Well, back when I was still only a fan, back when I still hated school, I
thought Delany was Ghod. I didn't know any other SF fans. I kept on trying
to tell everybody how cool he was, but nobody believed me. And then I read
V, by Pynchon, when I started undergrad, and I was like, oh, cool, SF. I
didn't know there were postmodern distinctions back then. I hadn't even
heard of "criticism" yet. And popular culture wasn't yet popular. =)
So--this may only indicate that I had a predisposition for academia, and
that's it.
But.
There are many fine writers out there who spin wonderful tales and whom I
read greedily. They don't have the particular linguistic twists that I
relish in my academic work, but they tickle all my fan buttons. And I call
them SF too. And then there's junk that makes my eyes glaze over after one
paragraph, when I realize I've just wasted $5 (if I'm lucky). Academia has
not made SF SF. SF writers themselves started making these distinctions a
long time ago, from what it seems to me in all the intros I've read to
various and sundry anthologies, where editors/peers pick the cream of the crop.
I like play with language. Does that make what I like to read literary? I
know most of the stuff I read is neither popular, nor canon. *shrug* Who
knows. This just happens to be my kink. Your kink is ok too. =)
Heather
=)
(who still maintains that Wittig's _Les guerilleres_ is less SF (though
arguably more literary) than Christiane Rochefort's _Une rose pour
Morrison_, but nobody ever seems to have heard of the latter)
hmaclean@kent.edu
http://www.personal.kent.edu/~hmaclean
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