STILL RAINING

It’s been raining here quite a bit lately. I figured there would be mushrooms in abundance this weekend, but apparently not, at least not in Redwoods Regional Park. Plenty of this Western trillium (Trillium ovatum) though, which is always a welcome sight.

Guh now has a new, faster, more flexible home thanks to a generous party. Rejoice.

I was disussing my literary tastes with Andy the other day and sort of realized I don’t actually like reading science fiction. Well, maybe I like it, but I don’t love it unconditionally. When I attempt to list favorite books, scifi rarely rises to the top, whereas fantasy always seems to bubble right on up. Sure, I like David Brin, Ender’s Game, Kim Stanley Robinson, etc., but I don’t love them, and they couldn’t honestly be described as ‘great’ in the context of contemporary literature as a whole. God knows I loves me some Firefly and Star Trek and Babylon 5, but I can’t think of a single science fiction novel that I’ve read more than twice.

Of course, if you broadened your definition of science fiction a bit to include “secret scifi” like Cloud Atlas and Never Let Me Go, then I’m back on board. I guess, as with all non-genre literature, it boils down to writing quality, stylistic or structural innovations over world-creation. I sort of had this in the back of my mind as I was reading this first entry in the NYTimes Book Review’s “new” scifi colum (not sure what happened to the old one). The author complains that he has trouble recommending science fiction to the non-dork because it’s almost always “too geeky,” and then goes on to sing praise to one of these geeky books. If he wants people to take science fiction seriously, maybe he should review serious books instead of space opera. Not that I have anything against space opera, per se, but I think the scale of a space opera is so massive that you can’t approach any themes with it smaller than human nature itself, and it’s practically impossible to say anything interesting about that without flogging some beast of burden. Namely, a horse. A dead one. See how I avoided aphorism! Take that, high school English!

This got me googling and I found this column by someone named Robert Killheffer. Seems like an intelligent critic of scifi.

Also, I have decided to despise the words ‘brio’ and ‘elan,’ especially when used in the same sentence.