Some time perhaps you could go into more detail on the NYT Book review re: subjects like Marion Bradley trashing Disch. Who would they get, do you think, to do a really serious piece on Gene Wolfe, for example? Or do they just not bother because he's too niche? Too hard to comprehehend...?

I thought the stuff about Peck's sexuality was beside the point and, to say the least, unfortunate. Actually, I think the author did have a point: she just didn't make it. She starts to point out that none of the writers that Peck names in the article is female or gay. (I pointed out the female part myself, when I commented on the original discussion here.) What she doesn't do is explain why this is interesting. And I think it is, not because Peck might be bigoted against straight white men, but because it would something about "postmodern literature" if indeed it's mainly written by straight white men. (I can't think of any cubical, Gravity's-Rainbow-type books written by women. I'd love to hear about any that exist.)

My guess about the MZB review of Disch is that it was simple (if unforgiveable) ignorance. "Oh, we need a sci fi writer to review this. Who writes sci fi?"

John, those are complicated question, and I don't have time to do them justice today. Here are some short answers:

1. Bringing up Peck's sexual orientation devalues him to whatever extent that particular datum has that effect on the reader. That's for starters. The article is also suggesting that in spite of his having edited an anthology of gay fiction, and in spite of his being on record as admiring women writers, his failure to include any women in his general denunciation means he doesn't think they're up to snuff -- no doubt many perfectly worthy and creditable writers among them, but no real literary heavyweights.

This is not, of course, a valid conclusion to draw about him from the facts presented. What it does is implicitly position him as one of those stereotypical gay guys who doesn't like women. This robs him of the sympathy of another large segment of Salon's readership.

The article caps this off by quoting Stanley Crouch -- a writer whom Peck has given a sound thumping -- saying "Dale Peck is a troubled queen, and the only person who cares about him being a troubled queen is himself." We don't know exactly what Stanley Crouch means by that, or how he comes by his knowledge, or what the context of the remark was aside from Crouch being pissed about the bad review, but it's the kind of nasty remark that, true or false, automatically sticks to your brain.

To summarize what we have learned from this: Dale Peck is a troubled queen who only goes after straight white guys. Eeeeeuw, ick.

2. Attacks on Our Beloved Genre are neither as comprehensive nor as crude as they used to be; note that Salon's Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors had the great good sense to enlist John Clute to write about science fiction. Do we still get snubbed and redlined? Hell, yes. Just not quite as much, and not quite as blatantly.

Gene Wolfe is brilliant, but he doesn't get as much critical attention as Ursula Le Guin. Nobody does. The academic critics adore Le Guin. A couple of editors who shall remain nameless have theorized that this is because she recognizably reads like, you know, literature. (They are not, however, responsible for the line about her prose reading like it was translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett.)

They have further theorized that Le Guin is esteemed by mainstream critics because you can tell what's going on in her books even if you've never read any other science fiction. Gene Wolfe is working from deep within the genre. If you don't know SF but want to understand what he's doing, your required reading list just grew by several dozen books, and many of them are not masterworks of literature. Easier to just read Ursula Le Guin -- and, more recently, Philip K. Dick.

None of this is her fault, by the way, and she's used her access to the microphone to tell people to read other worthy SF authors.

Gene Wolfe doesn't lack critical attention, but almost all of it comes from within the field. His work sends the genre's mandarin-level critics into what one of them has characterized as "a frenzy of interpretation". It makes them happy, and Wolfe certainly gives them a lot to chew on.

In my opinion, the author with the greatest disparity between the importance of his work to the field, and the amount of criticism that's been written about that work, is Fritz Leiber. Everyone knows he's huge, but no one can think of anything to say.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/09/specials/disch-businessman.html

Obvious (semi-catty) comment: Well, it *is* postmodern literature, after all.

Postmodernism (at least in philosophy, which is more my field) isn't known for either coherence or good writing, after all.

Oh, and I suspect that another reason that Le Guin (whose work I adore immoderately, by the way) gets extra attention from outside the genre is that, in addition to being obviously and clearly one of us and caring about style, she's a poet.

In trying to unpack this, I came up with some works that strike me as, perhaps, precursor elements in the stfnal dialog, but not absolutely essential. For the New Sun, I thought of Vance's "The Dying Earth," and "Five Demon Princes," maybe "The Humanoids," "Behold the Man," "By His Bootstraps," and the C.S. Lewis' "Silent Planet" trilogy for the "Urth" sequel.

But, for me, "The Seventh Seal," "Give Us Barabas," Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm," Robertson Davies' "What's Bred in the Bone," Kazantsakis' "Last Temptation of Christ" and Shaw's "Back to Methusaleh" are what strike associations with the New Sun.

There's Heinlein's "Universe," of course, for the Long Sun books, and most of Wolfe's novels that deal with gods and goddesses have hints of Thorne Smith and Roger Zelazny.

I'm curious about what else you had in mind -- and who you'd consider to be John Clute's fellow mandarins.

(Just working my way through the Short Sun books, now, and geeking out on a Friday evening.)

Dale Peck seems a moron to me for similar reasons as to Mr. Hlavaty.

I don't at all care for Moody's work either.

But that's how the mainstream (in every form of discourse) stays in power: by only paying attention to (whether pissing on or lifting from the waves) its fellow members. Wolfe and Engh and so on (including Joyce, in his time) are kept in their place by not being included in any such debate.

This set of mainstreamers are only fighting guys their own size, which I suppose is admirable. What I don't understand is why we should direct our attention to midget wrestling when there's so much other entertainment available. Let them squabble; we have Karen Joy Fowler to attend to.

http://www.kokonino.com/cgi-bin/mktopical.cgi?Salon.com+Reader%27s+Guide

The Mists of Avalon itself I threw against the wall. You want a killer review? Ask me to review that tripe. But first I'd have to finish it....

I actually find myself wondering how much specific sf one needs to have read to appreciate New Sun. Certainly one has to be familiar with the major tropes--one loses a great deal if one doesn't recognize the Matachin Tower as a spaceship. If one is not familiar with ray-guns, flying cars, magic swords, and time travellers, one misses how different Wolfe's are than everyone else's, but at this point, who isn't familiar with those?

The more one knows about everything, the more one is likely to appreciate in Wolfe--Borges? The battle of the Merrimac and the Monitor? Matthew chapter 4? The Arabic word for "hyena"? The sayings of Chairman Mao? Feynman diagrams? Got 'em all; I still don't know how much I don't recognize.

I appreciate the precedents as much as anyone, and I've read a lot of SF, though not nearly as much as most visitors here, I'm sure.

But for me, re: Gene Wolfe: it's the man's prose. I think even a total stranger to SF, say a William Trevor fanatic (which I also am) who's never read SF, could open New Sun at any random spot and be captured by the prose.

And it's getting so damned difficult these days to go into the book store, open up something new and not be disappointed by the prose these days...

I think Kevin's observation that so many s-f tropes are now embedded in pop culture is a good one. Do you need to be familiar with Jack Williamson's "The Humanoids" or Asimov's robots and androids to appreciate the plight of Severian's pal Jonas and the Mayteras? A good many people may have experienced Asimov's memes, second-hand, these days through Startrek's Data. Is some knowledge of Talos, the legendary watchman of Athens, more to the point?

But, maybe there are genre s-f tropes so ingrained in my consciousness that I can't separate them, anymore, from a "mainstream" reader's perspective. I'd certainly be interested in reading the case Teresa might present if she feels like expanding upon her original comment.

MKK--another datapoint heard from