I am enclosing the letterhead of Professor Darko Suvin, to go with information and enclosures which I have sent you previously. This is the first contact I have had with Professor Suvin. Listed with him are three Marxists whom I sent you information about before, based on personal dealings with them: Peter Fitting, Fredric Jameson, and Franz Rottensteiner who is Stanislaw Lem's official Western agent. The text of the letter indicates the extensive influence of this publication, SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES.
What is involved here is not that these persons are Marxists per se or even that Fitting, Rottensteiner and Suvin are foreign-based but that all of them without exception represent dedicated outlets in a chain of command from Stanislaw Lem in Krakow, Poland, himself a total Party functionary (I know this from his published writing and personal letters to me and to other people). For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of science fiction and its free exchange of views and ideas. Peter Fitting has in addition begun to review books for the magazines Locus and Galaxy. The Party operates (a U..S.] publishing house which does a great deal of Party-controlled science fiction. And in earlier material which I sent to you I indicated their evident penetration of the crucial publications of our professional organization SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA.
Their main successes would appear to be in the fields of academic articles, book reviews and possibly through our organization the control in the future of the awarding of honors and titles. I think, though, at this time, that their campaign to establish Lem himself as a major novelist and critic is losing ground; it has begun to encounter serious opposition: Lem's creative abilities now appear to have been overrated and Lem's crude, insulting and downright ignorant attacks on American science fiction and American science fiction writers went too far too fast and alienated everyone but the Party faithful (I am one of those highly alienated).
It is a grim development for our field and its hopes to find much of our criticism and academic theses and publications completely controlled by a faceless group in Krakow, Poland. What can be done, though, I do not know.
Impper posted:he thinks science fiction is controlled bya face less party from krakow, Polandia
imagine how much better it would be if it had been.
TG posted:idk who is worse, pkd or the trot china mieville
there's a lot linking the two of them, i think. what is probably mievile's best (only readable) book, the city and the city, is essentially a police procedural with a goofy semiotic overlay. similarly so are "flow my tears . . ." and "scanner darkly," only instead of semiotics it's whatever solipsistic musings about reality and identity that dick can't seem to stop talking about. both authors attempt fancy-brainy glosses on pulp genre tropes here with varying success. when we look at dick's background as a pulp author and mieville's longwinded fantasy epics (and awful book "king rat," basically the ccru in megacrap novel form, nineties english boredom and jungle and amphetamines and amphetamine driven awful writing), plus the debt of "man in the high castle"' to pulpier genre predecessors like CM kornbluth, a startlingly symmetrical picture starts to emerge.
so, the surface: both of these authors are at first glance men with highfalutin intellectual pretensions who are stuck with genre to pay the bills. they're both handily at their best when they utilize the tropes of precedent pulp fiction (crime/noir for both, dick paying close attention to certain early 50s pulp scifi writers, and mievilles obsession with "weird fiction"- in other words a catchall term for dork interests across several eras). in reality they aren't any brainier or more innovative than the genre hacks they try to transcend, and their particular flights of fancy tend to end in inauthentic, wordy, shit pulp with none of the conscious ghettoized pleasures of their "literary" forebears. they're essentially the same unhappily situated person 30 years apart
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getfiscal posted:for the record i've never read any pk dick, but i feel compelled to condemn his work based on various movies i have seen which reference his work. more importantly, science fiction was a key dissident artform in the soviet union, with reactionary artists like tarkovsky polluting the minds of youth with idealism. we must crush science fiction and reach out to the stars ourselves.
the strugatskys, the guys who wrote the book that would become tarkovsky's "Stalker," weren't dissidents, and fully outclassed their american contemporaries, most of whom were pulp hacks trying to diversify their income streams. the official distaste for scifi under stalin may actually represent the steel man's literary discernment as many of the most interesting early soviet sic-fi authors perished in world war two
swampman posted:The year is 2850 AD. America rules the galaxy! But, can one lone man survive some kind of threat to his individuality or masculinity, and save the universe from destruction? Yes!
i don't think pkd ever let the universe get saved.
getfiscal posted:for the record i've never read any pk dick, but i feel compelled to condemn his work based on various movies i have seen which reference his work. more importantly, science fiction was a key dissident artform in the soviet union, with reactionary artists like tarkovsky polluting the minds of youth with idealism. we must crush science fiction and reach out to the stars ourselves.
actually there is a long and badass tradition of Soviet science fiction, part of the reason their space program was so much more badass than ours. find a copy of Worlds Apart for a bunch of good short stories/excerpts from this tradition. or my fave scifi novel of all time Self-Discovery by Savchenko. A lot of it involves Martians whose Red Planet is totally communist.
roseweird posted:counterpoint: take all the drugs
uh... ok! *pops antipsychotics and antidepressants* ... feelin' even steven here....