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  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."
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October 07, 2004

TOP 15 SCI FI?

We imagine this list of 15 Great Science Fiction Novels from Business Week will be dissected and commented upon by those who know more about it than we do, but we pass it along for your consideration. The bottom third of this list reads as follows:

11. Man Plus (Frederik Pohl, 1976) If you lose a leg, are you still yourself? And if you gain wings? And what if you remake yourself perfectly for an inhuman environment?

12. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (Kate Wilhelm, 1976)
In a world of exhausted fertility, will the technologies of reproduction bind us together, change us all forever, or separate us from our offspring?

13. China Mountain Zhang (Maureen F. McHugh, 1992)
In a backwater America, outsiders dominate through the strength of their technologies. This novel questions whether American values of individualism can survive.

14. Galatea 2.2 (Richard Powers, 1995)
The arts and the sciences make up two different cultures. Artificial intelligence thrives at the point where they intersect.

15. Calculating God (Robert J. Sawyer, 2000)
If we are not alone, what does the Other make of us? And if the Other is more powerful yet seems to want to help us, what do we make of the Other?

You can find the top ten on the site.

Posted by TEV at 12:09 AM |

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Comments

Ed

Interesting to see "Galatea 2.2" on the list when "Operation Wandering Soul" is the riskier (and more dystopian SF) book from Powers. I never really considered "Galatea" to be science fiction. Then again, I try to avoid the genre ghettoization whenever possible.

Even so, any list without at least "The Demolished Man" or "The Man in the High Castle" is lacking big-time.

Posted by: Ed | October 07, 2004 at 07:22 AM

Cheryl Morgan

It is a personal list, rather than claiming to be a "best of all time", so I have no objection. There's a lot of good stuff there. I note that the books are listed in chronological order, so I'm not sure that the term "top ten" has any significant meaning.

Posted by: Cheryl Morgan | October 07, 2004 at 09:33 AM

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