Writers with no style

Ever noticed these scribblers? They seem to have no discernible style or voice, they write absolutely toneless prose, featuring cliched exchanges, stock characterization, the syntax of a Grade 8. You forget their books an hour after closing them, no scenes resonate, no characters say anything worth recalling. And yet when you look, you have two or three titles by these guys/gals in your collection. How? WHY?

Some writers that come to mind for me: Jack McDevitt, Robert Charles Wilson, Dean Koontz, James Patterson, Ben Bova, Robert J. Sawyer. Mebbe Alastair Maclean (haven't read him for years)?

Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov have no discernible style, save "being paid by the word" talkiness. To be completely fair, Heinlein wrote about some really cool ideas, it's just his prose sucked.

I also think the fact that creative writing classes and well-meaning writing groups pushing "invisible style" upon neophytes is a literary crime. It strangles the budding literary voices and is akin to Chinese footbinding. Sure, you might have the possibility of the potential of getting your story published if it is written in "invisible style," too bad the 400,000 other submissions on the Mount Everest slush-pile are also written in the same non-style. I've read some of these stories and I could tell you what they were about, if I could actually remember them. They are the opposite of a work by Pynchon, Beckett, Waugh, or Burgess. Their voices are unmistakable.

The one that comes close is Tom Clancy. His descriptions and stories of weaponry, vehicles, and training regimen are exemplary, I dare say Homeric. His human characters are another story: flat, boring, cliched, and wooden. In Clear and Present Danger, the Coast Guard patrol boat had more characterization than effin Jack Ryan! WTF?

Jeffrey Deaver and Val McDermid. Apologies to the fans out there :/

paul Samuelson - economics. style and subject to induce sleep. i need to get a used copy

Patterson, Koontz, Steele, Clancy Grisham...

I'm pretty sure their lack of style is exactly why they sell so much. People who read just to pass the time would probably get nervous if they detected some hint of an author's voice in what they were reading.

High fantasy writers are particularly guilty of generic writing, don't you think? Put Jordan et all side by side, I couldn't tell 'em apart...

Well, yeah. I've got a bit of a bias towards the genre myself, and I think I could probably set apart a few fantasy writers by their style. (Are continuous bad things happening to the protagonist? Robin Hobb probably wrote it.) It is a bit hypocritical of me to denounce pop-fiction writers while gleefully reading some silly fantasy, I guess. =P

I wouldn't say Koontz has no style, more like a negative style. I've only read two of his books, and both had moments that were memorably tin-eared. Even his character names can be off in weirdly intriguing ways.

The Key to Midnight features a masochistic stuck-up heiress named Marie Dumont in a scene that served little purpose except to get me wondering about the sexual dynamics between Margaret Dumont and Groucho Marx.

And his arguably not bad Odd Thomas features a villain named Bob Robertson, who turns out to be a Satanist, but whose name seemed like an obvious shout-out to Tim Robbins as Lee Atwater without scruples. (The gulf between Koontz' politics and Robbins', combined with the way Koontz' works sometimes drift into polemic, gives it an added level of irony.)

Heinlein is pretty bland and talky, but his worst is Moon is a Harsh Mistress It had some cool ideas, but the prose was like going to the dentist for teeth cleaning. Ugh!

I read a James Lee Burke novel once. Can't remember what it was about. A co-worker lent it to me. I was mildly entertained, it just had no staying power.

Granted people have been reading crap populist fiction since time immemorial, we just tend to remember the successful, talented commercial writers like Balzac, Dickens, etc. For one of those, there are dozens of lesser quality hacks.

I enjoyed Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I also enjoyed the Foundation series by Asimov.

Sometimes a good story makes up for lack of literary talent. Plus, I read all of them before I turned 18.

"Plus, I read all of them before I turned 18."

Yup, and there's the key. It's when you re-read them later, after developing a more sophisticated literate palette, that you can't open those books without holding your nose...

Foundation is on my to-reread list; we'll see how I feel about it now that I'm 25 and not 16. that is, if I get around to it while I'm still 25... that's a long list I've got.

I can tell you that when you reach 40, Foundation is a piece of crap.

I actually braved The DaVinci Code the 3rd time a student gave it to me; talk about toneless. The dialogue is the kind of thing 8th graders write. Throwaway prose at its worst.

Steinbeck is pretty awkward, though I like him in spite of that.

Bradbury is a terrible sentence writer--the worst combination of pretentiousness and a tin ear. Must have been a terrible dancer.

I've only read The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy, but he's no ballerina either. He's guilty of the same crimes as Steinbeck and Bradbury: his sentences are all seized up by the gravity of his topic.

James Thackara also let's the gravity of the topic overwhelm the writing. I couldn't finish his Book of Kings, which looked like a promising WW 2 historical fiction novel. It's self-regarding seriousness for the "proper-ness" of the topic (WW 2, Holocaust, etc.) slowed the pacing down to a snail's crawl and redlined on the Pretentiousness Meter.

Granted I bought it at a used bookstore on a whim, but even then, I felt my money was wasted. Glad I wasn't stupid enough to buy it for full cover price. (Another thing I don't understand about people. Why they pay full price for disposable pop garbage like Brown, Meyer, Clancy, etc.? Use your money better, like with a cigarette habit.)

What's the official line on James Clavell--is he the Tom Clancy of historical fiction? I bought all his books a while back because I had liked them as a teenager, but was somewhat dismayed to find dozens of copies of the hardcovers on Amazon for a few cents. I couldn't argue with the bargain, but it doesn't bode well when so many people just want a book the hell out of their house at any price.

Thoughts on Michner?

all i can think of is his 2000 assistants tracking down important facts about new zeal-land or some such improbable location.

Michener, Clavell...I would think their plodding doorstops would certainly qualify. Irving Stone, Ernest K. Gann...historical fiction, especially during the 1950's to 70's was ripe for plucking by hacks and style-challenged pros...

#10, 11, 12, 13
When I was in the 9th , 10th grade I read every science fiction I could find. I thought Ray Bradbury deserved the Nobel prize. Close behind were Heinlein, Asimov & Andre Norton. (I met MS. Norton when she spoke to our HS future-writers club. ) SF was just becoming popular & we all believed that we were way ahead of the "masses" still tied to everyday fiction. The best SF was & possibly still is, written in short story form. Perhaps it is easier for the reader to suspend his disbelief for a shorter period of time. Each year the Best Fantasy & SF short stories were published & they were so popular that they disappeared from our HS library shelves, never to be seen again.

