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He has difficulty in saying what he meanswell then, obscurity will become the hallmark of his prose, and he will cultivate it assiduously. He cannot characterise properlywell then, let the motivations of his characters be relentlessly absurd, let their illogicality at least be blessed with the compulsion of obsession. He loves to throw into his plots any and every idea that occurs to him during the time of writing, whether it fits or not and despite the fact that it prohibits him ever making a sensible resolution to the plot and its contentswell then, forget fitting things together and to hell with sensible resolutions; make disorder the rule and go in for magical formulae whose mere recitation will be said (no proof need be given) to have made everything satisfactory. Tell the reader that while staring them straight in the eye, and tell them that your climactic miracle, as well as resolving your irresolvable plot, has also resolved all the problems of mankind, and maybe a few of God's as well, and even though they will know that you are telling the most blatant lies imaginable, they will have to respect you for it. Who else has ever told them such breathtakingly appalling lies? |
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It isn't Literature, but in its own sweet way, it's magnificent. |
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Brian Stableford, [Review of Cosmic Encounter], Foundation No. 20 (October 1980): 82 |
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(Brian) Aldiss fails to do justice to the three great father figures of the American Golden Age, Heinlein, Asimov, and especially A. E. Van Vogt, whose "creative insanity" he is willing to acknowledge, but whose most influential and central book he completely ignores. Given his prejudices, one does not expect Aldiss to speak of Slan as hyperbolically as does (Sam) Moskowitz, who calls it Van Vogt's "most famous and perhaps best work"; but one expects at least a mention of it in so compendious and inclusive a history of the genre as Billion Year Spree. |
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Van Vogt is a test case, not just for Aldiss; since an apology for or analysis of science fiction which fails to come to terms with his appeal and major importance, defends or defines the genre by falsifying it. If a writer as widely sympathetic to sf in all its varieties as Aldiss flunks that test, what can we expect of later, more academic, elitist, and rigorous critics like Rabkin and Scholes but total disaster. Indeed, they tell us in their ambitious and otherwise useful study, Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision (1977), that Van Vogt has not worn well, and that Slan, whose centrality to his work they |
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