There are some very good books on that list, and I would contest his argument that SF has improved over the decades. Some 60s stuff is good, but a lot requires a taste for mind-blowing psychological (and sometimes sexual) imagineering that, like rock music, I don't have much capacity for: a little goes a long way. Then fantasy rose to dominate speculative fiction, leaving those of us with hard science tastes with relatively few choices. There's also an underlying American assumption that one is buying the stuff: I owe my past love of SF to a public library in London and particularly its holdings in canary yellow Gollancz covers, most of which were 10 or more years old (I'm half a decade younger than the author).
Yes, one stumbles across laughable or sad stuff in old SF. There's one story I recall in which a woman accidentally travels forward in time, and her entire concern is with the fact the fabric of her dress - not even the cut, if I remember rightly - is patterned with something suddenly unfashionable. So she buys a new dress - nothing about whether the price is surprising, or even whether the store has a strange name or is in a strange place - and when she equally suddenly is returned to her own time, does the same again. A mean-spirited little tale that by its lack of imagination suddenly revealed to me that the author was a very blinkered man. But on the other hand there are so many things that have come true, or that explored what-ifs in a way that still resonates: The Caves of Steel still has lessons, not to mention The Lathe of Heaven. And while it made me very sad when my new American friends took pains to tell me what an unpleasant person Asimov was, I still regret that my education closed off the possibility of my becoming Susan Calvin. The world of Google would be a lot better with a Susan Calvin in it. Good books are valuable for a very long time - I won't say forever because I would happily consign Piers Plowman and the entire oeuvre of Henry James to a bottomless pit - but I don't see why I should judge speculative fiction by a different standard than any other kind of fiction of ideas. (For that matter, I still like Conan Doyle and M. R. James.)
I've never been in fandom - which strikes me as a peculiarly American thing - and I haven't read fiction of any kind in years: I'd lose my job for getting too caught up in the book, and I honestly am not tempted by any of the recent SF on the new acquisitions shelves at the San Jose library. I might be sufficiently tempted to find a way, if a new Golden Age anthology appeared there. So personally, I think this guy's argument ain't necessarily so.
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Yes, one stumbles across laughable or sad stuff in old SF. There's one story I recall in which a woman accidentally travels forward in time, and her entire concern is with the fact the fabric of her dress - not even the cut, if I remember rightly - is patterned with something suddenly unfashionable. So she buys a new dress - nothing about whether the price is surprising, or even whether the store has a strange name or is in a strange place - and when she equally suddenly is returned to her own time, does the same again. A mean-spirited little tale that by its lack of imagination suddenly revealed to me that the author was a very blinkered man. But on the other hand there are so many things that have come true, or that explored what-ifs in a way that still resonates: The Caves of Steel still has lessons, not to mention The Lathe of Heaven. And while it made me very sad when my new American friends took pains to tell me what an unpleasant person Asimov was, I still regret that my education closed off the possibility of my becoming Susan Calvin. The world of Google would be a lot better with a Susan Calvin in it. Good books are valuable for a very long time - I won't say forever because I would happily consign Piers Plowman and the entire oeuvre of Henry James to a bottomless pit - but I don't see why I should judge speculative fiction by a different standard than any other kind of fiction of ideas. (For that matter, I still like Conan Doyle and M. R. James.)
I've never been in fandom - which strikes me as a peculiarly American thing - and I haven't read fiction of any kind in years: I'd lose my job for getting too caught up in the book, and I honestly am not tempted by any of the recent SF on the new acquisitions shelves at the San Jose library. I might be sufficiently tempted to find a way, if a new Golden Age anthology appeared there. So personally, I think this guy's argument ain't necessarily so.
M