On May 30, 2004, at 4:44 PM, rone wrote: > David Dyer-Bennet writes: > "bonham15" <bonham15 at cox.net> writes: >> i actually came to lord of light rather late. i think last year it >> was that >> i picked it up for something like fifty cents from a used book store. >> it >> has held up amazingly well for a 40 year old story, as good ones will >> imho > 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. > > A story sometimes exists in the context of the time it was written, > though, and many stories don't age very well. > > rone > -- Thats true but some books, like the original Planet of the Apes (best book I've ever read), continue to be under appreciated.