All Shaking Thunder

Rejected by Tor Dot Com, no doubt prudently, five reasons why I
omitted your favour book from my latest list.

https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/post/all-shaking-thunder-or-why-i-didnt-mention-your-favourite-book
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On 3/03/24 03:30, James Nicoll wrote:
> All Shaking Thunder
>
> Rejected by Tor Dot Com, no doubt prudently, five reasons why I
> omitted your favour book from my latest list.
>
> https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/post/all-shaking-thunder-or-why-i-didnt-mention-your-favourite-book

That was fun. I wildly guess that I would have read less than 4,000
books over the last half century plus. 15,000 is amazing, though your
arithmetic is suspect, maybe it was 14,000. :p

On Sat, 2 Mar 2024 14:30:11 -0000 (UTC), jdnicoll@panix.com (James
Nicoll) wrote:

>All Shaking Thunder
>
>Rejected by Tor Dot Com, no doubt prudently, five reasons why I
>omitted your favour book from my latest list.
>
>https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/post/all-shaking-thunder-or-why-i-didnt-mention-your-favourite-book

Generally speaking, it seems to me that the second reason given is the
most common. It is indeed very frequent that your lists will omit the
most "obvious" example of the type of work in question - often, but
hardly always, somethinjg by Heinlein.

It is amusing that only _four_ reasons were given, but I can suggest
a fifth, which would be best placed between the third reason and the
final one... that you might bear malice towards specific *authors*.
And Heinlein, for the conservative views he sometimes expresses, would
make an obvious target.

However, I'm charitable enough to think it's the second reason rather
than this 3 1/2-th reason that is more likely to apply in that case.

But that this fifth reason comes to mind is because you do at least
definitely exhibit its converse: in some of your essays, you go out of
your way to highlight the work of progressive new authors, authors of
color, authors who are women, authors who are from countries not well
known as being the sources of science fiction works, and so on.

All of which is quite commendable, even if it risks boring or even
alienating an audience which seems to be more and more exclusively
composed, as the years go on, of old farts for whom science fiction is
what existed before that pesky New Wave came along.

Which, come to think of it, is hard to believe. As these old farts
suffer attrition due to old age, and as njew readers of science
fiction grow to maturity (or at least learn to read and use a
computer), one would expeckt this exclusivity to gradually diminish as
the years go on. Unless science fiction is a dying genre.

Actkually, though, the words "seems to be" suggest a resolution.
Perhaps the proportion of old farts _is_ diminishing with time, even
as one might expect, but it is doing so so slowly that this is offset
by how much more noticeable and jarring their preponderance becomes
with each passing year making it ever more incongrous!

John Savard