I think too many SF novels are really overblown short stories or novellas so I'm with ya on that one, Marian.

I still have a soft spot for Ray Bradbury, though I acknowledge his shortcomings. THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN was one of the first SF books I can remember reading and the beginning of my love-hate relationship with that beautiful, worrisome, silly, transcendent genre...

re: Clavell, I heard lots of gushing reviews of Shogun and picked it up. It was one of about 7 books I had with me when I left for Japan (yes, I know) and eight hundred pages later I wished I'd packed two books that were good instead of one that was a snore. (The Portuguese character, Rodrigues, was actually sort of cool. He was very minor though)

What's the appeal with doorstoppers? (Huge, epic, usually bloated works.) Except for Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy, very few authors can successfully pull of a truly giant epic. But there's something in the human mind that is attracted to "big works." Any one got a clue why? I fall for it myself.

Speaking of huge books like Shogun, has anyone read Herman Wouk, especially War and Remembrance and The Winds of War? Does Wouk fall into the no-style commercial hack?

Never read Wouk's big ones but there was a coming of age story set in New York...it's been many moons since I've read it but I remember finding it likable. Title?

Don't have a lot of time and patience for big books. So many hours of my day are eaten up by my work and I think big books need to be read in BIG CHUNKS so they sustain their narrative drive. That's why I don't really think I gave Denis Johnson's TREE OF SMOKE a fair shot. Should have devoured that one over the course of 3-4 days. Instead it took 2 weeks and the novel never really hooked me, I finished it more out of stubbornness and because of my respect for the author.

Please note, this novel won the Pulitzer Prize so obviously it's got somethin' going for it.

All that said, I DO have the new Pynchon on pre-order. Hypocrite!

Karl, didja see the quote on big/small books I posted on another thread:

"Small books are more durable than big ones; they go farther. The booksellers revere big books; readers like small ones. An exquisite thing is worth more than a huge thing. A book that reveals a mind is worth more than one that only reveals its subject."

-Joseph Joubert

Big books vs. little books thread? Anyone?

23: Re Wouk, I read the Winds of War and was not interested enough to read the sequels. So I guess I was not overwhelmed by his writing. Usually I like those sorts of historical fiction books.

I read a bunch of Clavell books as a kid shortly after the miniseries Shogun was on TV. I loved them then, but probably would not get into them so much as an adult. Same for Michener.

25:
http://doonesbury.com/strip/halberstam.html

David Halberstam (phone voice): I write tomes. Tomes about power. Tomes like "The Best and the Brightest" and "The Powers That Be."

Halberstam (continuing): They're massive books, big, very big, towering best sellers, 750 pages, sometimes more, that's how big they are. The kind of books about which men like to say, "I own them."

Joanie: Oh. Do these men read them?

Halberstam: Very few. Only the best.

Ha! Great! I've got two Halberstam books and have never read them. Ouch!

I think Marjorie Morningstar may be the Wouk novel you are referring to Cliff, the coming of age in NYC book.

I read The Caine Mutiny and enjoyed it quite a bit, but I was a young whippersnapper at the time and wouldn't have known style from dog poop. It's one of those I have fond memories of, but on re-reading may not like as much.

A tome, to me, does not represent a challenge by virtue of its size. I routinely read and enjoy books over 750 pages. The author's ability to string out a good story without having too many characters and threads that I get lost and am referring backwards in order to make sense of moving forward, determines the success or failure of the read, along with an interesting story to read. The Little Friend is an example of a book that had just the right number of well-drawn characters, not too many plots or subplots, but after 750 or whatever number of pages later still had not got off the ground. I don't know who was more bored with it by the end, me or the author.

Dickens, Eliot, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy all have written tomes that had they sacrificed a single word would have been the poorer for it. It's when a book is really long that talent begins to take hold. It takes real talent to carry off an eight or nine hundred page book.

That's the right book, Gene, got it first time.

I guess a badly written narrative can be a bore whether it's 8 pages long...or 800. I know I loved DeLillo's UNDERWORLD and that one is a monster.

And I read it in the required 3-4 days.

geneg: Couldn't agree more about Tartt's The Little Friend. I thought some of the writing was extraordinary, but the story's impact withered at the end. In fact, it kind of ran off somewhere. Very disappointing.

The only Wouk I've read was A Hole in Texas--standard length, standard story.

Anna--Doonesberry fan here! In the strip, as I remember it, Halberstam also says of those "best and the brightest": "Gods. I kiss their Guccis."

Tartt's SECRET HISTORY has one of the best opening paragraphs I've ever read. Terrific book--but I do recall Sherron not caring for THE LITTLE FRIEND...

31: Yes, he does, a propos Woodward and Bernstein. The whole series is at the link; GT posted it when he died last year.

33--Ah, yes! Woodward and Bernstein. See the link now. Thanks.

23: The appeal of doorstoppers is the same as all these goddamn 100-book challenges: so people can feel good about themselves. I read this big, thick, square book; I must be smart! How can you doubt me? Behold its thickness!

29: The author's ability to string out a good story without having too many characters and threads that I get lost and am referring backwards in order to make sense of moving forward, determines the success or failure of the read...

I dont know what you mean by "too many characters". Do Proust or Dickens have too many characters? Either the author has the ability to create characters that stay alive in your mind or he doesnt.

27: Anna, Halberstam wrote an excellent book about the 1980 Portland Trailblazers called The Breaks of the Game. Lots of interesting stuff on Ramsey, Walton, Lucas, Gross, the development of the Player's Union, negotiating, Martin Buber, etc. Its a must-read for any Oregonian.

>35 semckibbin: - not sure that's the appeal of big books for the many; most readers seem to like big books because they can 'lose' themselves in the fictional world. (Step forward, interminable fantasy books/sagas, overblown romances, etc).

