Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 05:16:00 +0300 From: Anatoly Vorobey <mellon@pobox.com> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <19980614051600.62407@techunix.technion.ac.il> In-Reply-To: <199806132000.NAA04949@usr06.primenet.com>; from Terry Lambert on Sat, Jun 13, 1998 at 08:00:33PM %2B0000 References: <19980613212837.A17939@doriath.org> <199806132000.NAA04949@usr06.primenet.com>
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You, Terry Lambert, were spotted writing this on Sat, Jun 13, 1998 at 08:00:33PM +0000: > I don't read solely Science Fiction, but it is certainly the vast > majority of what I read. More's the pity, if you ask me. > > I think you are unfairly maligning the genre. I don't think so. I would rather say I'm aware of its limitations as well as its advantages. I certainly don't despise the genre. Most of my childhood and youth were spent under the sign of addiction to SF. I swallowed SF it by dozens, hundreds of books; knew by heart all of Bradbury and Azimov and Shackley and Simak (I must have reread "City" at least 10 times) and so on, and so forth, fathers of the genre as well as recent books, still famous authors as well as authors now unfairly forgotten by many (Henry Kuttner is one, for example). It supported and enhanced my interest in science; it made me curious about computers; it inspired my daydreaming. But there comes a time when one can look back and reassess the books and genre he grew up with. And when I did that, I saw that few books really stayed with me, enriched me, taught me something besides another idea of a null-space. The favourite authors and favourite books remain with me, but they are so rare in the sea of funky aliens and badly thought-out future societies... But above all, I wonder: why only SF, or mostly SF? Why is Ovid to be confined to a readership of classics departments in universities? Why Shakespeare is something you learn at school and then forget, or, at best, a source of worn-out quotes? >From a literary point of view, SF looks like an ignorant child. The art of writing prose has been refined in Europe during the last seven centuries. It's not easy, writing good prose; writers gradually learned to carefully weave the plot line, to breathe life into their characters, to avoid cliches and dead metaphors, to shift narrative voices, to break and maintain unity of time, place and action, to let their words flow or stumble as they wished; to break the novel into a surrealistic chaos and resurrect it in a Joycean synthesis. SF, as a genre, remains provincial and ignorant in regard to this tradition of refining art of prose. SF authors, by and large, don't write well, just as cheap romance novels aren't written well. Many people who grew up exclusively on SF (I didn't) simply lack the appreciation and the taste for good prose; their motives for reading are different, shaped by SF. No SF novel I am familiar with begins as beautifully as Nabokov's Lolita: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." But one friend of mine doesn't understand my fascination with this passage; he sees nothing but a few symbols and allegories in it. He expects unusual wonders and novel technologies in a book; he lacks the taste that can only be built up by reading lots of good prose. I am far from condemning the genre. Every genre has its right to live. But to read only SF, or even mostly SF, is in my opinion to miss the exquisite beauty of great literature that is much more subtle, beautiful, passionate and thrilling than all the spaceships and subspaces of the multiverse. [a somewhat eclectic list of non-SF writers skipped; I must admit I don't know who Guy Kawasaki is, and my knowledge of Japanese authors is limited to Akutagava Ryunoske in prose and many haiku authors in verse] > PS: Excuse my butchery; I'm not home (where the book is) right now: > > "Very well", said Klapaucius, "Let's have a love poem, lyrical, > pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. > Tensor algebra mostly, with a little topology and higher > calculus, if need be. But with real feeling, mind you, and in > the true cybernetic spirit." > > PPS: If you think computer scientists don't read Lem, you should > check your "fortunes.dat" files... I know that computer scientists read Lem (my point was about general SF-reading community), but even they don't read him enough. A good example is Lem's book "Summa technologiae". This non-fiction book was written in the middle of the 50ies and in it Lem tries to predict and discuss future technological breakthroughs, ethical and philosophical problems they can bring, etc., based on the knowledge of technology we had in the 50ies. Not only does the book predict with amazing accuracy some of the technological changes we've seen since then; it also singlehandedly invents and describes the basics of several branches of philosophy of mind, AI and cognitive science. For example, it contains amazingly accurate prediction and description of "virtual reality" concept and problems related to it (such as recognizing whether you are in the "real" reality or the virtual one, feasibility of building entirely convicning virtual reality, etc.) The book was never translated to English (AFAIK) and some of the problems and concepts described in it were discussed in the AI and philosophy of mind community only starting in late 70ies, and it took the community quite a few years to reach the clarity and precision of Lem's thought (quite well-known Hofstadter and Dennett's anthology "The Mind's I" of '81 dealing with similar range of problems is unaware of "Summa technologiae" and some of the articles and commentaries in it look amazingly childish compared to that work of the 50ies). And what is read by Lem when Lem is read? Most computer scientists or SF lovers who read Lem are familiar only with "Cyberiad", sometimes the "Diaries of Ijon Tichy", rarely with anything else. These are very good, and very funny works, but they are *old*, they have been written in 50ies and 60ies, and since then Lem has been writing amazingly smart and beatiful SF for more than 30 years. "Solaris", "Fiasco", "Investigation"... many more novels and stories, essays and novelettes which together comprise some of the best SF ever written and most of which remain virtually unknown to American readers. I own a 14-volumed set of Lem's works translated into Russian, and these are selected, not complete works. I suppose that a half of these works were even never translated into English. Sincerely, Anatoly. -- Anatoly Vorobey, mellon@pobox.com http://pobox.com/~mellon/ "Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly" - G.K.Chesterton To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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