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.

Or what Amy said.

I have less than no interest in reading self-consciously clever prose. Good writing in service of a story, sure, but I cannot work with authors who you can just feel their self-congratulations as they craft yet another... I can't even with this sentence, even.

I also think there's no worse idea than trying to be the next literary darling. You have to write what you write to the best of your ability, and you have to remember to actually *tell* a story while you play with how best to tell it. Time tells who lasts and who doesn't, and it's not always as obvious; see Dickens, for instance.

I'm going to stand here, nod vigorously, and point at what Amy and Jesse said. The authors I love that could be considered clever stylists (Bradbury, Tanith Lee, Angela Carter), but they never let those clever, lush words get in the way of the story.

Hell, even Anne Rice, queen of bombast and purple prose, had a good story and characters in Interview With The Vampire and The Vampire Lestat. It was later on that she started valuing overwrought over story.

What Amy said. And Ginger. And Gris. And Jesse. ... And Jilli.

Style over content is a bad goal for any art, probably, but writing particularly.

wrod wrod wrod

I have less than no interest in reading self-consciously clever prose. Good writing in service of a story, sure,

With wrod sauce.

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.

The analogy doesn't really work because the idea is more significant in SF than the gryphon on painting. It would be fairer to posit your Asimovetti as someone who, say, was a groundbreaker (or genius, if you prefer) in composition but derivative color and flat humans.

If you don't want to put him in the top tier, you'd have a case. But at the same time, a self-respecting museum wouldn't necessarily be ashamed to show his work.