35: Proust and Dickens have been accused of character overpopulation (usually by unpublished creative writing professors and John Gardner) Then again, both writers were unambiguously geniuses. But a great writer knows how to balance major characters and minor characters, creating constellations of relationships, not an avalanche of names that becomes incomprehensible.

36: You can "lose yourself" in shorter works as well. Metamorphosis, both Kafka and Ovid, were small-scale stories. Then again, not many writers can write epics and actually pull it off. It's easy to write an overblown, bloated monstrosity (JK Rowling, Robert Jordan, Tom Clancy, etc.) as opposed to a finely crafted mega work (2666, Gravity's Rainbow, JR, etc.)

Since big works consistently sell, it's easy for the market to get degraded. If epics were scarce, then it might not be a devalued, ridiculed genre (is "epic" a genre, style, or technique?) Same goes for cop shows and medical shows on TV. A dime a dozen and only a few stand-outs.

I find it very hard to conceive of a single writer with "no style." Language being what it is, the choice of a particular agglomeration of words to convey something externally which heretofore was simply an internal event (whether of the head or the heart), constitutes a "style" - nearly any specimen of which can be expected to permeate the outpourings of anyone who has the temerity to cobble together more than a paragraph or two.

Let's take an example of someone who the contributors to this thread seem to agree has "no style." Right at the beginning of Stranger in a Strange Land, we find this: "Eight humans, crowded together for almost three Terran years, had better get along much better than humans usually did. An all-male crew was vetoed as unhealthy and unstable. Four married couples was considered optimum, if necessary specialties could be found in such combination." This passage was chosen very much at random, yet I believe it's representative of a style that can reliably be called Heinleinian.

Use of a phrase like "had better get along much better than" establishes a jovial, if clumsy, tone of voice. In the same sentence, use of the word "did" rather than "do", causes the reader to wonder if Heinlein was aware of the difference, and, whether he did (does) or not, what does "did" tell you about narrative stance? "Four married couples" would normally require "were" rather than "was", except Heinlein clearly expects the reader to realize that he's saying something like "A shipboard configuration of 4 married couples". Why does he use the noun "optimum" when the adjective he needs is the perfectly accessible "optimal"? "The optimum" might serve him better, but he chose to omit the article -- in the interest of speed? Because he was already experiencing writer's cramp? "In such combination" again is condensed to the point where it feels awkward, though nobody would fail to comprehend the meaning. Always, the author is willing to abandon precision, confident in the ability and willingness of his reader to persist without complaining.

Would the passage have been better if Henry James had crafted it instead of Robert Heinlein?

Warning: Red herring alert!

Funny you should bring up that pop commercial hack Henry James. "Stranger in a Strange Land" was my first encounter with Heinlein, although I did see the Starship Troopers movie before I read any of his stuff.

Good style does not mean a person uses good grammar. Henry James uses incredibly proper English because he was an incredibly proper striver and had to overcome his handicap of being born an American.

Also good style is not related to genre or non-genre works. Portrait of a Lady, arguably one of the finest novels ever written, has a plot no more complicated than "Little Girl Lost." The characters fit the usual archetypes one finds in fables: damsel in distress (Isabel Archer), evil queen (Madame Merle), Prince Charming (Gilbert Osmond), Prince Valium (Caspar Goodwood), and a comic foil (Edward Rosier). But the way he writes, the subtle shading of character, the scene-setting, the witty dialogue, all make the novel transcend its fable-like superficialities.

It's a known fact that Heinlein was paid by the word. It's not that he could have written it better or worse than Henry James. Heinlein is the Grandmaster of Science Fiction after all and has been instrumental in the creation of the alternate history and military sci fi genres. That said, he could have cut 40% of what he wrote to say the same thing. Short of characters from Angels in America and Sade novels, I have never met characters so talky. Half the time, I'm saying: "Shut up already and get on with it!" Heinlein's characters, like Tom Clancy's characters, are a wee bit on the flat side. Henry James didn't write sci fi, but Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Burgess, and Vladimir Nabokov did. But each possesses a singular style that cannot be easily imitated. Heinlein wrote with all the flair and style of a local newspaper. Bland, basic, and replaceable. You could probably create a pretty decent writing program to imitate Heinlein's style, but you couldn't create a machine to create his ideas, which were varied, infuriating, and occasionally contradictory.

If you're writing style is no different from basic journalism, then you have no style. Even journalist-writers like Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson had glittering, sensational style. It's called "invisible style" for a reason. Maybe semiotician Umberto Eco would have an opinion of invisible style = no style.

>39 kswolff: - I'm sorry, but a question, please. Based solely on what you've said, I can't see Henry James as a 'pop commercial hack.' Did you mean Heinlein, or did I understand it all wrong?

Karl, all sf characters are incredibly talky. That's because they carry the plot. And because the writers were not as imaginative as received wisdom would have us believe - they could come up with their Big Idea, but they didn't have the invention to furnish an entire future world. So the galactic federation of 3000 years hence is 1950s USA in all but name. And computers use punched cards, pilots use slide rules, cameras use film, mercenaries never consider using satellites or RPVs for reconnaissance.... In most cases, the writers finessed it - they kept the descriptive prose to a minimum - by using lots of dialogue.

And the only problem with THAT was, they couldn't write credible dialogue worth a shit either. So you had bad writing, reams of clumsy exposition, tin ear dialogue and silly extrapolations of the future.

What's not to love about the "Golden Age" of SF?

#42 "What's not to love about the "Golden Age" of SF?"
You had to be there. In the late 40's & 50's when all the best-sellers were huge tomes by wordy writers like Ben Ames Willians Taylor Caldwell
irving Stone Sydney Sheldon James Michener
& others who wrote like they were being paid by the word.
(BTW the early SF mags, like the true detective & wild westerns all paid by the word at first, but as SF became popular & Mags. like The magazine of Fantisy & Science Fiction appeared on the rack next to the Sat. Eve Post, the practice was dropped.)
SF made it into the mainstream by its short stories, it took a few years before the 1st. novel length SF appeared. Because SF was a new genre trying to crash the established market, those early writers had to be good enough to be read by mainstream & lierary writers. That's why SF had its "Golden Age." unfortunatly, Golden Ages are fleeting as more & more writers climb on the band wagon the quality of the writing drops. Heinlein & Bradbury & other writers seemed to slip their standards as they wrote faster & faster to keep up with the demand. The best & purest SF is found in the early short story collections & when you read those stories over again, you will agree that there was a short, but real "Golden Age."

