Flippant Haiku and Serious Genre

[ase]

Spring indications:
lawn mowers buzzing long greens,
light heating branches.

What on Earth moved me to buy three Heinlein novels and one short story collection Friday? I have serious and persistent problems with his fiction, because Uncle Bob does not know best, and yet, I still pick up these skinny time-faded paperbacks. I blame Heinlein's ability to actually tell a story and write witty prose, which means I still remember most of the stories from The Green Hills of Earth. That's a testament to skill, since I tend to lose short stories out of memory faster than I misplace my keys. (Fortunately, the keys keep turning up.) Heinlein is one of the greats of his SF cadre for a reason. Even if picking which Heinlein to read next is much like picking one's way through a minefield. (Citizen of the Galaxy: greatness. The Puppetmasters: erk.)

If one were going to pick the formative authors for a generation of SF fans, I'd point to Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov. I am not asserting they were consistently the best writers, but you can invoke the Foundation or "I'm sorry, Dave", or "the one with the lunar revolution and Mike" and people know what you're talking about. It's the background against which everyone reacted (and )is still reacting).

Who are the top authors of my generation, and the next?

I think Bujold, Pratchett and maybe Gaiman are the Big Three authors who everyone in my fannish age cohort has read; I could be wrong, because I am wildly biased about Bujold, and Gaiman really depends on whether you count Sandman or just his novels. The up and coming cohort might include some combination of Scalzi, Doctorow, Gaiman (version YA), Novik, and/or Stross. That totally ignores non-genre novels widely read by fans (Laurie R. King's mystery novels come to mind), and media fannishness, comics (see Sandman), and fan fiction, some (but far from all) of which has surprisingly cool speculative fiction content. And once you open the floor that much, you have to question what pool of readers you're talking about, anyway, and that changes the game (and Big Name Author list) significantly.

Comments

[twistedchick]

Unfortunately, the Puppetmasters has been made into a movie at least twice that I can remember. 'Double Star' was to some degree the inspiration for 'Dave', which featured Kevin Kline as the president/actor. Several other Heinlein novels have inspired movies at further distance; 'The Man Who Fell To Earth' came from 'Stranger in a Strange Land' (sort of). I would love to see a decent, reasonable version of 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' (one of my longtime favorites for many reasons) now that computer effects could be used, but I doubt it will happen.

[ase]

Unfortunately, the Puppetmasters has been made into a movie at least twice that I can remember.

You are kidding me. Okay, IMdB says you're not. Erk.

I would love to see a decent, reasonable version of 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' (one of my longtime favorites for many reasons) now that computer effects could be used, but I doubt it will happen.

I would too! Why do you think it won't be filmed?

[twistedchick]

Because of the language, the wonderful language of the Loonies that Heinlein assembled from Russian, English and several other things. There's this idea in Hollywood that movies in "manufactured languages" don't work -- ignoring, of course, all of Tolkien, Crouching Tiger-Hidden Dragon, White Nights and many other successes, most of which weren't made in Hollywood. Quest for Fire had an invented language and so did A Clockwork Orange, and both had to overcome this in the press.

[ase]

I'd argue that it's not invented, it's slang, and point to urbandictionary.com - but someone might try to take that as a model, and that's not right. Moon has grammatical changes, rather than the overdose of portmanteau-slinging that passes for wit among my peers. (What? My first exposure to portmanteaus culture was Harry Potter shipping wars. The only 'ship portmanteus I don't find twee are the funny ones for irreverent ships, like Tony Stark/Pepper Potts: pepperoni! Anyway.) However, given what Hollywood does to novels, any movie based on Moon would quickly become the story of Manny heroically shooting his way to independence, with Whyoh hanging on his arm.