Just read this hilarity in the Onion, which is funny because I recently read Isaac Asimov's Foundation. It's a collection of SF mag short stories, which doesn't help in conveying an overall feeling of novelistic contiguousness, but the annoying thing was that all the characters were pretty much identical, and spouted the same (albeit snappy) dialogue.
There was but one female character, who appeared for two pages and was a bit of a shrew. The ideas were all interesting, but really, it's a tatty piece of literature, and you can see why everyone looks down their nose at SF.
I also read Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titans recently. It was a very decent novel, but in a way it was just too cynical and anti-religious to be likeable.
So, so much for SF classics!
Posted by stuart at March 30, 2006 12:00 PM