"The best & purest SF is found in the early short story collections..."

Marian: can you give some examples?

Science fiction had been around for a couple of decades before Bradbury and Heinlein saw print. And if you look at the contents of those early Amazing Stories and the like - Jack Williamson, Ross Rocklynne - they were rubbish. I don't believe Sidney Sheldon or James Michener were being published that early either. And there was a healthy market in the 1920s for short fiction - everything from PG Wodehouse to Katharine Mansfield.

40: Henry James wrote Portrait of a Lady for serial publication, ergo he was a commercial writer. When I called him a "pop commercial hack," I was using that elusive, little-used style of sarcasm.

(Something he does with regularity, so be warned.)

Re #23: Not a member here, but I just finished reading Wouk's War and Remembrance and found it quite excellent. If you agree with Browning's Andrea del Sarto that "a man's reach should exceed his grasp," then you may agree with me that it may be the best novel written about WWII.

That said, I personally prefer The Caine Mutiny which adheres to the Aristotelian unities, has great characters and a clean, workmanlike prose that eschews verbal showing off, and dialogue that sounds like the real thing.

>46 kswolff: - Oh, I see. I'm sorry.

48: How does War and Remembrance stack up against Naked and the Dead and The Thin Red Line? I've also heard a lot about Vassily Grossman and his WW2 writings. Another strange book about WW2 is Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte.

Re #50: Well, Naked and the Dead is a very fine novel that deals with one specific battle in the South Pacific and a single platoon. The same is true of The Thin Red Line, which narrows the emphasis to the dehumanizing aspects of warfare. Jones' novel is very much anti-war whereas Mailer's is more anti-authoritarian.

Both are fine novels, but to compare them to War and Remembrance would be like comparing The Charterhouse of Parma to War and Peace. Both are first-rate, but there is an enormous difference in the magnitude of their achievement and the aim of the writer.

War and Remembrance is not exactly Tolstoy--some of the characters are thinly drawn, and some of the incidents strain credulity, but the scope of the work is staggering, and for every character that seems drawn with too quick and facile a pen, there are many, many more who lump out of the pages like living people. Had Wouk's talents been commensurate with his vision, this would have been perhaps the best novel ever written--as is, it's still the greatest (as opposed to "best") American novel about WW II I have read. As I said earlier, The Caine Mutiny is a tighter work, and if we are talking about perfection, albeit on a smaller scale, I think the sadly forgotten novella by Harry Brown, A Walk in the Sun, has no peers.

What can one say about Kaputt other than to say its power is unequalled by any other antiwar novel I have read. As to its merits relative to the works above, not having read it in the original language, I can't make a call on whether it is the "best" WWII novel. The same goes or Aksynov's Generations of Winter, which has been highly praised.

Some may say "what about Catch-22?" but I consider it in a different category, as it makes no serious claim to being a realistic depiction of combat.

#45 you are referring to the genre known as "pulp fiction" popular in the early pare of the 20th c. Edgar Rice Burroughs & his "Sands of Mars" series belongs to this genre as do " True Detectives" & early westerns.

What we know as true Science Fiction began to be written during WW2 & it differed from the "pulp" type by being true to fundamentals of Scientific fact & was written in the style used by mainstream writers during that era. Fans of SF (AKA SF & Fantasy - the fantasy label was dropped & fantasy became its own genre in the 1980's) When Martha Foley included a story by Ray Bradbury in the esteemed literary collection Best American Short Stories in the 1950's good writing as well as interesting plots with action that usually took place in the future helped to define the new SF genre.

There is a series of collections The Year's Best Science Fiction anthology which is equivilent to the "Best American" series, but contains works from world wide publications. There are at least 25 years of these. There is also The SF Hall of Fame & The Oxford Book of Science Fiction stories

I stopped reading SF somewhere in the 1970's. It had gotten too technical & I was more interested in stories with a romantic element. I still read Ursula LeGuin & Andre Norton every now & then. I worked at our local library for over 30 years, & I used to be able to identify the average SF fanatic. They were usually very bright kids & fun to talk to - a way of keeping in touch with a world I used to inhabit, but moved on.

The genre of science fiction came into being in 1926 with the publication of the first issue of Amazing Stories. ERB and his Barsoom series predate this by more than a decade, but a lot of proto-sf was picked and reprinted by Gernsback - including "scientific romances" by the likes of Wells and Poe. Jack Williamson sold his first story to Amazing Stories in 1928, so he is definitely a science fiction author.

Incidentally, sf has never been characterised by "good writing". It wasn't until the New Wave of the 1960s that anything approaching literary sensibilities became part of the genre.

You seem to have a strangely narrow view of sf.

"Incidentally, sf has never been characterised by "good writing". It wasn't until the New Wave of the 1960s that anything approaching literary sensibilities became part of the genre."

Bingo!

And most "fans" rejected the New Wave stuff because it was too difficult, literary, "pretentious", featured (gasp!) sex scenes. The vast majority of fan-dumb lives up to that term to perfection.

... in the basement of their parents' home, playing World of Warcraft, etc.

Funny how similar SF fandom is with anti-elitist charlatans from the Sarah Palin fan club.

"He done gone use big words in his space-man book!" -- Kevin J. Anderson

I've tried Dennis Johnston a couple of times and his books didn't work for me at all. Probably the Oxford, MS thing.

On the particulars of war i've found (as mentioned in other threads) Tim O'Brien captivating in his VNam memory permeated novels. Generally grim - but w/ the odd leavening of what i'd guess could be thought of as existential black humor. I'm not sure you need the "big picture" war novel when the accretion of terrifying/mundane minutiae can leave one repeatedly shaken.

#54 - i kind of aged through SF in a near optimal fashion (for my tastes). Bradbury/Clarke/Asimov et al. jr high and then the new wave in hschool/college.

