A new game

[james_davis_nicoll]

Factual statements beginning with 'I've read enough Sci-Fi to know [...]'.

My suggestions were:

"that long series whose plot threads are diverging instead of converging are unlikely to go anywhere interesting."

"that many Golden Age writers behaved as if women were something they'd only heard of 3rd hand via malicious intermediaries."

and

"that turning to SF for the science is like turning to Carl Barks for the ornithology."

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Cool ideas can be wasted by forcing them into action plots.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

Action plots can be wasted by the writer thinking that cool ideas is enough to make a story exciting.

Hey, you have your priorities and I have mine... :P

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Any stories with excess cool ideas that you'd like to mention?

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman, perhaps? Amazingly bizarre setting, tragically wasted on the author doing nothing but going, "look at how amazingly bizarre I'm being!" instead of telling a decent story in it.

And just about anything by Iain M Banks, it seems. The Player of Games takes place in a world of god-like supercomputers, amazing alien vistas, technology that defies imagination. What's the story about? A chess tournament.

Ursula K LeGuin. Which of her stories? ALL OF THEM. :P

Ooooh oooh ooooh, and Philip K Dick! Awesome ideas, that man had. He also somehow managed to make hunting killer androids boring.

Oh, dear lord, I can't possibly leave this reply without mentioning Peter F Hamilton's The Reality Dysfunction. A giant sprawling universe of living space stations, pirates, aliens races, and, just in case that wasn't enough, let's have an invasion of the dead come back to life! Then show that off through countless shaggy dog stories about unsympathetic characters being idiots and usually coming to a sticky end, and add in a lot of poop and gratuitous-yet-unsexy sex, because it's just not science fiction if we don't have poop and gratuious-yet-unsexy sex! Yeah, that's the ticket! Gaaaah, the wasted potential, it burns!

Actually, name one big-name science fiction author, and chances are I am dissatisfied with their interesting-premise/exciting-story quotient. I've wracked my brain coming up with an exception, and all that comes to mind is Glasshouse by Charles Stross. A marvelous story, one of my favourites, because it had the novel idea of taking an interesting setting and - oh marvel, oh glory! - actually telling a story set in it! On the other hand, Accelerando is everything I despise about science fiction with an extra layer of geek-smugness, so I'm on the fence even with Stross.

... man. I apparently had a lot more repressed frustration about this than I thought. ^_^;

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Some of your bad examples are among my favorite stories.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't doubt it. There wouldn't be this many authors writing stories like that if there weren't even more people wanting to read stories like that.