He's a clue, Simps, if you want to meet my request for a list of sci-fi books that come up to the level of art, you don't give me a list of authors, two, who, to my knowledge, never wrote a piece of sci-fi, one of whom I seem to recall having far more disparaging things to say about the quality of sci-fi than I did this morning, and to then equate popularity with literary quality. And, I note, you don't even list the works of the two who had written stuff that is, arguably, science fiction. I doubt you know they exist. Then you claim that "no one reads Katherine Anne Porter" as if that is relevant to what I said, especially after I noted that the largely forgotten Howard Fast was a better writer than the sci-fi writers whose work I'd enjoyed.
I doubt you ever read a single book by any of the writers I named or the ones you did, I doubt you've read a novel you weren't assigned to read in college or high school and you probably skimmed, at best. I'll bet you wrote your grade school book reports from the dusk jacket flaps.
I'd have thought that someone might name something by Ray Bradbury or, possibly, Kurt Vonnegut, though I would have been pretty sure you wouldn't mention Octavia Butler. All of them superior writers who have written sci-fi (I tend to like their non-sci-fi stuff better). Though I still wouldn't compare them favorably with writers like KAP.
When you can just make up any old thing to fix the problems of your story, it tends to go flaccid*. I'm sure your experience is flaccid though I doubt you'd ever reflect on that. Flaccidity doesn't often lead to lucidity.
I notice you didn't take up the questions I said I'd have liked to see Ursula Le Guin address dealing with her contention that she and her body were the same thing. I'm not surprised, when two of your tag-team buddies, JR (Freki) and "Skeptic Tank" tried to - coming up with predictable and inadequate arguments - I kicked their asses. That's a feeling you must know.
* That's been the most unsatisfying thing about science fiction in my experience, how when authors are allowed to take any old route to solving the problems of their characters, inventing everything up to and including basic physics, the temptation is to make an easy shortcut. I think, when it gets down to that, even some of those authors I've liked, even in books I otherwise liked, the writer didn't seem to be able to continue with the story, ending it any old way. Clifford Simak in All Flesh is Grass worked himself into an elaborate plot line, working up to a cataclysmic denouement when, to give his story a happy ending, he had to rely on having his sentient flowers make the effort to solve all of our problems because they needed us to think they're pretty. I enjoyed lots of the book but the ending sucked. Even in the decidedly superior Ursula Le Guin I find that resort to be far more unsatisfying than any of the constant ambiguities of her narratives. I don't find that they do much to inform my thinking about real things.
It's a sad commentary on the alleged educations of modern people that so many people with such high credentials are so invested in what ends up being kind of chintzy. I am sure it's related to the addiction that so many college credentialed people have to historical fiction over actual history only in that case the even greater distance between what is real over what is presented as real is far more dangerous.
As to the argument that more people read science fiction than read Katherine Anne Porter, that's hardly a surprise, facile and easy entertainment is more popular than difficult and challenging examinations of real life. There was a time the educational and intellectual industry encouraged people to try the difficult and challenging and examinations of real life. With the "study" of pop culture all the rage these days, that's not true but that has more to do with profit potential than it does the most important thing about popular culture. Something you can also say about science, as well. Pop culture's influence makes its content enormously dangerous when, as it so often does, it promotes sexism, racism, ethnic bigotry, hatred of minority groups, bad attitudes to people on the lower levels of society, the poor, the disabled, the troubled or if it glorifies power and the exercise of power by the powerful.
I take popular entertainment very seriously because its huge audiences make what it does potentially very dangerous and my experience of it is that any positive effects it can have are easily turned around by the money men who control what goes on screens, what comes out of speakers. I watched the very, very brief period of an attempt to present positive images of Women and Black People of the early 1970s, turned into the backlash against feminism and the rise of "anti-political correctness" which was really the use of still well entrenched habits of straight white male supremacy as a weapon against women and minority groups. I saw that even within the gay male subculture as promiscuous, anonymous sex, especially anal sex, was popularized and continued even as its results became deadly in the 1980s and it still is there in ever more extreme forms in the explosion of online availability of porn. You can contrast that with the typical college-department view of pop culture which is directly tied to its profit making potential, trying to paste onto it an intellectual substance which, if it was really there, would cut into its ability to make money.
The conception, the compound noun, "science fiction" is interesting to think about because of the proud, hubristic claim of the champions of science that it very intentionally and specifically DOESN'T DEAL IN FICTION. Science fiction is 100% fiction, it is most often close to 100% science free.
To associate a genre of writing which depends for its defining elements on things that don't exist, on things that, according to the only science we have available to us, cannot exist or science as we know it is invalidated, to associate that with science is more telling about some of the truly bizarre notions we have about science than it does anything else. It's tempting to say that that's a phenomenon of those who hold an ignorance based, romantic view of science (like many online) but there are lots of professional scientists who seem to be true believes of that type, too. I have to wonder if it didn't influence some of the stupider things Carl Sagan did, everything from his incredibly stupid "The Amniotic Universe"(published in the friggin' Atlantic!) to his invention of the pseudo-science of "exo-biology" a science based securely on life forms that have never been seen, heard, smelled, sensed, and which are not known to exist, which we know are not available to subject to legitimate scientific methods. And, to top off the total and hypocritical absurdity of it, which, by Sagans arguments, as a good member of the Council of CSICOP against UFO buffs, almost certainly will never be there to compare the science fictitious fabrications of the exobiologists against.
That the set of all Sci-ranger defenders of the cultural and political hegemony of science comprises an enormous intersection with the set of all heavily emotionally invested sci-fi fans is interesting. It makes you wonder how sophisticated their knowledge of science or even basic mathematics could be or how deep their commitment to their asserted exclusive route to reality is.
I do think that that tell us a lot about those two groups and, especially, that intersection and the problems of the culture which a STEM based education produces. They seem to be powerless and helpless when dealing with real life.
I don't read that much science fiction, I pick up a book about once every five years or so and sometimes I like it. I've never mistaken it as important. It's not like reading Noon Wine or Home.
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