I don't remember a blessed thing about James Clavell's style but I do know that I enjoyed his books immensely (except for Whirlwind, which I found unreadable). But style alone does not a good book make, nor does its lack remove the book from consideration . . . what I liked about Clavell was his characters and his plotting. I can still remember and could describe major and minor characters from Shogun, Tai Pan, or Noble House, whereas if I were to sum up the characters from (easy target) The Da Vinci Code, I'd come up with good guy, good girl, bad guy. Oh, yeah, and in the beginning, dead guy. Personalities? Nope.

Cliff, I have to agree with you on McDevitt. I heard good things about him from any number of people, so when I had the chance to pick up a few of his books at a yard sale a while back I jumped at the opportunity. What a disappointment. I slogged through Eternity Road and the first half of The Engines of God and finally realized that I just didn't care.

#59: And please note that Steve King praises both McDevitt and Robert Charles Wilson. What a fucking moron--whoever tapped King to be the editor of BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES a couple of years ago should be roasted alive like a medieval heretic. His nomination to that position was like a punchline to a bad, extremely tasteless joke. Yet another indication of our spiral toward a post-literate world...

To Stephen King a short story is anything less than four hundred pages.

Ah, Gene, right as usual...

An epic fantasy novella usually runs 500 pages, 3 appendices, a glossary, and 18 fold-out maps. If bloat is profundity, then Rush Limbaugh is a frakkin genius.

Please someone say Dune.

The English is so poor I gave up. It's about nothing.

It's not Herbert's best-written book by any means, but it's certainly not "about nothing". And it remains one of the best examples of world-building in the genre.

Well, the first book is...but was there any real necessity for the legion that followed (even the ones Frank wrote/excreted)? Aye, there's the rub...

>66 CliffBurns: - It's easier to just pretend they never happened. Self-deception is useful indeed.

The first three books form a thematic whole, and the later books are arguably better-written. The biggest shame is not that he finished the series, but that his son & Kevin J Anderson did.

But, Ian, I recall the first book ended just fine. CHILDREN OF DUNE and DUNE MESSIAH seemed like afterthoughts to me, even when I tackled them nearly 30 years ago. You feel the books that followed the first one were essential? Don't you think his literary reputation suffered for stretching things out as long as he did? It seemed like a typical genre writer's conceit: milking an idea for da dough as long as humanly possible...

Herbert wrote that he thought up the first three books as one long book about messianism, although at what point in the writing of Dune he decided that he never revealed. As for the later books, I shouldn't have thought it was money which drove him back to the Dune universe - The White Plague was a best-seller, and that book probably damaged his literary reputation more. I suspect he simply had more to say about the ideas he had created the Duniverse to explore.

Yeah, I recall THE WHITE PLAGUE was a clinker (a disease that kills Irishmen? How about just introducing another potato blight?).

There was submarine novel he wrote too and I never got more than 20 pages into that one.

Was Herbert a one-trick pony? And, by that standard, can he be considered a major novelist, genre or otherwise?

I vaguely remember enjoying The Dosadi Experiment a long time ago.

I'm with Cliff on Dune; I'd recommend it to people who haven't read it but I think the following books--all of them--are inferior. I certainly didn't get to the end of the book and wonder what happened afterward.

I "vaguely remember" DOSADI too. Clearly, it didn't make a big impression on either of us. And so I return to my my previous statement re: "one trick ponies"...

Well, in support of that, the plot of Dosadi revolved around the inhabitants of a planet forced to live in extremely harsh conditions, which made them tough and vengeful, so it was more than a little reminiscent of the conditions that created the emperor's Sardakar soldiers in Dune.

The submarine novel was The Dragon in the Sea, his first novel. The Dosadi Experiment is probably his most popular novel after Dune. It was a sequel to the space opera Whipping Star.

I think Herbert definitely counts as a major genre novelist. He was the most thoughtful writer of his generation - there are serious ideas underlying his novels, unlike most sf authors who were being published at the same time. Some of his books don't entirely work, like the fix-up The Godmakers; but others still read pretty good today, like The Santaroga Barrier. I also think The Green Brain is a good book.

I wonder if, a la Asimov and Heinlein, Frank Herbert's body of work will undergo a kind of re-assessment and if his "legacy" is as secure and unassailable as it once was. I haven't read him in (at least) a couple of decades and have no intention of ever picking up one of his books again.

Any thoughts?

Herbert has never been held in as high regard as Asimov or Heinlein. I think he's a better sf writer than either of them. I don't think his oeuvre will ever be reassessed, though. Dune casts too huge a shadow.

Sorry, Ian, I think we were posting simultaneously.

I agree his ideas were good and he could build a world but you could say that about many of the SF writers we both deplore. In terms of execution, are his novels particularly well-written, tightly scripted and literary? Feel nervous cramming my hand into this particular "gom jabbar" (spelling?), but what the hell...

"Herbert has never been held in as high regard as Asimov or Heinlein. I think he's a better sf writer than either of them."

This strikes me as EXTREMELY faint praise.

Knowing how Ian feels about Asimov, I'd agree!

But I'm planning to re-read Dune sometime in the not-too-distant future. Of course (destroying all credibility here!), I'm also planning to re-read the Foundation trilogy. Sometimes familiarity provides comfort.

On the other hand, when I get that list from the "suggestions for new readers of sci fi" compiled, I'm also going to try to read a good portion of those I've not read.

His writing is better in some books than it is in others. Good: The Green Brain, The Santaroga Barrier. Bad: The Godmakers, Dune, The Eyes of Heisenberg, The Heavenmakers. Neither good nor bad: Whipping Star, The Dragon in the Sea. Others I've not read for a long time and will have to reread.

You should give The Santaroga Barrier a go, see what you think.

Re: SANTAROGA

I'll see if my library has it. As for actually shelling out my hard-earned shekels for a Herbert novel...er...

Ejji: Let us know how your re-read of DUNE fares. Not so much FOUNDATION. That one I'd use for kindling. Dreadful, dreadful book.

Hopping in on the Asimov discussion: I mostly find that his works really haven't aged well. He got all this praise for fantastic sci-fi and all, but I was rather bored with the few things I read. I think when he first started writing that they were pretty controversial, but now they're nothing special.

