Comments on: Hype and Substance

By: Mark Holmes

Mark Holmes — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 13:25:30 +0000

I think I am one of the very few prog fans who is left completely cold by King Crimson. I’ve tried to like them, played different albums over and over again and cannot see what they are so revered. Their undoubted appeal is completely lost on me.

As an aside, I happen to like Be Here Now and love Clockwork Angels! The latter has (IMHO) a smattering of classics – Caravan, BU2B, Headlong flight and the superb The Garden.

By: Tim Hall

Tim Hall — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 20:50:36 +0000

Heinlein is an interesting case, because there's no denying he's a hugely important and influential figure in the history of science fiction, even though much of what he wrote has dated badly. As for his skills as a prose stylist, were there any good writers in SF in the pulp-magazine days of the 40s and 50s? The more literary SF writers came a generation later.

By: Serdar Yegulalp

Serdar Yegulalp — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 18:28:28 +0000

I think a big part of the buzz there was “Oh, cool, Rush does a concept album again!” — something which if memory serves hadn’t happened since “2112″. The mere idea of the album slobbered all over everything else about it in the minds of the trufanz [sic].

Most any fandom has examples of this; I should actually take the time to do a full essay about it, because I could exhaust this space enumerating them. But a few recent ones come to mind: I thought Heinlein was grossly overrated by his fandom (influential, but being influential doesn’t mean you’re actually a good writer or a coherent thinker), and I thought “Ichi the Killer” was, despite all its fan blather, both pretentious and morally repugnant (not an easy combination to achieve).