I enjoy sf for a lot of reasons. Beautiful prose can keep me reading, but ideas can also keep me reading. Stories like Nightfall, The Ugly Little Boy, Misbegotten Missionary and The Last Question are unforgettable.

I have, under duress, read the condensed Clarissa. Now that's painful.

Btw, Gar, I just had an image of us arguing Asimov's merits at some old SF WorldCon and just as you said, "And Asimov's prose did rise above serviceable on occasion," he walks up behind you and claps his hand on your shoulder. And he says, "Thank you for your gallantry, but can I ask you not to rush to my defense anymore? I don't think my ego can survive any more of your sallies on my behalf."

Pish tosh, serviceable is exactly what prose is supposed to be. Prosaic, even.

There's nothing wrong with serviceable prose. Writers can be great for any of a number of reasons. And great writers can be less than great in certain areas. Dickens's characters are magnificent, but his plots rely too much on coincidence. ("Our hero walked through London. Out of all the millions of people in the city, he just happened to meet an old friend that he hadn't seen in 500 pages....")

See, I find Martin TL:DR. He's like a sleeping pill for me.

Since the only non-shared-world Martin I've ever read is Fevre Dream, I have a skewed sense of him. (I love Fevre Dream.)

I haven't re-read any Asimov in years, but I remember liking what he wrote. And in terms of the SF Valhalla, these days I prefer Asimov to Heinlein. (I suppose it's telling that my favorite Heinlein really is Magic, Inc. )

But of course, I will place Bradbury above them all.

There's nothing wrong with serviceable prose.

For a writer there certainly is something wrong with it.

Let me posit the lost Italian Renaissance painter Asimovetti. He was a contemporary of Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Titian. His compositions were static, his use of color derivative, and his humans were all flat. But he was the first person to paint gryphons with blue tinged wings and everybody after painted them that way. He was influential. But you don't put him in the same rank with Da Vinci, Michelangleo and Titian because he's not as good.

His paintings are serviceable. You can see what he's getting at. There are some interesting ideas in there about robots gryphons. The way he laid out that Triptych wasn't particularly well executed but everybody had to admit Triptych's were a pretty cool idea.

I can get it if you don't want to swallow the entire Modernism insistence on the medium itself as the essence of art. But the mere serviceability of Asimov's prose negatively affects the quality of the work. Because writing is made of words and he's not particularly great at it.

There's a reason why Asimov only writes the foreword to Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions instead of contributing a story to it. Because when you're trying to create a new standard for science fiction that's more daring in subject and of a higher literary standard then you have to set the bar over Asimov's head.

Asimov as a Beloved and Respected Figure can lend his credibility and approval to the project, but Asimov the writer doesn't deserve to be in the same book with Fritz Leiber, Robert Silverberg, Brian Aldiss, Phillip K.Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, J.G. Ballard, Philip Jose Farmer, Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delaney and Harlan Ellison. The standard of Asimov's merely serviceable prose is the very thing they are trying to overthrow to improve the genre.

What you're saying feels rather condescending. You implied earlier that Martin and Rowling were fine to be respected, despite their perhaps merely serviceable prose, because they did something else well: they told a good story and had great character development. Now, I personally found many of the characters in Foundation and the Robots series to be quite well developed, and the storytelling to be plenty captivating, but I will even give to you that he's not as good at either of those things as some others, but the fact is that he does a better job of combining those things with big ideas than most writers. Many science fiction writers do an amazing job of setting a traditional story in a science fiction universe, and some of them even do a great job fleshing out those universes, which is a beautiful thing. Often, that's my preferred type of story. Asimov does something different, in that his stories are primarily concerned with how the universe he has built works, with the story serving as a vehicle to explore that. The stories in I, Robot are each individually about the characters, but their point is not to make us like the characters, it's to fascinate us with the paradoxes of the Laws of Robotics and the Frankenstein Complex. The Caves of Steel goes even further, taking the same human psychology first explored in I, Robot to a perfectly reasonable conclusion about where Earth and humans might end up, exploring the sociological and psychological implications of that, while simultaneously telling a perfectly interesting detective story. When I think on it as a mystery, it's fine, as good as something I might pick up at an airport. When I think on it as speculative fiction, though, it sends shivers down my spine. His particular vision of future Earth is very interesting, very compelling, and very scary, mostly because it's very easy to see us heading in that direction even now.

And from your list, I'd argue that Philip K. Dick, at least, lets trying to write beautiful prose destroy the readability and understandability of his ideas. I've finished about three of his short stories in my life, despite trying many times. He's not accessible. And I think accessibility is also pretty necessary for greatness.

ETA: Honestly, after all that writing, my real statement is just that I completely disagree with "As a writer there is certainly something wrong with [servicable prose]." There is not. Writing is made up of words but words are designed to transmit the ideas. If the ideas are interesting, I could not possible care less if the words themselves are beautiful, as long as they are edited to the point of easy readability. Greatness in literature, to me, comes from the story told.

Much of Fritz Leiber hasn't aged well. Silverberg probably wrote more fiction that I'd think of as "serviceable" than Asimov; he just wrote a lot more fiction. I've never thought much of Aldiss, but that's a matter of taste, isn't it? Dick is a force onto himself; if he had treated himself better, maybe we'd have more of him. A lot of early Sturgeon -- in the same era the Asimov's major fiction was written -- was clunky. Ballard repeats himself. Farmer was erratic. I never got into Zelazny. Delany: Dhalgren. Ellison, some brilliant short fiction, but not enough because of his tendency to explode.

They all did wonderful things, though. But without the scope and imagination of writers like Asimov and Doc Smith, we might not have had them at all.

I'm only willing to damn two SF writers all together: Mark Clifton and John Norman.

Because writing is made of words and he's not particularly great at it.

Right. And words have meaning. So depending how you string them together, you could be presenting some fresh ideas or themes, even if you're doing it pretty plainly.

Style over content is a bad goal for any art, probably, but writing particularly. There are a lot of *literary novelists* out there who can write beautifully, with innovation, and in the end don't say much of anything new or interesting. I'm looking at Dave Eggers here, for the record -- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius could have packed a hell of a lot more punch if he had stopped jerking off over his own idea of his brilliance and edited the thing even a little bit.

Yes, Amy!

I just stopped reading Portnoy's Complaint because no matter how cleverly the words were strung together, and they really were, I just didn't care to read about the ridiculous sexual escapades of a completely unlikeable character any more. There wasn't anything to like beyond the cleverness, which only took me so far.