QOTD

[randy_byers]

'I find that my students read and admire Asimov and Clarke in greater numbers than students ever have before, but when they write they steal fantasies from A.E. Van Vogt, who is unmistakably in the first stage, that of pure invention. They don't write A.E. Van Vogt stories; they use him for poems or for strange works that aren't, properly speaking, science fiction at all, or for science fiction which owes nothing directly to Van Vogt but an eerie kind of glamor. When artists are given a choice between imitating crude originals and second-hand, polished literary versions thereof, most bad artists will choose the literary version and most good artists the bad original. My good writing students don't imitate Asimov, because one can't imitate Asimov; he is good enough to have exhausted his subject matter. A.E. Van Vogt (to put the matter as politely as I can) is a very inventive and yet very bad artist -- in Shaw's words, the victory of an enormously fertile imagination over a commonplace mind. (He said this about Marie Corelli.)'

-- Joanna Russ, "The Wearing out of Genre Materials" (1971) in The Country You Have Never Seen (Liverpool University Press, 2007)

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"I find that my students read and admire Asimov and Clarke in greater numbers than students ever have before"

I would be really interested in knowing if a teacher of the kind of class Joanna was doing would still find that to be so today. I'm guessing not.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing you're right. That was almost forty years ago when she wrote that.