came up in conversation among the committee, floating together above other possible choices, but dang if we could come to a definitive choice between them. So we thought, there's room for more than one panel focused on a specific book, so why not choose both?
Always Coming Home has come up as a possible choice before. It has a strongly-imagined Northern California setting, it is (in my opinion, anyway) the masterwork by SF's greatest author, and it's a good discussion topic because it's surprisingly controversial.
*Is it a utopia? Are the Kesh too sweetness-and-light to be true?
*Is it even a novel? Norman Spinrad once described it as an underweight novella surrounded by the equivalent of the Dune Encyclopedia; is he right?
I say no to both criticisms, and am ready to defend it on all counts. And I'd better stop here or I'll go on all day.
Growing Up Weightless came up in the intersection of two conversations. Though we don't want Potlatch BoH-hood to become the Required Memorial Panel for Recently Dead Authors, we couldn't help thinking of John M. Ford and his bristlingly intelligent work. The other conversation was back when we were apportioning committee jobs. We were chatting about what kind of panels we'd have if Alice were in charge of programming, and a couple of us found a serious side to this. Why not talk about children's and Young Adult SF? There's good work in that area that doesn't get discussed, and Growing Up Weightless is a masterpiece of recent decades' work. Someone suggested a smackdown (a la Wiscon's Narnia vs. Philip Pullman): Ford vs. Robert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy.
And that's our choices.
Both Always Coming Home and Growing Up Weightless came up in conversation among the committee, floating together above other possible choices, but dang if we could come to a definitive choice between them. So we thought, there's room for more than one panel focused on a specific book, so why not choose both?
Always Coming Home has come up as a possible choice before. It has a strongly-imagined Northern California setting, it is (in my opinion, anyway) the masterwork by SF's greatest author, and it's a good discussion topic because it's surprisingly controversial.
*Is it a utopia? Are the Kesh too sweetness-and-light to be true?
*Is it even a novel? Norman Spinrad once described it as an underweight novella surrounded by the equivalent of the Dune Encyclopedia; is he right?
I say no to both criticisms, and am ready to defend it on all counts. And I'd better stop here or I'll go on all day.
Growing Up Weightless came up in the intersection of two conversations. Though we don't want Potlatch BoH-hood to become the Required Memorial Panel for Recently Dead Authors, we couldn't help thinking of John M. Ford and his bristlingly intelligent work. The other conversation was back when we were apportioning committee jobs. We were chatting about what kind of panels we'd have if Alice were in charge of programming, and a couple of us found a serious side to this. Why not talk about children's and Young Adult SF? There's good work in that area that doesn't get discussed, and Growing Up Weightless is a masterpiece of recent decades' work. Someone suggested a smackdown (a la Wiscon's Narnia vs. Philip Pullman): Ford vs. Robert A. Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy.
And that's our choices.
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-24 07:05 pm (UTC)Is it a utopia? Yes. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's hardly the only Le Guin fictional society that has figured out how to channel conflict and aggression. And she does make the tiny point somewhere in the text that even in utopia there will be unhappy people. To me it's no more sweetness-and-light than Tolkien is black-and-white/good-and-evil.
Is it a novel? No. I had a three-hour argument with the NYRSF [New York Review of Science Fiction] staff on this point, they maintaining that any book-length work of fiction is a novel. The problem with conceding the point is that the book "fails" because it does not do well what novels do well (cf. Spinrad's criticism). However, if you look at the work as a fictional ethnography, all of a sudden it formally makes sense.
Don Keller
no subject
Date: 2008-08-03 06:26 pm (UTC)