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do not deny, proves him "precisely the sort of writer that has given science fiction a bad name among serious readers." My heart sinks at the phrase "serious readers," and when Rabkin and Scholes go on to say of the same novel that "this is not fiction for adults," I lose all hope. It is, after all, the availability to children and the childlike in us all, along with the challenge to the defunct notion of the serious reader which characterizes not just Van Vogt but all sf at its most authentic. |
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Any bright high school sophomore can identify all the things that are wrong about Van Vogt, whose clumsiness is equaled only by his stupidity. But the challenge to criticism which pretends to do justice to science fiction is to say what is right about him: to identify his mythopoeic power, his ability to evoke primordial images, his gift for redeeming the marvelous in a world in which technology has preempted the province of magic and God is dead. To do this, structuralism and its spin-offs, those strange French (or naturalized Slavic) gods after whom recent scholars of fantasy and popular literature have gone a-whoring, are of little helpas, indeed, they are of little help with any good-bad literature, whose virtues are independent of the text and therefore immune to semiotic analysis. |
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Leslie A. Fiedler, "The Criticism of Science Fiction," Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. George E. Slusser, Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), pp. 1011 |
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No one has taken Van Vogt seriously as a writer for a long time now. Yet he has been read and still is. |
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What no one seems to have noticed is that Van Vogt, more than any other single SF writer, is the conduit through which the energy of Gernsbackian, primitive wonder stories has been transmitted through the Campbellian age, when earlier styles of SF were otherwise rejected, and on into the SF of the present. James E. Gunn comes closest to understanding the importance of Van Vogt when he says, "Van Vogt was creating the mythology of science, writing stories of science as magic or magic as science" (Alternate Worlds, New Jersey: PrenticeHall, 1975, p. 163). The style hardly matters. And as Knight proved, Van Vogt's awkwardness is certainly easy to ridiculebut to do so without an appreciation of Van Vogt's virtues misses the point. |
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While literary criticism has never admitted complication as a virtue in fiction, complication has always been central to the mainstream of science |
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