Friday's Poll Follow-Up

[mrissa]

Okay, first things first: people. People. I did not think I would have to give you this speech, but: pulling stuff out of an orifice does not make you a science fiction or fantasy writer. No, really. It doesn't. So regardless of what you think of Noam Chomsky's theories, he cannot be your least favorite science fiction or fantasy writer unless he goes off and writes science fiction or fantasy. Which he has not, to the best of my knowledge, done. Bullshit and fantasy are not the same thing. I should know; I've done both.

So. The list of SF or fantasy authors whose work people like least:

Stephen R. Donaldson was the clear winner at 14 people, and that wasn't even combing through the comments to get the people who were saying, "I know! Totally!" Piers Anthony was second with 8 people hating on his work. At five expressions of dislike apiece, we find Terry Goodkind, Laurell K. Hamilton, Robert Heinlein, and John Norman. Four votes each for Orson Scott Card and J. R. R. Tolkien. Three for Jack Chalker and Stephanie Meyer. And two for Catherine Asaro, C. J. Cherryh, Robert Jordan, Mercedes Lackey, Mike Resnick, and Robert J. Sawyer.

The list of people who got one vote each is behind the cut: Daffyd ap Hugh, L. A. Banks, T. A. Barron, Elizabeth Bear, Vanna Bonta, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Michael Burstein, Arthur C. Clarke, Janine Cross, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Philip K. Dick, Hal Duncan, Rosemary Edgehill, Harlan Ellison/Cordwainer Bird (one vote for each, so maybe I should have counted that as two), Raymond Feist, Dan Gallagher, William Gibson, Sharon Green, Neil Hancock, Michelle Hauf, Guy Gavriel Kay, Ursula LeGuin, C. S. Lewis, Kelly Link, Scott Lynch, Dennis McKiernan, Tim Powers, Alistair Reynolds, Anne Rice, Patrick Rothfuss, Mary Doria Russell, Nalini Singh, Wen Spencer.

So what do we learn from this incredibly scientific poll? Well, I think first that some things don't weather very well. Most of the authors who were getting a lot of votes are showing their age pretty strongly in one way or another. Most of them have also sold a great many books, which makes sense: while there are people in the one-vote-each list I haven't heard of (and I read a lot in this genre!), the odds are far better that something that's getting a lot of attention is going to 1) be subject to fairly strenuous analysis of its flaws and 2) get handed to people for whom it's not the right book regardless of objective flaws. I think -- and, of course, you can jump in and tell me how wrong I am any time you like -- that many of the authors listed were people someone's friends raved about, but the work did not impress the poll answerer.

I'm wondering whether my experience of having Stephen R. Donaldson's and Piers Anthony's books absolutely ubiquitous in bookstores and libraries when I was younger and short on books (in my case, in junior high and early high school) is shared by most of the people who answered this poll. An author whose work you don't like is one thing, but I suspect that I personally have a more negative attitude about those two because one couldn't $%$&#@ avoid them, and because so very much space and money (book-buying in the libraries' case, promotion in the bookstores') was being spent on something disliked when there were alternatives out there. I had the "I've read all the SF and fantasy they have except the role-playing tie-ins and that stupid Stephen R. Donaldson" experience more times than I can count, when I was in my early teens.

I also notice that "lush" prose appears to have more risk of being disliked, and so do books with a great deal of sex in them compared to the genre standards for their time. Anybody else picking out trends here? Spotting commonalities I've missed? Want to say why you like or dislike the work of people listed? Me, I like the work of several people listed (in addition to personally liking several people listed), but mostly I can see why people dislike the things and people I like, and this is not really an exception.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Harold Bloom, on the other hand, has written science fiction. Or something that he purports is, and which got published; though I picked it up because it sounded hilariously absurd from the back cover, I have not yet tried reading it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I actually did check Chomsky's bibliography just to make sure I wasn't missing similar (yet totally different!) hilarious absurdity.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Well, but it's less sex (I like sex!) and more BAD sex, at least in LKH's case.

