On Stephenson, I’m prepared to bet heavily that he is clued up on pomo/poststruc etc but was using short hand - he mostly complained about the death of the author, which had a certain logic given his argument (but he knows that he is himself a postmodern writer). In a way I think he’s right - because actually we could do worse than go back to Richards and Empson (proof that the smartest guys in the room in the 20s and 30s were not modernists). I’ve never managed to read Suvin, but Empson’s sense of pastoral is presumably the one that works for sf and Empson’s poetry must be a candidate for the best sfnal poetry ever (try ‘Camping Out’) and he wrote an essay titled ‘Donne the Spaceman’ and he would have liked the Baroque Cycle.

I didn’t notice you there but I was in an odd headspace. James won the war in that he won the right to be taken seriously, to be reviewed in heavy weight critical quarterlies, to have biographies written about him, to be quoted endlessly on how to write. He got all the kudos. And style still dominates over narrative in critical discussions

Wells just had to make do with readers.

Incidentally, back in the 1990s Roger L was one of those poststructuralists who crept under Stephenson radar and did deconstruction with sf; the result was a book on Ballard and a number of very useful articles in SFS. Any a couple of stinking reviews from the sf community. (In one of them as I recall he discusses the new wave as a point when sf gets modernism, but is uncomfortable with the assertion as it implies a progression he isn’t happy with.)

Tony: I’d like to see more of your two rivers model of crit. I suspect Adam Roberts and myself are closer to Willis/Luckhurst than Clute/Kincaid. It might be something to do with using existing critical tools as opposed to sometimes inventing them on the fly. I make no value judgement as to which is preferable.

Don’t worry, you’re not the only one who lost the thread. There were a couple of talks where I was completely lost quite quickly but I suspect that this was because we weren’t operating under the methodology of “here’s something true, let me prove it” as “here’s a cool idea… and another… and another”, which I suspect carries a lot more weight in the humanities than it does anywhere else.

Tony :

The duality of SF criticism is interesting actually as there is SOME bleed between the two. Some academic critics review for ‘zines and some fan critics publish in academic journals. I think it’s a side-effect of the snobbishness regarding SF, it’s tough to make an academic career out of specialising in SF and so SF hasn’t been completely professionalised, there’s still room for the dilettante or gentleman-scholar so to speak.

it’s hard for me to switch gears and stop wanting to know where their experimental evidence is.

Yeah. The slackers! SF critics are ignoring the nineteenth century? Show me numbers!

Nick:

I think his final list of books comprise radically differing impulses.

I have to assume he was being deliberately provocative in his choices. I can see how, say, The Road and HARM fit; I have much more difficulty seeing how Against the Day and Pattern Recognition fit. I think the general point that sfnal horror can be found in books that try to challenge societal amnesia or head-in-sand-tendency is a good one, though.