leichter (04/12/83)
In response to Donn Seeley: I stand by my previous note. There are books that are obviously (to the reader familiar with the field) SF and little else; there is also literature that uses the forms of SF, may even legitimately BE SF, but is also something more. Similarly, there is a qualitative difference between an SF book review - at least as such things often appear in net.sf-lovers - and a, for lack of a better term, "non-SF" book review. Again, it's difficult to specify exactly where the difference lies, but "I know it when I see it", and so do most people. Examples of things that mark a review as an "SF review": Interminable discussions of scientific "errors" and how to work around them; arguments about alternative courses of action the actors could have/should have taken; nit- picking about minor - or even major - inconsistencies within a book or between books of a series; incredible attempts to show that a number of books are/are not part of a consistent future history. Borges's writing would "fail" many of the "tests" implied by these review topics. So what? All that proves is the irrelevence of the "tests"! I found the idiotic discussions of the Star Wars and Startrek movies - movies I enjoyed - just as annoying as you did. I found the piles of comments about Destination: Void - which inspired this whole discussion - just as boring and annoying, for the same reasons. If we are going to discuss SF books here - and there is nothing wrong with that - let's discuss them as SF @i(books) rather than as @i(SF) books. -- Jerry decvax!yale-comix!leichter leichter@yale
franka (04/14/83)
#R:yale-com:-127000:tekcad:23300003:000:417
tekcad!franka Apr 14 07:57:00 1983
Hey guys, why not just form a subgroup net.books.sf? This would get
all the people who don't want to read about sf books off the backs of those
who do. Also, don't flame at me about "newsgroup proliferation". People who
run brain damaged versions of news deserve what they get.
Frank Adrian
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