Also, in the three people I listed, it was less that they were ubiquitous (though they were) and more that I read much more than my RDA of them, realized I disliked them intensely, read a few more of them, and then FINALLY stopped reading them. So it's more my own lack of willpower.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, but the thing is, I doubt that LKH sat down to write BAD sex. Obviously doing anything badly is not a win in itself. But it just looks like writing more about sex risks readers going, "Ack! Bad sex!" a great deal more than writing about geology risks readers going, "Ack! Bad geology!"

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Anybody else picking out trends here?

A lot of those lots-of-hate authors are completely emblematic of a subgenre or a style.

I wouldn't be surprised if "I hate Goodkind" could translate to "I hate this style of big fat fantasy (and Objectivism)" and "I hate Heinlein" could translate to "I hate old-school space opera stuff" and "I hate Tolkein" could translate to "and all those 239852398523 books who want to be him, dammit!"

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I wonder. There might be some "I hate this style of big fat fantasy," and also some, "I love this style of big fat fantasy, but it presses a button that this missed, so I was more disappointed than I would have been if it had been something I'm generally sort of meh about."

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

Heinlein did decent old-school space opera. I specifically didn't vote for him because I like his old-school space opera. The genre that I hate, of which he is emblematic, is: "In the future we live forever and flirt with anything that moves and then we have sex with anything that flirts back."

He also did some fairly neat character-driven short stories (I am fond of the stories in The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag). In general, he was a strong writer if and only if he kept it short. Otherwise, it seems to me that he would get bored easily and then he would throw in Lazarus Long or a deus ex machina or both, get all Mary Sue for a bit, and then he could move on to the next book.

And yet I don't mind the first two thirds of Stranger in a Strange Land, probably because it's closer to Space Opera.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Heinlein transformed the field, but what he transformed it *away from* was old-school space opera; that's not anything like a reasonable description of what he wrote. He's a Campbell author, post space-opera, investigating social effects of technological change.

[atdt1991.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed Piers Anthony to a reasonable amount, but I avoided most of the Xanth novels. After making my way through his other big popular one (Incarnations of Immortality), I never read beyond the first ever again.

Of course, I started reading him when I was nine. :)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I didn't have trouble avoiding Donaldson and Anthony, so that was not a contributing factor to my dislike. Anthony I don't have a hate on for; I just think he extrudes brightly-colored plastic product that can be fun for a brief period of time before you grow up. Donaldson gets me far more, because he's hailed in certain quarters as this great writer of stunningly original epic fantasy with wonderfully flawed characters, whereas I picked up Lord Foul's Bane and found derivative hackwork with a rampaging asshole of a protagonist and prose that a group of Harvard liberal arts majors agreed was pretentious.

Crap that's recognized as crap doesn't bother me much. It's when I perceive a giant gap between reputation and reality that I get annoyed.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

I do see a lot of people who have been promoted, either by other authors or readers or by the establishment (meaning schools or fan clubs or awards). It is very difficult to interpret such poll responses without knowing which works a reader reacted unpleasantly to. Especially for an author like Heinlein; there are plenty of people who might admire "requiem" who can't stand _Stranger in a Strange Land_ - does that mean they don't like the author? Well, an author's work is (hopefully) not a consistent monolith.

[dherblay.livejournal.com]

When I was an adolescent I compulsively counted the number of books I owned by each author in my collection, and I considered it a great day in my maturation when Piers Anthony (my vote) was passed by Robert Heinlein -- I had finally put seventh grade behind me. My vote was definitely motivated by a sense of embarrassment at my childish enthusiasms.

I wonder how much some of these votes are driven by the authors' political or public personae as much as by their prose. I know that just yesterday I was wandering through Borders with an improv-friend of mine, and she started talking about what a big fan of Orson Scott Card her pro-gay-rights husband had been, and how disillusioned he had been when they found a certain interview.

Put these together and I really regret not realizing that I could vote for multiple writers. Massive advertising buys in Waldenbooks's incredibly credulous Xignals kept me plugging away at Invasion Earth until volume six, and I'm surprised that not one person named L. Ron Hubbard.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I more or less completely lack a sense of embarrassment at my childish enthusiasms. I think part of that is that even when I don't think something is good now, I can generally tell you what I liked about it then. I make sense to myself in retrospect. I was going to post on that topic. I may still.

