[SFRA-L] Atwood bashing

[Peter Halasz]

Hey,

What's with the picking on Canadians? First Atwood and now van Vogt. 
Who next? 

Sheesh. 

<grin>

Peter

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Rob Latham" <rob.latham at ucr.edu>
> To: "Dominick Grace" <dgrace2 at uwo.ca>
> Cc: "sfra-l List" <SFRA-L at charlemagne.cddc.vt.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, 12 October, 2011 11:04:09 AM
> Subject: Re: [SFRA-L] Atwood bashing
> 
> 
> Why is it that when a writer squarely within the SF tradition
> produces hilarious pastiches of pulp enormities (e.g., Barry
> Malzberg, Robert Silverberg, M. John Harrison, Eleanor Arnason),
> everyone doesn't go off with quite the fury that Atwood seems to
> inspire? I agree with Andy Sawyer's comments: the vituperative way
> SF insiders react to her comments is only likely to reinforce her
> prejudices. Besides that, I think she is a fine writer whose views
> about SF are no more ridiculous than, say, A.E. Van Vogt's.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Oct 12, 2011, at 7:11 AM, Dominick Grace wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Well, first off, this review does not seem that terribly bad to me,
> but maybe that's because comparing something to a doctoral
> dissertation does not seem like an insult to me. . . . Anyway, I
> doubt the review would have been any less dismissive if Atwood had
> written a book about some other genre.
> 
> I haven't read the book, though I plan to. I have, however, heard
> Atwood on more than one occasion give talks on SF and her relation
> to it, and my impression was that she was not in fact terribly
> knowledgeable. In one such talk, she said her work (HT etc) wasn't
> SF because (and this is a fairly close paraphrase) SF was about
> giant squids from Jupiter. Tongue in cheek slightly perhaps? It
> didn't seem so to me. Given the truly wretched pulp SF pastiche she
> included in The Blind Assassin , I don't think she does see what she
> does in books like HT as qualitatively the same thing at all as what
> she represents within-genre SF as being in that book. . . . The fact
> that the "Science Fiction masters" she discusses seem from the list
> provided actually to be generally writers from outside the genre
> (Wells is perhaps a bit of an exception, since there was not yet a
> distinct genre for him to be outside, and in any event, he certainly
> saw himself as a serious writer and intellectual) does not inspire
> me with confidence that the book will really engage with SF so much
> as it will engage with non-SF engagements with SF
> 
> Dom
> On 10/12/11, John Pierce < pierceqfpl at ewwpi.com > wrote:
> 
> 
> The San Francisco Chronicle sure doesn't like her new book:
> 
> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/10/09/entertainment/e220246D71.DTL
> 
> But is the book really that bad, or is she just being put down for
> taking sf seriously?
> 
> --J.J.P.
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