New Yorker magazine alert thread

i don't know if you're using some weird purist definition of sci-fi but:

Lethem’s first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music, is a merging of science fiction and the Chandleresque detective story, which includes talking kangaroos, radical futuristic versions of the drug scene, and cryogenic prisons.
...
He followed Gun, with Occasional Music in 1995 with Amnesia Moon. Partially inspired by Lethem's experiences hitchhiking cross-country,[8] this second novel uses a road narrative to explore a multi-post-apocalyptic future landscape rife with perception tricks. After publishing many of his early stories in a 1996 collection (The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye), Lethem's third novel, As She Climbed Across the Table, was published in 1997. The novel takes as its starting point a physics researcher who falls in love with an artificially generated spatial anomaly called "Lack", for whom she spurns her previous partner. Her ex-partner's comic struggle with this rejection, and with the anomaly constitute the majority of the narrative.
...
His next book, published after his return to Brooklyn, was Girl in Landscape. In the novel, a young girl must endure puberty while also having to face a strange and new world populated by aliens known as Archbuilders.

he is an urban fabulist in the tradition of borges and calvino! i made that up. i've glanced at his pre-whatever he does now books and i never wanted to read them. same with the corrections dude's "sci-fi" books. nobody needs to read that stuff. its like telling a crime fiction fan to read motherless brooklyn. they would laugh and then set that book on fire.

crappy genre fiction fanboys be not proud

ok so you're using some weird purist definition of sci-fi

in that case, i don't know why you would expect the new yorker to publish what you consider to be sci-fi

no flogging your shit to Analog for a nickel a word, no credibility

^^^

he talks about his inspiration at length here:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/228/the-art-of-fiction-no-177-jonathan-lethem

and he mentions borges and calvino. it's all good. PoMo pastiche is cool. whatevs. no bigs. i was a kathy acker fan back in the day. can't read burroughs to save my life though. or pynchon.

it is a bit weird for them to do a scifi issue with only 'literary' writers, i mean, not weird, it is the new yorker, but it would be cooler if they asked ben bova or something (never actually read anything by that guy) to do a story

lethem is a sci-fi writer, or a former sci-fi writer at least

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, May 29, 2012 5:54 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

RONG

oh cool now this thread is about authenticity

nerds are the worst

im staying out of that argument but i do think it would be cool if they went pulpy.

we all loved blade runner.

who would've thought the new yorker thread would get mired in arguments about writing and class distinction

lol at "mired" - it's been like 20 posts over an hour

plus hardboiled scifi could have been its own genre before lethem got to it. don't know when the first scifi detective story hit the racks but it was before he was born.

http://d1466nnw0ex81e.cloudfront.net/iss/400w/24/370241/1034517.jpg

anyways read the sam lipsyte story, it's not sci-fi at all but it's great

confession: i never actually read nyer fiction

i almost never do either but i like lipsyte a lot so i read this one, it's not very "nyer fiction" in style, it's absurd and funny and has lots of swearing

me three

lethem makes new scientist's top ten list:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/04/top-10-greatest-science-fiction-detective-novels.html

lol at "mired" - it's been like 20 posts over an hour

i read it when its lorrie moore or alice munro. that's about it for the most part.

or saunders

col.?

n

geo.

posts about how long a thread is, how many comments are filling it, the kinds of comments being posted, how frequently things are being posted, the quality of what is being posted, etc --> these are the sounds of ilx clearing its own throat. (nb i do not exempt this comment from this generalization.)

*moves bookmark*

i read it when its lorrie moore or alice munro. that's about it for the most part.

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 29, 2012

thirded. I will read the Lipsyte story though.

I don't care if you're white black or a fucking bum off of the streets. If you write about shooting aliens, flying ships, wearing spacesuits, drinking hennessy, and whatever else, I'll buy your book. If you write about the economy and how its hurts off-world workers, fuck you. If you write about your telekenisis or some equally retarded nerd shit, fuck you. That basically how I break it down to an extent.

you should enter that in the caption contest

Whitehead's last novel is a zombie book. Not sci-fi but genre (also not great).

i never read the fiction either, unless it's saunders. or wasn't that atwood story in the nyer? i read the lorrie moore last week because it was short (not that i have anything against lorrie moore). guess they needed something tiny after grann went apeshit

was the grann thing good? i didn't read it yet. i think our subscription expired. but that's still online i think. maybe i'll read it tonight.

the grann thing was grebt but . . . he is so fucking detailed about things that happened 50 years ago that i found myself thinking o rly

what is the grann thing

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/28/120528fa_fact_grann

double-issue this week kk - catch up

here's a response to the genre fiction piece

http://entertainment.time.com/2012/05/23/genre-fiction-is-disruptive-technology/

Two weeks now (four weeks into new subscription) no issues in the mailbox. Wtf.

"(And to say that such books “transcend” the genres they’re in is bollocks, of the most bollocky kind. As soon as a novel becomes moving or important or great, critics try to surgically extract it from its genre, lest our carefully constructed hierarchies collapse in the presence of such a taxonomical anomaly.)"

will have his babies. five stars. kudos.

that was so awesome. thanks for that. i've been thinking about this for WEEKS. even before the sci-fi issue and all that. i've even been writing about this very thing. uncanny. and he says it so well. love it.

see, now i can't even read the krystal thing it would drive me insane.

i could talk about this all night. but i have to go to bed. food for friggin' thought. it dawned on me not that long ago that sooooo much of what i have written is some sort of mortal combat against that standard new yorker attitude. or just standard lit crit attitude. or music crit attitude. it does totally drive me insane and i guess i just don't understand how at this late date after all that has gone on and all the micro-genre studies and the french and kael and trash and camp and high and low and pop and the 60's and 70's and jeez just decades of scholarship devoted to everything and anything and cases made for manga and death metal and EVERYTHING you name it EVERYTHING how in the world there are so many ignorant dismissive SMART - supposedly - people out there who get so many things wrong and who pass that wrongness on from generation to generation. how is that possible? it always surprises me.

i keep waiting for all the old people to die, but they keep making new ones!

i wrote this on facebook the other day:

"i always cringe when i read a blurb on the back of an SF book that says that the book is so good that it "transcends the genre". UGH. how about the book is so good that it is "a really good example of how good the genre can be"??!!"

but the guy in Time said it better. jesus, in Time! when was the last time i read anything in Time? 1990? Maybe a doctor's office...

glad to see colson whitehead give a shout-out to michael weldon's psychotronic encyclopedia of film in the article on b-movies. i spent years with that book next to my tv too. i hope whitehead's novels are better though cause this autobiographical essay is slack, not much going on besides the movies.