REPTILE NEWS

Mr. Augean Stapledon, a third-eyed tuatara of the first water, offers us the following REPTILE NEWS:

I started with the intention of writing something about Isaac Asimov's ROBOTS OF DAWN. And then I thought, why do you want to do that? That old hack isn't the problem. Just another guy resurrecting the decaying flesh of ideas, plots, and characters dead thirty years now, pumping in a little '80's topicality (lame sex), and grabbing himself a whole bunch of money and a chrome rocket. What the hell? You give a guy a license to steal, you've got to expect him to use it.

But who gave him the license? That's better, more to the point.

First, though, look further. An endless stream of Dune books, leper books, Riverworld books, 2010-and-counting books, Majipoor books, magic blue horse books.... help me, Jesus, I can't do it by myself.

It can't be the books. Most are unreadable, some merely boring, and a few achieve the exalted status of a well-prepared cheeseburger.

SF used to be solely the province of the visionary and/or deranged. Its writers could count on, at best, a living wage -- along with, of course, the warm admiration of thousands of the isomorphically visionary/deranged, for whatever it was worth. This was not a good thing. Philip Dick ate pet food; others committed suicide, said the hell with it, or lived lives of constant despair. Name your poison. But the crazed were allowed to flourish in their own peculiar way, and the results were, now and then, amazing.

So by all means bring SF onto center stage and give it a shot at the Big Time: New York Times Best Seller Lists, mighty advances, fancy covers, seven-piece supermarket dump bins.

But don't take a razor to the hamstrings and then say, "Go on, get out there, buddy, and run with the best." Don't, in short, isolate the Dune-leper-magic blue horse&c. books as quintessential SF and ignore everything else. But this is, of course, precisely what mainstream corporate publishing does.

Meanwhile, back at Waldenbooks, they're honing the SF section -- you know, stripping it down to the 'essentials' ... and Waldenbooks are spreading exponentially, in more disgusting fashion than any monster SF ever dreamed up, while the publishers are reading the writing on the shopping center walls -- which says nothing about being weighed in the balance and found wanting -- and following along.

There was a hint at the end of ROBOTS OF DAWN that Asimov might tie the ROBOT books and the FOUNDATION books together. Imagine that. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, my ass. Why bother?