The Altera Centauri collection has been brought up to date by Darsnan. It comprises every decent scenario he's been able to find anywhere on the web, going back over 20 years.
25 themes/skins/styles are now available to members. Check the select drop-down at the bottom-left of each page.
Call To Power 2 Cradle 3+ mod in progress: https://apolyton.net/forum/other-games/call-to-power-2/ctp2-creation/9437883-making-cradle-3-fully-compatible-with-the-apolyton-edition
Crime and Punishment bah. Could have been reduced to about 90 pages and not really missed anything important.
It's almost as if all his overconfident, absolutist assertions were spoonfed to him by a trusted website or subreddit. Sheeple
RIP Tony Bogey & Baron O
I don't think anyone sane would argue that SF as a genre is solely a definition used by snotty literature professors. I think the argument is that snotty professors use the definition to lessen the value of some novels as opposed to others. They point to a novel such as DADoES and suggest it is something less because it is science fiction, and then point to The Road and say it is great literature, but not a word about SF...
FWIW, I think Time Traveller's Wife is science fiction. When someone asks me for a rec, I generally try to figure out what sort of SF they read - I read all types but most people have a sub-genre they prefer.
I agree, there's snobbery involved. BTW, DADoES is not a very good novel, IMO. Dick has good ideas, but he ruins it, as always.
Let us be lazy in everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy – Lessing
I'd say it comes down to a difference in temperament, and the fact that most SF writers are good at ideas, but not so good as writers.
On the other hand, I can't see any reason why The War of the Worlds can't be considered a major work of literature. It's quite well written and a very thoughtful critique of imperialism.
maybe what's considered as literature is based around how much that piece of written work has an effect upon the culture at the time, of course how a piece of fiction is labelled as literature could come down to votes based on a council of literary (as in both literature and general fiction as well as genre fiction) critics
i like different types of science fiction: hard sf (egan, baxter) soft sf (dick, heinlein) cyberpunk (gibson, stross) some space opera (asimov, heinlein)
personally i'm attempting to write a trans-genre fiction, which goes from one genre to another as it moves through different historical epochs per chapter
but that's just my two cents worth
cheers
matt
"Life is the only RPG you'll ever play, The religious want to be one with the moderator, the scientists want to hack the game, and the gamers want to do both."
One of the difficulties with any subset of literature like science fiction is that there is an awful lot of it written.
And as Kingsley Amis pointed out (and he was both a fan of s.f. and a writer of alternate histories) 90% of s.f. is crap, but then 90% of anything is crap.
I enjoy a lot of s.f. for its 'pulp' qualities- it has a vigour and healthy vulgarity that makes it come alive on the page- and if anyone thinks vulgarity is necessarily a bad thing, then they haven't read Dickens.
Another criticism levelled at authors of 'genre' fiction (mostly by critics who haven't read much good detective or science fiction) is that it's commercial.
Well guess what ? Dr. Johnson, Shakespeare, Dickens and many others wrote for monetary returns.
It might be correct to say that up until the mid to late 60s much of science fiction's readership was both white and male- but the New Wave of s.f. writing in the 60s helped usher in changes.
And if people think I'm exaggerating, then let me put it in context with the James Tiptree Jr. identity 'controversy':
Speculation about Tiptree's identity was widespread: Robert Silverberg notoriously rejected suggestions he might be a woman on the grounds that there was "something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing".
Tiptree was of course the inarguably feminine Alice Sheldon...
It's not just women who have complained about the trite, one note characterisations prevalent in much s.f. up until the 70s- try finding a leading black or ethnic minority protagonist, or stories in which women aren't frequently portrayed as ambulatory breasts to be rescued from imminent peril...
Even the recent adapation of Le Guin's Earth Sea books changed the skin colour of Ged. Why, well who can say ?
Vive la liberte. Noor Inayat Khan, Dachau.
...patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone. Edith Cavell, 1915
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