David Dyer-Bennet wrote: > "bonham15" <bonham15 at cox.net> writes: > > That's an attitude that continues to catch me by surprise -- that you > expect new stories to be *better* than old stories. I expect exactly > the reverse; we're living with the cream skimmed off a few thousand > years of literary history, and the best stuff from that much time is > mostly incomparably better than nearly anything created this year. It > takes something really fantastic like _A Fire Upon the Deep_, say, to > even look like a *candidate* for that sort of status in the long run. I disagree. Sturgeon's law worked then and it works now - but now there are tremendously more educated writers. Even applying Sturgeon's law to the 10% gives us an elite 1% that is vastly larger than the 10% of the past. The main advantage in looking at great works of the past is that it is easier to find the cream. Nowadays one of the best way of finding the cream is to notice what kind of blurbs Steve gives for Gene Wolfe. I wonder how many people have been turned onto literary works by Mr. Brust. I also wonder - what authors do you (David Dyer-Bennet) recommend, that we might have missed?