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Baycon Friday
May. 29th, 2010 07:24 amAt previous conventions, panels on the topic of "how to judge a book by a random page" have consisted of random pages from covered books being read aloud, while the panelists attempt to judge them. Much hilarity supposedly ensues when they pass thumbs-down on some award-winning novel, but y'know, some award-winning novels deserve thumbs-down.
Nobody was that organized yesterday, and the moderator never showed up. Instead, we talked rather randomly about various ways to judge whether you want to read a novel before you actually read it in full, including 1) by the first page, 2) by the last page (if it says "Continued in Volume Four of the Celts in Space Trilogy," don't), 3) by a random page, 4) by the author, 5) by the publisher, 6) by the cover artist. By numbers, by mirrors, by water. By dots made at random on paper. (Sorry, got a little distracted there.)
I told my favorite cautionary tale of judging a book by a random chunk. In mybook of dreams misspent youth (sorry, I'm still feeling distracted), specifically the part spent writing a senior thesis in college, I undertook to find every English-language general-magazine article about science fiction published before the mid-1950s. There weren't many. Occasionally they were written by someone who actually knew something about SF, and that person would be Fletcher Pratt, who had a general literary reputation that gave him access to such outlets. What happened most of the time, though, was that some literatum looking for a subject for next month's column would hear that SF was the bang, so he'd enquire by the impeccable scientific technique of going to the newsstand, buying a few random magazines (and, once they started appearing after WW2, paperback books), and reporting on the contents. Not surprisingly, he'd find a lot of crap that way, and some lone reader would write in giving a few magazine titles like Astounding (or, in later years, Galaxy or F&SF) that might have given better results. The impression of a fastidious anthropologist picking his way through the fetid jungle is emphasized by the fact that the articles never reveal the titles or authors of the stories they're telling about.
It can be challenging tracking down this information, the more so as when you do the stories turn out, unsurprisingly, to be by obscure authors you've never heard of. But there was one exception, an article whose conclusion was not that SF was crappy but that it was so damn depressing.1 Although the writer gave no author or title, I immediately recognized one of the described stories as "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury, which certainly enables that conclusion.2
But my cautionary tale is this. The writer dismissed one novel, which again he didn't name, as totally unreadable, and to prove this provided a brief quote from it. I recognized its source immediately, and chuckled, because the novel is considered a classic in the field, and its author had good plot reasons to seem momentarily incomprehensible. In fact, at around the same time, another magazine asked four genuine experts on the field to give basic SF checklists.3 The only book named by all four of them was this very same totally unreadable novel.
So those are your clues: published by 1953-54; charged as incomprehensible and totally unreadable by an outside reader; yet the only book four genuine experts could agree on as tops in the field, and a classic in future years. Care to guess what it was? Let's tell the future. Let's see how it's been done.
1. I didn't keep a copy of this article, and couldn't get hold of it again on short notice, but I cited it in the thesis: A.C.B. Lovell, "A Counterblast to Science Fiction," New Statesman, March 13, 1954, p. 319-21. The reader who wrote the inevitable correcting letter (March 20, p. 358-9) was Robert Conquest.
2. If the title doesn't ring a bell, that's the one consisting of a lyrical description of an automated house-of-the-future, the kind that rings your alarm clock for you and then automatically fixes your breakfast, all the while chatting away with the insane cheerfulness of Eddie Your Friendly Shipboard Computer, doing all this in blissful ignorance of the fact that all the people had been incinerated the previous day, presumably by a neutron bomb.
3. They were Horace Gold, editor of Galaxy; Anthony Boucher, editor of F&SF; Robert Heinlein, who needs no introduction; and Kurt Vonnegut, who hadn't yet decided he wasn't an SF writer. The Nation, May 2, 1953, p. 367.
Nobody was that organized yesterday, and the moderator never showed up. Instead, we talked rather randomly about various ways to judge whether you want to read a novel before you actually read it in full, including 1) by the first page, 2) by the last page (if it says "Continued in Volume Four of the Celts in Space Trilogy," don't), 3) by a random page, 4) by the author, 5) by the publisher, 6) by the cover artist. By numbers, by mirrors, by water. By dots made at random on paper. (Sorry, got a little distracted there.)
I told my favorite cautionary tale of judging a book by a random chunk. In my
It can be challenging tracking down this information, the more so as when you do the stories turn out, unsurprisingly, to be by obscure authors you've never heard of. But there was one exception, an article whose conclusion was not that SF was crappy but that it was so damn depressing.1 Although the writer gave no author or title, I immediately recognized one of the described stories as "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury, which certainly enables that conclusion.2
But my cautionary tale is this. The writer dismissed one novel, which again he didn't name, as totally unreadable, and to prove this provided a brief quote from it. I recognized its source immediately, and chuckled, because the novel is considered a classic in the field, and its author had good plot reasons to seem momentarily incomprehensible. In fact, at around the same time, another magazine asked four genuine experts on the field to give basic SF checklists.3 The only book named by all four of them was this very same totally unreadable novel.
So those are your clues: published by 1953-54; charged as incomprehensible and totally unreadable by an outside reader; yet the only book four genuine experts could agree on as tops in the field, and a classic in future years. Care to guess what it was? Let's tell the future. Let's see how it's been done.
1. I didn't keep a copy of this article, and couldn't get hold of it again on short notice, but I cited it in the thesis: A.C.B. Lovell, "A Counterblast to Science Fiction," New Statesman, March 13, 1954, p. 319-21. The reader who wrote the inevitable correcting letter (March 20, p. 358-9) was Robert Conquest.
2. If the title doesn't ring a bell, that's the one consisting of a lyrical description of an automated house-of-the-future, the kind that rings your alarm clock for you and then automatically fixes your breakfast, all the while chatting away with the insane cheerfulness of Eddie Your Friendly Shipboard Computer, doing all this in blissful ignorance of the fact that all the people had been incinerated the previous day, presumably by a neutron bomb.
3. They were Horace Gold, editor of Galaxy; Anthony Boucher, editor of F&SF; Robert Heinlein, who needs no introduction; and Kurt Vonnegut, who hadn't yet decided he wasn't an SF writer. The Nation, May 2, 1953, p. 367.
