Went to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens

[SheilaT]

14. I can only take a little bit of

S.M. Stirling. I did like "Dies the Fire", thought it well done for the most part, but when it started going off into essentially medieval fantasy, he lost me. I actually know Steve and he's a great guy, so I feel a bit bad about not liking his books better.

I tend to have a very low tolerance for series books in the first place. Likewise, I liked "Island in the Sea of Time" and couldn't get very far in the second one. And he's not really writing alternate history, to quibble here a bit, but having some major catastrophe happen and then go from there. Real alternate history says, "What if some specific thing had happened differently in the past? What would our world be like now?"

Again, Harry Turtledove is a master of alternate history, or has been up until recently. I found his latest, "Joe Steele" to be unreadable, and gave up after about fifty or so pages. But much of his earlier works are really good.

I read "1632", but again, for me an open-ended series almost never works. Or even a closed one.

Another writer I really like these days is James Van Pelt. He mostly writes short stories and has four collections out. Also two stand-alone novels, both of which are YA.

"Time and Again" and "From Time to Time" by Jack Finney are two of the very best time travel novels ever written. For years, when in conversation with someone who said they didn't like science fiction, I'd recommend "Time and Again", and invariably the people who read it said they really liked it, and it changed their mind about s-f.

While I read a fair amount of s-f, it's by no means the bulk of my reading. About half of everything I read is non-fiction, almost any subject you could name, and lots of mainstream novels. Also thrillers and mysteries. Perhaps that's why I'm critical and unforgiving of the flaws I see in s-f. Then again, you probably never want to go to a movie with me, because I start in on all the flaws I perceive as soon as I leave the theater.

The real problem with s-f movies, in my opinion is two-fold. First is that the people making them absolutely know how to make movies (while I wouldn't have a clue where to start, were I to get it into my I head I wanted to make a movie), but know very little about real science fiction. They think it *is* the movies, and they're missing a body of literature that goes back more than a century. The other problem is the reliance on special effects almost to the complete exclusion of a plot -- my problem with the new Star Wars movie in a nutshell. Too bad, because modern fx is truly wonderful. One reason I'd love to see "The End of Eternity" by Isaac Asimov made into a movie is that now we have the special effects to pull off his descriptions of the different centuries. Plus, it has a pretty decent plot.

In any case, thanks for reading through this old thread and responding to me.