Post by seraphim on Dec 30, 2008 14:11:24 GMT -5
Cordwainer Smith: Try Norstrilla or The Rediscovery of Man. You might also like his short story Scanners Live in Vain, available online here: www.webscription.net/chapters/1416521461/1416521461___5.htm
Waltern Wangerin: Book of the Dun Cow. Can hold its own easily with Narina or Watership Down. Unless you are bleeding out stop whatever you are doing now and go find a copy to buy or to borrow. You won't be sorry.
R. A. Lafferty: He wrote a great number of short stories set in his Instrumentality milieu. You might consider reading his Hugo award winning novel: Stand of Zanzibar. I would also recommend the book mentioned above Okla Hannali. It is a tale tale/nearly alteranate history about a Choctaw Mingo, Okla Hannili...a bigger than life character like Huckleberry Finn...if Finn had a touch of Paul Bunyan to him. You owe yourself this book. It is an overlooked masterwork of English literature easily within the top 10 written in the 20th century. The passage I quoted served to illustrate the nature of the main character and to illustrate the way Choctaws spoke English...following long flowing agglutinative Choctaw grammatical sensibilities instead of standard English grammar.
Addendum:
RE: Cordwainer Smith. In the short story named above despite its (to us) retro techological feel (its from the 50's) the story absolutely ripples with Christian imagry, but doesn't wear it on its sleeve. It is a great example of how to do Christian SF.
RE: Lafferty: Here is an excerpt from a review of R. A. Lafferty's writing: From greatsfandf.com/AUTHORS/RALafferty.php
Waltern Wangerin: Book of the Dun Cow. Can hold its own easily with Narina or Watership Down. Unless you are bleeding out stop whatever you are doing now and go find a copy to buy or to borrow. You won't be sorry.
R. A. Lafferty: He wrote a great number of short stories set in his Instrumentality milieu. You might consider reading his Hugo award winning novel: Stand of Zanzibar. I would also recommend the book mentioned above Okla Hannali. It is a tale tale/nearly alteranate history about a Choctaw Mingo, Okla Hannili...a bigger than life character like Huckleberry Finn...if Finn had a touch of Paul Bunyan to him. You owe yourself this book. It is an overlooked masterwork of English literature easily within the top 10 written in the 20th century. The passage I quoted served to illustrate the nature of the main character and to illustrate the way Choctaws spoke English...following long flowing agglutinative Choctaw grammatical sensibilities instead of standard English grammar.
Addendum:
RE: Cordwainer Smith. In the short story named above despite its (to us) retro techological feel (its from the 50's) the story absolutely ripples with Christian imagry, but doesn't wear it on its sleeve. It is a great example of how to do Christian SF.
RE: Lafferty: Here is an excerpt from a review of R. A. Lafferty's writing: From greatsfandf.com/AUTHORS/RALafferty.php
Everything Lafferty says in that tale is heavily freighted with overtones that are invisible if one does not have the key, plain--almost obvious--if one does.
"How is a person or a world unmade or unformed? First, by being deformed. And following the deforming is the collapsing. The tenuous balance is broken. Insanity is induced easily under the name of the higher sanity. Then the little candle that is in each head is blown out on the pretext that the great cosmic light can better be seen without it."
The process is not some great uprising of evil, easy to see, to rally against: it is insidious, it creeps, it overtakes the unwary:
The persons and the worlds were never highly stable. A cross-member is removed here on the pretext of added freedom. Foundation blocks are taken away on the pretext of change. Supporting studs are pulled down on the pretext of new experience. And none of the entities had ever been supported more strongly than was necessary. What happens then? A man collapses, a town, a city, a nation, a world. And it is hardly noticed.
That, to Lafferty, is how evil triumphs: it erases, it reduces, it boils down; it destroys intellect, individuality; it depersonalizes. The monsters it creates do not slaver and torture and rend flesh: they trade stock options and take three weeks in Bermuda and swap wives and starve the poor and blow up cities with jaunty gaiety, literal mindlessness. They have the desires, and the morals, and the minds, of small children. They pull the wings off flies and the heads off people because it is so amusing. The one crime, the one sin, left available, is to fail to pursue gaiety with sufficient force--to assert values or individual personality, individual thoughts; and if you do that, gray faceless men come and take you away, and no one cares because you were just an old wet blanket anyway. Recall the phrase Kraft durch Freude; recall other cautionary tales, Brave New World, That Hideous Strength (C. S. Lewis)
"How is a person or a world unmade or unformed? First, by being deformed. And following the deforming is the collapsing. The tenuous balance is broken. Insanity is induced easily under the name of the higher sanity. Then the little candle that is in each head is blown out on the pretext that the great cosmic light can better be seen without it."
The process is not some great uprising of evil, easy to see, to rally against: it is insidious, it creeps, it overtakes the unwary:
The persons and the worlds were never highly stable. A cross-member is removed here on the pretext of added freedom. Foundation blocks are taken away on the pretext of change. Supporting studs are pulled down on the pretext of new experience. And none of the entities had ever been supported more strongly than was necessary. What happens then? A man collapses, a town, a city, a nation, a world. And it is hardly noticed.
That, to Lafferty, is how evil triumphs: it erases, it reduces, it boils down; it destroys intellect, individuality; it depersonalizes. The monsters it creates do not slaver and torture and rend flesh: they trade stock options and take three weeks in Bermuda and swap wives and starve the poor and blow up cities with jaunty gaiety, literal mindlessness. They have the desires, and the morals, and the minds, of small children. They pull the wings off flies and the heads off people because it is so amusing. The one crime, the one sin, left available, is to fail to pursue gaiety with sufficient force--to assert values or individual personality, individual thoughts; and if you do that, gray faceless men come and take you away, and no one cares because you were just an old wet blanket anyway. Recall the phrase Kraft durch Freude; recall other cautionary tales, Brave New World, That Hideous Strength (C. S. Lewis)
