'A Hole in the World'
[NAFDA] "There will be an occasional happy, so that it might be crushed under the boot of the writer." From Zorro to Angel (including Wonderfalls and The Inside), this is where Buffistas come to anoint themselves in the bloodbath.
Andre Norton is in terrible health and is selling High Hallack
Oh, that's terribly sad. She's such an important part of my growing up. The first novel I remember reading is The Stars are Ours. But you can't say she didn't have an impact, and I'm very happy she got a Grand Master award.
She is elderly, but still around. A lot of her stuff is being written in collaboration right now, in fact has been for some time.
High Hallack was going to be a place where writers could go and read other peoples work, or write, or just decompress. I don't know if that part ever happened. I am not a writer and lost touch. If you really want to know more, I could ask.
I would be interested in knowing. "Selling High Hallack" is such a mournful statement, and a shock in a way. I wondered if she had named her home that, or was selling the rights to the High Hallack stories, or the use of the name, or what.
She named her home that.
She named her home that.
Oh, I see. Thank you for clearing that up for me. That is sad. She's always been a writer I've loved, who had a great influence on my expectations for storytelling, since I read a lot of her work in my teens and early 20s.
The funny thing about Heinlien is that he is about the only "hard" SF writer I really like. I like cool gadgets, but I enjoy stories about people more than I do about gadgets. And for all his flaws, Heinlein (to me) wrote mainly about (male admittedly) people. Mike in Moon came in part (I believe) out Heinleins inability to conveive of a really cool gadget that did not in fact turn out to be a person. I don't think the science was ever the point of the story for Heinlein. For this I could ignore the repulsive politics, and the reduction of women to some weird private fantasy of his. His books were about people, and society, and a view of the universe - the gadgets were just plot devices.
Gar, have you ever read Charles Sheffield's collections of short fiction? Very hard science-y, but I think he does (well, did, he died in 2002) a good job of exploring characterization as well. Hidden Variables was my first introduction to him, and I also liked The MacAndrew Chronicles.
What means "hard" SF writer? Does Bradbury count? Atwood? Also is "The Children of Men" SF? I tend to think it is, but maybe there's some other category for apocolyptic stuff. What about Adams? I'm assuming he doesn't count because his is satire set in SFland- but then, should he not be counted as SF just because he's funny? Parts of The Martian Chronicals struck me funny too.
I've always thought of hard as SF that puts ideas and technology above characters and atmosphere.
Asimov's my favourite.
I like Cherryh's Cyteen too, in that same category.
I don't think of Bradbury as Hard SF generally, because he wrote a lot of character-centric stories. He does have some stories of ideas, which revolve around some scientific concept or other, but I think of the Hard SF writers as being much more rule-driven, than people-driven.