I also find Ayn Rand and Gregory Maguire to be very boring. They're not "wordy" per se, just bland. I feel like Maguire had this ridiculous grin on his face while writing Wicked, as if to say "HA! Who can deny my literary genius now?"
Rand was just nowhere near as clever as I had been told. I always seem to be highly disappointed when something comes to me highly recommended and is so utterly boring. I felt the praise for The Fountainhead was about as unwarranted as a rave review of the Twilight movie.

**Inevitable L. Ron Hubbard reference**

Now there's a writer with no talent to spare. Just be prolific and have your cult of body-thetan-sporting sub-morons buy your books. Works like a charm.

What think ye of PKD? I've read a few of his books and, well, his writing ain't that good. But his ideas -- paranoia, identity, drugz!, the government, religion -- are incredible. He's seems a viable precursor to Pynchon Dick's writing seemed to improve in later books, but it's still sometimes painful to read.

"Dick's writing seemed to improve in later books..."

That's true, methinks. A SCANNER DARKLY, THREE STIGMATA, UBIK, DO ANDROIDS DREAM...those are his best.

His early stuff, VULCAN'S HAMMER and SOLAR LOTTERY et all, do make for painful reading at times.

Just read this:

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/HowTo:Write_Good

23: For me, the appeal of doorstoppers is that when they are really good, and take me to an incredible world, I just want to go deeper and deeper and stay there forever, drinking more in.

That's only true of the really gifted writers, though, who keep revealing more every chapter, every page. If it's long just because the writer couldn't/wouldn't edit, it shows.

I agree with many upthread who cited Asimov and some other SF writers. I was blown away by the Foundation series, but went back a few years ago, and like many of you, found the prose almost unbearable.

He's got great ideas, though, great plots, interesting characters. That helps overcome the extreme weaknesses in the sentences and paragraphs.

That seems to be true with quite a few science fiction writers: great ideas, not enough attention to the prose.

I read the Dune books way too early in my writing/reading life to know about the prose, but I thought the ideas were extraordinary.

#88 What great ideas? The only one that really resonates in the Foundation trilogy is the idea of the Second Foundation - the secret organisation set to watch over everyone. There's not much else that's inventive in it. Variations on pyschohistory had bee naround for a while, Asimov's empire was pretty much an atomic-powered 1950s with spaceships, and the characters are all as contemporary as the writer.

That's funny! Almost makes me wish that I liked weapons and weaponry.

The appeal of FOUNDATION/Asimov has always been a source of mystery to me. And strong proof to bring to bear to support my contention that many SF fans couldn't tell good writing from a prolapsed rectum.

88: That said, they need to be really, really good ideas. It's a tough thing with SF/Fantasy, since many of the common tropes -- space travel, aliens, robots, etc. -- have been done a kajillion times before ... by the 1950s.

This thread helps me understand why I didn't enjoy the Foundation trilogy. I was nearly forty the first time I read it and it just didn't make sense, was hard to read and felt very clunky. I didn't understand all the fuss and did not read another SF work after until last year when I read David Brin's Earth. So, you might say the Foundation Trilogy killed SF for me for a long time, probably just when it was getting interesting again.

Gene: your comment is yet another reason why people should STOP recommending FOUNDATION, Asimov, Heinlein, et all to readers new to the field. Once they tackle a page of two of the really awful shit that passes for "classic" SF, smart, discerning readers will run shrieking in the opposite direction...

(P.S. I hate David Brin too.)

95: You couldn't be more right.

(Personally, I recommend Arthur C. Clarke to people new to the genre. Just not the million 2001 sequels. Those were him at his worst.)

Reading Childhood's End in high school made me detest the genre. Then I found Neuromancer I would recommend that book to genre newbies, since the style is so fun. Then again, my sci fi passions run towards the hot, not towards the cold, clinical, Apollonian variant (Clarke, Asimov, etc.). I want crime and violence and dirt. My biggest pet peeve is "It's the future and it's never dirty and nothing ever breaks down!" As if society became some IBM Clean Room. Ick.

The championing of Asimovian "invisible style" aka "beige prose" in writing groups is detrimental to the development of budding writers. It's also incredibly philistine and stupid. Not everyone will want to write like Pynchon or Gibson, but using this "invisible style" as the prejudiced norm is BAD! Way to turn your writing charges into mute castrati. Once you get over the hurdles of Creative Writing Basics, style is a means to establishing an author's individualized voice. There will be imitation and accumulation along the way, but anyone in the creative field that's not developmentally disabled will understand that. People advocating "invisible style" should be exiled to St. Helena or the nearest Air Force bombing range. Except for Elmore Leonard He's cool, he can stay.

Yes; I always wonder about those futuristic movies or TV shows where everyone dresses the same. There's economic prosperity, advanced technology, and everyone wears beige tunics? Umm . . . why?

I think it is to each his/her own. I mean, I saw King is not liked her for his style. I for one, love King for his style. He surely is different from the other horror writers.

Lazy costume designer. "Oh, this is set in the future? Sweet. Break out the monochrome jumpsuits, I'm going to go catch nine holes."

99: King at least has a style. Asimov and Heinlein is like reading the Branson Yellowpages.

Thought this was worth posting:

The New York Times review of the first volume, L. Ron Hubbard's The Invaders' Plan, describes it thus: "... a paralyzingly slow-moving adventure enlivened by interludes of kinky sex, sendups of effeminate homosexuals and a disregard of conventional grammar so global as to suggest a satire on the possibility of communication through language."

LOL, I would not have wanted to be that writer reading that review!

102: OUCH.

And a lot of the so-called "classic" sci-fi stuff is very dry, now that I think about it. It's also pretty redundant. I've always preferred more contemporary stuff.
"Technology will be the downfall of mankind! Robots cannot be trusted! Woe is the human race for relying on technology!..." only, it's as if someone is speaking this in a very monotone voice, and they're being totally serious.

I love Phillip K. Dick and loved Dune (as a teenager), if we're keeping score.

"Technology will be our downfall!" It's like the Taliban or those abortion doctor-slaughtering pro-lifers wrote that.

Funny how sci fi tropes are disturbingly similar to the real-world philosophies of extremist groups (usually religious, but not always).

I'm paraphrasing George Carlin here, but the fact that the Unabomber wrote his manifesto on a typewriter makes him a sellout.