As for OSC, while his politics range from the disingenuous to the outright disgusting, I think there's plenty to dislike within his fiction in its own right. Especially these days.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

I had to be careful to vote for "I hate the work of..." rather than "I hate the fanbase of..."

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

I didn't vote for Heinlein because I'm split on his work. I love a lot of it but HATE every time he tries to write from a female perspective.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

I would like Friday a lot more if he would have cut the first chapter and the last chapter. I haven't read any other books of his from a female perspective, but I haven't found most of the women to be super...um....realistic.

[cissa.livejournal.com]

It's probably a stupidly geekish thing but...

The whole premise of "White Gold Wielder: from donaldson is just so damn stupid. OK, now I'm a metalsmith... but before that I was a chemist, and white gold does not, in fact exist. It is an alloy of gold and various other things, just like every other kind of gold except for fine gold/24K. The idea that it has some sort of mystical quality because it's one set of metals melted together rather than another is just... dumb. From my point of view.

Which admittedly is a POV that explains various "white gold" alloys to people several times a week in the course of my profession.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

If, on the other hand, they had real chemistry for part of the explanation of their magic system, that might be cool.

[arkuat]

I seriously considered voting for Piers Anthony or Steve Donaldson in this, but as for Piers Anthony, I know I loved Tarot when I was a young teen, but can't really remember anything else of his that I've read, and I ought not be voting for him just because Tarot makes me a little queasy when I try to reread it now. (Unlike, for instance, Barrie's Peter Pan, which just made me sob enjoyably last time I read it, some years ago.)

As for Steve Donaldson, I haven't really read him. I bounced off the beginning of whatever I started with, that Thomas Covenant thing, and never went back, despite the promise of beautiful use of rare words on nearly every page.

[voidmonster.livejournal.com]

Having nominated someone who uses lush prose, I'd like to take a moment to defend using lush prose.

I adore loquacious, dense, difficult writing. I love it so hard that I have high standards for its use. Adverbs are awesome, semi-colons are a treasure, em dashes are candy. Though I'll probably not be impressed by someone who uses lots of all of them in one paragraph. To those who say 'delete every word that ends in LY', I say 'and then you'll never have anything lovely.' English is a great big huge box of toys and I wanna play with ALL OF THEM.

However.

I am not so keen on authors that use a cataphoresis of words to describe something the wrong way, or who have clearly not understood the principles they are describing. There are few things as frustrating as watching a Rube Goldberg device fail, and that is precisely what it's like for me to read shag-carpeted words nailed to broken ideas.

You're not the only one to grumble at me for lumping Chomsky in there though. I admit to being cantankerous with genre definition. Guilty is me. Happily guilty. Same reason I insist erotica, porn and smut are all the same, even if I do perceive boundaries. It's the only Overton window I regularly feel like kicking open. I like inclusive genre definition.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Inclusive" meaning "anything that is not true is this genre" does not look very useful to me for genre discussion.

[redbird]

Never mind "lovely," I suspect that if someone told me to "delete every word that ends in LY," I would ask them how birds move through the air, and hope they accused me of being silly.

[dhole.livejournal.com]

Just for the record: My vote for Hancock isn't because I used to like him when I was a kid, and am now appalled that I did so. It's because I was a kid when I first encountered him, and I bought most of the series at the Barnes and Noble used book annex (of blessed memory) because they were obviously genre, and I bought every genre book I could get my hands on that cost less than a dollar, on those few and glorious trips downtown.

They were the first books I didn't finish, and I didn't give up easy. It's some of the most brain searingly awful prose that I've ever encountered, wrapped in a coating of sickly twee. I don't enjoy Terry Goodkind, and I found John Norman to be bewilderingly focused, but they wrote objects recognizable as books.

For all I know, Hancock is a great person, and he apparently has fans. But holy cow do his books rub me the wrong way.

[keilexandra]

Aww! Guy Gavriel Kay is my favorite author. :( But I understand why someone would dislike him, if they weren't fond of his prose. Not dense enough to be "lush" IMHO, but it's getting there.

Beyond the top two, I think the rest falls mostly to differing reader tastes.