Disgraced Return of The Kap's Needle by Renan Bernardo

When the target world proves too inhospitable for colonization,
colonists make a desperate bid to return to Earth on a failing starship.

https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/all-around-i-see
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On Tue, 17 Jun 2025 12:58:52 +0000, James Nicoll wrote:

Disgraced Return of The Kap's Needle by Renan Bernardo

When the target world proves too inhospitable for colonization,
colonists make a desperate bid to return to Earth on a failing starship.

https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/all-around-i-see

Oh, dear. The author made the mistake of making Reva the protagonist,
instead of the villain in whose defeat the reader is supposed to
vicariously triumph?

But the whole situation seems so depressing that... oh, well, it's
suitable for "real literature" instead of cheap space-opera melodrama,
like sci-fi fans are conditioned to expect. So it's one of those darned
New Wave stories!

Genuine literary merit and science fiction are not incompatible.

However, readers seeking profound explorations of the human condition...
often see no need to have them complicated with flashing lights and
flying cars and spaceships. Readers who are attuned to the future and technology... often want diverting and optimistic entertainment; they
seek hope, not to be reminded that human flaws mean no real change will
ever happen.

This is why the science fiction genre in English-speaking countries has
been stubbornly resistant to the commercial success of works that
combine science fiction with the highest levels of genuine literary
merit. The readership for the two kinds of stories doesn't have enough
overlap.

Or the real problem is perhaps a lack of imagination on the part of
authors.

How to ask a real question about the human heart... that can only be set
in a future with technologies beyond what we now have? If such a story
were written, and it was good enough, it would find an audience.

Barring "other factors" that could get in its way, of course, and I
suspect those other factors are legion enough to explain why this hasn't already happened. Because even if the story reviewed - handicapped by
the other factor of not being originally written in English - isn't it,
no doubt in the non-English speaking world there perhaps are already
lots of very good science-fiction stories of genuine literary merit that
are being ignored.

Which explains very well your nontraditional choice of material to
review, so instead of complaining about it I should wish you good luck.

John Savard

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On Wed, 18 Jun 2025 16:50:30 +0000, quadibloc wrote:

Which explains very well your nontraditional choice of material to
review, so instead of complaining about it I should wish you good luck.

The Big Three of science-fiction are usually Clarke, Asimov, and
Heinlein.

But while they are all of merit, I've tended to feel that, for me, at
least, Clarke rises above the other two in what I seek from a
science-fiction story.

In fact, thinking about it, I wonder if, in a "critic's choice" version,
one might get a different Big Three. Say Clarke, Bradbury, and Simak,
perhaps? Maybe #3 would be someone else; my memory isn't great enough to
know offhand all the best science fiction authors.

But Clarke didn't write that much science fiction.

In any case, though, it seems to me that it *ought* to be possible for
someone to write science fiction of such merit that it would blow even
Clarke out of the water. The future is where we will, after all, live
the rest of our lives, as someone once said.

Ah, well. C. P. Snow may have explained why it's hard to find authors
with the right overlapping skill sets - the "Two Cultures" of the arts
and the sciences.

Oh, wait a moment. 1984 is science fiction, among other things. So a
science fiction novel of great and profound literary merit _has_ already
been written. (And Bradbury with Fahrenheit 451, and Heinlein with If
This Goes On... took stabs in that direction too which did very well.)

John Savard

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On 19/06/25 05:05, quadibloc wrote:

The Big Three of science-fiction are usually Clarke, Asimov, and
Heinlein.

snip

The Big Three of science-fiction WERE usually Clarke, Asimov, and
Heinlein. I preferred Vonnegut, Dick and Asimov.

Before that, Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton and someone else were my Big
Three.

Ah, well. C. P. Snow may have explained why it's hard to find authors
with the right overlapping skill sets - the "Two Cultures" of the arts
and the sciences.

C P Snow died in 1980. His "Two Cultures" was dated 1959. He never read
Banks, nor Reynolds, nor Vinge, nor David Mitchell, nor Herbert, nor
Leckie, nor dozens of others that have developed skills in both Cultures
in the sixty five years since. I argue for Pantheism.


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