I do like "social" science fiction, work that focuses more on different kinds of society. Less about whiz-bang technology and cultures as sterile and antiseptic as an IBM Clean Room. Boring!

Yes, I like "social" science fiction too. That's why I love Ursela Le Guin.

this has been hashed over at length on the SF thread - but my intro to SF, which stuck, consisted of Clarke, l'Engle, a canticle for Leibowitz and Bradbury all in jr high and (except for a wrinkle in time which my mom got for us) all were in our school library. Soon thereafter came PKDick, Dune, Ballard, Zelazny(sp) etc which i had to get out of the public library. (Fairfax County, Va was - and remains - one of the wealthier counties in the US and we had a v. decent library a long walk or an easy bike ride away (about 5 miles) from home in the mid 1960s.

Asimov and Heinlein didn't work so well for me then - though i read a lot of them both "because they were there" in the library as well.

But there was enough good stuff early on that i got hooked and stayed hooked.

My favorite sf is either fairly off the wall, kind of wack stuff (Jack Womack, Michael Swanick) or "world building" SF (night sky mine, the difference engine). A lot of the best SF has relatively little to do w/ science (and generally the lesser the better). Rather it's tied into world/society building given a few premises. I get tickled by SF fans trying hard to separate themselves from fantasy fans* since the only real difference is the physical/technological environments that writers in the not so different genres tend to use. But then i like the biggies, Gibson, Stephenson up to the Baroque cycle and a lot of stuff that has its origins in cyberpunk (ie Souls in the Great Machine). So any generalization is just that on my part.

*well, fantasy fans, esp. of "high fantasy" that wallowed in JRRT's wake, are prone to "my hottest hero/heroine is.." and suchlike encomiumisms (sic)which SF fans generally eschew. But then there are Trekkies and the like so.

Bob,

Genre is a trap ... or to paraphrase Joyce, a nightmare from which I am trying to wake. Too often speculative fiction has had a reductive effect on how genre is defined: SF = spaceships, aliens; fantasy = trolls, elves, medieval place with abundant sword fighting. When something doesn't easily fit into those neat little categories (Naked Lunch, Gravity's Rainbow, Malone Dies, etc.), readers spaz out or get all reverse-elitist (being elitist in their non-intelligence). Like Oscar Wilde, I'm looking for well-written books, not necessarily books that fit into the SF or Fantasy Slot in the Barnes & Noble Borg Collective. Genre is the means, not the end, to an enjoyable reading experience.

After ten minutes of looking I am unable to locate one of my rants to reference on the topic of the amoeba like creep of SF absorbing all literature in its path, so I'll add it to this thread as well. those of you who are familiar with me know well how it goes.

Something like this:

I found this on one of the blogs I've taken to regularly reading:

"Given sections of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, wouldn't the science fiction equivalent of Jimmy Joyce be Jimmy Joyce? Finnegans Wake seems to anticipate the muddled nonsensical dream-logic of the Interwebs and the cacophony of idiot-voices struggling to find some sense in the place." (emphasis mine)

There you have it in a nutshell. Not even James Joyce can escape the slow drowning of all literature in a sea of Science Fiction.

Hey, I wrote that! I think I just done gone fathered me an Internet meme. Too bad you don't get royalty checks for those things ;)

I should have known it was one of us.

Thought this quote is relevant:

"I used to be a perfectionist but it was the wrong kind of perfection. And I no longer think perfection is interesting—by definition it's not lifelike." -- Steven Soderbergh

What is the context of the Soderbergh quote because I am not quite sure what he's talking about. And what does he think is the right kind of perfection?

By the way, Le Nozze di Figaro is perfect, and it is pretty damn interesting.

The Soderbergh quote is from some interview I found online. He's referring to "perfection" in film making. Unlike other movies that have been airbrushed and CGI'ed, his films have had a ragged edge to them. Not every camera move is perfect, etc. As opposed to the brilliant perfectionists like the Coen Bros.

On the whole, perfection is rather boring. I'd rather watch Schizopolis than Star Wars Episode I.

Well, Star Wars episode 1 may be technically perfect (I'm not qualified to judge), but as far as writing, story, acting, etc., it's crap.

But then, I'd say perfection is unattainable in art. Or fleeting. Or in the eye of the beholder!

Karl -
nice explication - generating yet a NEW short list.
for your consideration:

the king's last song, Geoff Ryman, set in Cambodia's "Most glorious past" and her "singularly inglorious recent present.
the ministry of special cases, Nathan Englander. A brilliant deconstruction of existence, metaphorical and literal, during the rule of junta
Kalpa Imperial Angelica Gorodischer, Argentina
shooting war, Anthony Lappe. exciting and intellectually honest graphic story documenting the ever increasing "news from nowhwere:" a global phenomenon that American local and nat. news honed to its current scalpeline edge. Reinterprets the war machine bush created to sink us into the mideast into in perpetuity.
Closer to what you were looking for?
bob

Those all look like cool books. Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya sounds really cool. All about a wannabe novelist editing an 1100 page report on atrocities that occurred in a Latin American banana republic.

116: Re: CGI and whatnot -- CGI is imperfect because it makes everything look "too perfect." Humans are never done right: it's either Horrors in the Uncanny Valley like the Polar Express movie or Thunderbirds Are Go! with a Better Budget aka that Final Fantasy movie. Only a couple movies have done humans right: Toy Story, but it was set in a Cartoon-World, so it doesn't really count. I Am Legend pulled it off successfully, since all of the Rabies Zombies were CGI. The graphics, combined with the excellent directing, acting, and writing, made for a winning combination. The Star Wars movies failed because George Lucas gets easily distracted by shiny things. The vehicle, creature, and droid designs are all spectacular. Too bad Lucas couldn't write himself out of a wet paper sack.

At least in Stars Wars (1977) Lucas was able to steal from Kurosawa for the story.

Could we call this style the literary equivalent of "smooth jazz?"

George Lucas mentioned in the same breath as Kurosawa. (Shudder)

The first trilogy were an amalgamated homage to Kurosawa, Westerns, Joseph Campbell, and, um, Leni Riefenstahl. Then the second trilogy came out, Lucas thought he created a religion, and it all became a self-referential circle jerk engineered for mentally unstable 8-year-olds.

