Do the Grand Masters Matter Anymore?

[jeriendhal]

Just got to thinking about this while reading a post about Isaac Asimov on OpenSalon. The author was waxing enthusiastically about the potential for turning more Asimov stories into films, but I politely disagreed with him, pointing out that Asimov was better at putting forth ideas than creating three dimensional characters that a viewer in a theater might connect with.

It got me to thinking about whether any of the big three, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke and their contemporaries who started the Golden Age of Science Fiction are relevant today. I'm not going to argue whether they were important back then. That's undisputed. It was their efforts that pulled sci fi out o the ghetto of rayguns and tentacled monsters threatening buxom blondes on the cover of digest mags to the "Literature of Ideas" that we cherish today. But a hundred years from now will we still be reading them or studying them, like we do Shakespeare? Or will we have put them aside to be ignored, like so many of Shakespeare's contemporaries?

Because let's face it, characterization is not their strong suit. Heinlien tends to come on out ahead, despite an obsession with polyamorous redheads certain quirks. But Clarke tends to fall back on a menagerie of stoic, sexless engineers or (in his more humorous works) flat characters that wouldn't look out of place in an Ealing comedy.[1] Asimov almost always left me cold, despite the intriguing nature of his puzzle stories. His later Foundation/Robot epics were just too painful for me to try to finish.

Ultimately characterization is what I read for. Someone I can connect to and admire, as they struggle with some strange new problem never seen before in our world. That's what made Shakespeare's works as relevant today as they did in his time, human nature never really changing. Can we say the same about the worlds of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, when all they have are ideas that have been superseded by today's technology, examined by characters we no longer can connect to?

[1] And god, some of his early works, particularly his Sands of Mars, seem intent on re-creating the British Empire IN SPACE. Complete with loyal natives to help their new white human masters.

Comments

[scarfman]

A good story well told is a good story well told, outdated tech and merely craftmanslike chacterization aside. I've just reread Time Enough for Love off the shelf, picked at random, but (my books being in no searchable order) it's inspired me to plan a trip to the library for Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls and To Sail Beyond the Sunset. And maybe Mistress and Stranger. I tend to reread the Foundation books and the space odysseys at least decadely too. (Ringworld novels also, for the record, though you're not singling out anyone alive.)

[chaypeta.livejournal.com]

I read a lot of Asimov (Foundation, all of the Robot collected stories and Bradbury as a teen. I tried Clarke, I really did, but left him for the same reason stated in your post: too much dry tech and world building and not enough characterisation. I really do think having fully rounded characters that you can care about what happens to them is the main reason that compells a person to finish a book. It's probably why I hit space opera's more then anything else. Although I still cringe at cross species offspring and other such things that are just wrong.

[chewipaka.livejournal.com]

Just because a human and an iguana* can't have a child is no reason for a human and (insert random alien from something, anything, here) to not have one!



*Somebody else made a point with this example about how improbable it is for aliens to be able to mate with humans.