David Wingrove

A history of SF, comprehensively examined, always in the author's witty voice. Frequently, Aldiss shares his critical, or personal opinion of a specific work. At such times, I found myself almost inevitably disagreeing with him. So be it. My esteem for the work remains intact despite having different tastes.

Marvelously well written.

Reading it after _The Book of Atrus_, as intended, does infuse a terrible fatalism into the story. Knowing the future is being a slave to it...

This was, hands down, one of the three most vile books I've ever read in my life. It's not science fiction or Chinoiserie, as it pretends to be; it's torture-porn of the very nastiest sort. Apart from that, it's quite poorly written, and as science fiction it's grade "Z" at best.

An absolutely disgusting book. I feel as if the author tried to molest me. I've never burned or destroyed a book in my life, and I can't bring myself to start now, but I will not continue reading it and I will never show more open its pages again.

I wish I could give negative stars, because this book deserves thousands of them. Only Jack Chalker and one of the authors of the "Wild Cards" series have ever equalled the utter vileness of Chung Kuo.

If you like seeing "heroes" discover bizarre new ways to torture and rape innocent characters, then Chung Kuo is the book for you. If so, I hope you'll seek therapy and stay away from children. The only positive thing I can say about the book is that the writing and characters are all so flat and lifeless that the details of the book didn't linger in my memory for too long. Except that even one SECOND was too long to have some of that crap in my head! show less

http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/sfsourcebk.htm

Gosh, this is a fantastic book. An introduction by Brian Aldiss on the history of SF, following from his earlier Billion Year Spree and preparing for his revision of it with Wingrove as Trillion Year Spree; forty pages on SF sub-genres by Brian Stableford (though of course no cyberpunk, given the date); ten superb vignettes by leading writers (Bradbury, Cowper, Le Guin, Silverberg, Sladek, Tuttle, Wolfe, Zelazny) revealing their own writing show more habits; pieces by Wingrove and Malcolm Edwards on sf publishing and criticism: and a superbly grumpy and negative afterword by Kingsley Amis on why none of it is any good, at least none that has been published since his own New Maps of Hell in 1960.

All that on its own would be attractive enough, but there is more. The core of the book is a survey of the works of 880 writers, with 2500 books and short stories given individual rankings. Lots to think about - of course, there is only room for a few works per author to be given the full treatment of ratings out of 5 for idea content, charcterisation, literary merit and readability; but I found myself more often nodding in agreement than wanting to yell at the author. Basically this is all the book that the dismally awful recent Mammoth Encyclopedia of Science Fiction tried to be, and more.

Strongly recommended, if you can find it. show less