[LMB] [LmMB] SFi vs Fantasy

[Paula Lieberman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dorian E. Gray" <israfel at eircom.net>


> Paula asked...
>
>> "Turkey City Lexicon" ??  Huh?  I don't remember when I first heard or
>> read
>> the term, but it was in SF circles long long ago, and it's part of the SF
>> critical vocabulary. Who/what is Turkey City?!
>
> The Turkey City Lexicon is a collection of various (most?) items in the SF
> critical vocabulary.  A copy of it, with background info about its 
> genesis,
> can be found here: http://www.sfwa.org/writing/turkeycity.html.

Or, they're in the vocabulary of folks whose writing I'm mostly allergic to 
(Lewis Shiner, Bruce Sterling, and William Gibson).   Their 
perspectives/perceptions/literary values are very much non-coincident with 
mine  generally (I've tried reading work by all three, and found it highly 
unpalatable.   I forced myself to read the entirety of a Sterling story in 
Asimov's once, and my reaction was, "Either that was the point and it was 
completely lacking in merit to me, or I didn't get the point of the story 
and so the story had no merit for me.  And the rhythm is unresolved anapests 
and that's repulsive to me, and I didn't like the characters/find them 
people I was interested in reading about/cared about, so that's a negative, 
and I wasn't interested in the setting...."  bottom line, it reinforced, 
"Bruce Sterling's writing lacks merit for me to read/spend my time trying to 
read."   I got halfway through Neuoromancer once when I had a cold so bad 
that half my neurons were offline--I'd never gotten to the end of page 3 on 
any of my previous attempts to read it. Once the neurons came back on-line, 
though, it went back to being unreadable!

Bruce Sterling I think is the fellow who dumped all over Lois McMaster 
Bujold's novel Falling Free, failing to see any merit or value in it.  The 
fact that it intentionally was an homage to and written in the style of 
old-fashioned Astounding/Analog nuts and bolts stores, with its hardware 
focus being welding technology, either completely escaped him, was 
irrelevant to him, was a bug rather than a feature to him, or otherwise 
either failed to sink in or was something he rejected as having any value or 
merit.

Whilte there are a lot of people who both like Lois McMaster Bujold's 
writing and Bruce Sterling, there are also a lot of other people who 
nominate the one of them for Hugos and strongly dislike the writing of the 
other.  I fall into the category of voting Lois McMaster Bujold's work for 
Hugos and strongly disliking/being completely unreceptive to Bruce 
Sterling's writing--and much of his literary criticism.

So, while there are some things I agree with on that list, there is other 
stuff that off on a different axis from my 
tastes/perceptions/perspectives...