>122 kswolff: with bad actors speaking bad dialog.

I enjoyed the 'new' Star Wars movies, especially Episode 3.

I still have a worn out copy of the first "Star Wars", without the enhanced special effects. Getting pretty yellow with age but it would be tough to find an original version without all the extra CGI crap Lucas insisted on adding in years later.

I'm not even sure I saw the last film, whatever it was. And no images from the most recent trilogy stick with me at all. And, of course, they introduced that timeless character, Jar-Jar Binks...

They actually released the original Star Wars on DVD sans CGI crap.

That's good news, I'll keep my eye out for it. Same with the first "Terminator" movie: my copy is really starting to show its age. Time for an upgrade...

If you took all the insults Bill the Butcher hurled at the Irish in Gangs of New York and replaced the word "Irish" with "George Lucas," that would be my take on the whole thing.

Tell us how you really feel!

Oh, Karl usually does...

I get very annoyed at my kids when they tell me it's actually episode 4. It's Star Wars, dammit. It came first, whatever you call it.

"CGI will make it better!" -- From someone who has never written a good story in their life. Glad to see we're letting culturally illiterate noobs /aka studio execs meddle with writers and directors. Yeah, that usually leads to good results.

How about, "nobody's going to like that downer ending to the Scarlet Letter--how about we make it, you know, happy?!"

Read the blog post "Atlas Tugged":

http://handjobsforthirdstringers.blogspot.com/

The writer and I were both teaching assistants together at Ye Olde University. If there was any justice in the world (at least affordable justice), then he would have his own radio show and a book deal.

"From that post, he endorsed a policy of lax regulation on derivatives trading and even went before Congress in 2004 to tell every homeowner in the country that adjustable rate mortgages were the greatest thing since the invention of the glory hole."

!!!

My understanding is that there is a version of episodes 4-6 you can get that DOES have all the CG crap in it, but there is the option of watching the original version as a SPECIAL FEATURE. A little smaller, and without mastered image and sound. Needless to say that is the version I will be getting for my collection when some extra bucks come my way...

As for the possibility a good DVD with ONLY the untainted version on it, I think we can give up hope. Lucas will never allow that version to outsell his "improved" one. Never happen.

Not being a fan of Star Wars chapter anything, it seems to me, as best I can remember (the series jumped the shark when it introduced a fucking muppet as a lead character), and I've said this before, the original Star Wars shown in theaters did not have a Chapter heading. It started simply with in a Galaxy far, far away... or whatever bullshit that prologue began with. The chapters only came to him after that movie was such a success. He would have done better to leave it at one.

Puppetry is an old, noble and dying art. It doesn't have to just be for kids, any more than someone who practices mime has to paint his face white, wear a striped shirt and beret, and irritate people on street corners. Anyway, Yoda is surely only a supporting character?

I don't think Gene was putting down puppetry per se: just Yoda. And I agree, he's an annoying little fucker. In terms of Masters of Puppets, my wife (a huge fan of puppets and marionettes) loves these folks:

http://www.theoldtrouts.org/

They've done a lovely video with the Canadian musician, Feist (don't like her music, meself, but the video is lovely):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN0A0ZSfnj4

I'm a fairly uncritical fan of the first three Star Wars movies (or chapters 4, 5, and 6, give me a break), including Yoda, R2D2, C2PO, Chewbacca, and even the dancing Ewoks. But the second three, aka chapters 1, 2, and 3, I found pretty screamingly bad (and not in a Plan 9 kind of so bad it's good way).

140: Agree on all your comments. Would add Han Solo to your list of things to like about the first three.

Whenever I see the word 'puppet' I think of Being John Malkovich.

139: Beautiful, Cliff. I'm afraid down here in the States, this is the best we can muster:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzTMf5W7ZLw

Holy...something or other.

That is truly demented.

Must be yet another manifestation of my old age but just watching that made me cringe like a wounded monkey. This "Jackass" stuff is a whole other generation of weirdness. I'm considered pretty far out among my circle of acquaintances (some of them whack jobs in their own right) but I'm wayyyy out of my depth with people who would subject their naughty bits to such wanton abuse.

Think I'll get back to my knitting and violin lessons...

Yeah, that was a tad harsh. I guess Chris Pontius won't be joining the ranks of Gretl Aicher or Simon Buckley, very soon...

140: I am a fan of muppets / puppets, etc. because they aren't CGI. They are characters on the stage with the actors. I enjoyed Yoda's Zen-like speech in Empire, the training sessions (Cf. Kill Bill, Vol. 2), and his Yiddishisms (putting at the end of sentences verbs). A charming character as timeless and iconic as Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, and Ernie and Bert. (On the other hand, Elmo should be shot in the street gangland-style.)

In the new trilogy, when they CGI'ed the shit out of Yoda, making him a ninjitsu swordsman with the light saber, I wanted to put a drill in George Lucas's eye-sockets. It was as vile as Fred Astaire dancing with a fucking vacuum and John Wayne shilling for beer.

>146 kswolff:

Yes. Maybe for me it all comes down to the idea that the original three, even when being cheesy, had heart. The new trilogy just strikes me as a glossy exercise and my eyes glaze over. I might tune the TV channel to one of them, because sometimes I like background noise for my naps.

For writers with no style, consider this exercise:

Which book has been more memorable and more iconic in literature:

*1984 -- Orwell's prescient dystopia written in 1949.

*The Moon is a Harsh Mistress -- Heinlein's tale of Martian revolution written in the mid-1950s.

***

Even though Orwell is a rather austere writer, he stands head above shoulders with his "science fiction" tale. Heinlein, going after the same crypto-Bolshevist menace in his novel, comes across as a talky Ayn Rand worshiper. The Visionary vs. the Typist.

Used correctly, Elmo can be awesome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUB7zTOpYaY

Oh and, uh...books.

146: I remember finding a blog "by" Yoda all written in the funny backwards way he talks. The funniest post there was about how in fights with lightsabres, someone always loses a hand. Yoda writes something like, "If a nickel I had for every time lost a hand is, rich I would be. Up with that, what is?" My kids and I now use "Up with that, what is?" for all occasions.

>150 anna_in_pdx: I love that!