Ursula Le Guin is quality, Dom, but c'mon, there's nobody to equal S. Lem.
After whom a lunar module was named, y'know: the LEM.
And he's given up creative writing for the last decade, which says it all.
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Leicester, England
Home Page
A Chide's Alphabet
Painting Without Numbers
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "domfox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 9:06 PM
Subject: Re: Noble Mouse
> I got on better with the Canopus in Argos novels than it sounds like you
> did, but did regard them as an interesting attempt at the genre by an
> interloper who hadn't fully grasped its possibilities (or its
constraints).
> Nothing like as good as Ursula le Guin, who apparently has some more
> Earthsea material coming out.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Candice Ward" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 7:57 PM
> Subject: Re: Noble Mouse
>
>
> > Oh, I don't see much to compare between these two writers, except an
> equally
> > unfortunate tendency in their novels to sag, go all doughy in the middle
> > like half-baked bread, whether due to laziness or indifference. (Murdoch
> > admitted the laziness--said she wrote fast and rarely revised--while
> Lessing
> > has sometimes taken a HMT toward style that's consistent with
> indifference.)
> > I loved Lessing's early novels but quickly tired of being targeted for
> > programmatic instruction in the later ones, and sci-fi with HMT is
really
> > deadly, I think. I read Murdoch right up to the end, enjoying both the
> > comedy and what one critic dubbed her fiction--their "metaphysical
> thriller"
> > quality--although the novels were notoriously uneven.
> >
> > Candice
> >
> >
> >
> > on 1/23/02 2:34 PM, domfox at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> >
> > > Having written this this morning, I shall be very interested to watch
> the
> > > Omnibus program on Iris Murdoch this evening. As a writer she is
rather
> > > severe about young women who do the sorts of things she did as a young
> and
> > > not so young woman, and I don't just mean the sex. She always has to
> have
> > > some saturnine male intellectual be severe with them. tell them off
for
> > > their lack of rigour and moral fibre. Most of the time it's amusing,
and
> > > answers a need in me to see some old acquaintances of mine be told off
> in
> > > like fashion, but there does seem to be something curiously
masochistic
> > > about it. Doris Lessing is even worse for this kind of thing. They're
> both
> > > quite indulgent towards silly young men, and often rather spiteful
> towards
> > > silly young women...
> > >
> > >
> > >> The heart is in the region of goodness, circling
> > >> slain virtue like a weeping carrion-bird
> >
>
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