more relateds

[psocoptera]

A Lit Fuse - do I actually have to care about Harlan Ellison in 2018? I mean, sure, he wrote some memorable and/or important stories (I was just talking about "I Have No Mouth" the other day, right?), I'm not saying we need to erase his place in sff history, but given that he himself is a dick (and, it would seem from this excerpt, a liar - I ended up reading more than I intended to, and his version of his mother's death vs reality jumped out at me), why do I want his perspective on his own life? If I actually wanted to understand his career arc, I would want to read something written by someone with some distance, not a sycophantic take where I can't tell what's real and what's lies and self-aggrandizement. The part about Ellison dealing with old age and decline was sort of interesting from a general grappling-with-that-stuff angle, but mostly I just don't caaaare.

Crash Override - in one sense I care more about Zoe Quinn than about Harlan Ellison, and yet as it turns out I don't really care about the exact details of her harassment by GamerGate? The "how we can win the fight" parts might have been more interesting but that's not the excerpt we got. I am very sympathetic to Quinn and I think her experience is important and possibly I'll want my kids to read this or something like it when they're older to understand the ugliness of that side of internet culture but I don't feel like I got anything out of this personally.

I am exempting myself from reading about Iain M. Banks on the grounds that I've never read any of his books but would still like to someday and would rather approach them without whatever background or interpretation might be in this book about him.

Comments

[glynhogen]

Re: Banks, he's...not terribly subtle?* Which is not to give you more homework, just to reassure you that whatever you pick up out of the ether is probably not going to have much of an impact on your reading experience.

* Which is not to say immune from misinterpretation, but really that falls more into the category with those people being really fucking dense and/or evil, most likely "and," and SPEAKING AND THINKING IN MARAIN IS A GODDAMN PLOT POINT YOU ASSHOLE and I feel slightly better now.

[psocoptera]

I feel slightly odd having dismissed Ellison the night before he died, but so it goes I guess.

[glynhogen]

I think that's still a fair read on his life (where by "fair" I mean "approximates my own views").