> -----Original Message----- > From: rone [mailto:rone at ennui.org] > Sent: Sunday, May 30, 2004 4:45 PM > To: SKZB List > Subject: Re: From Neil Gaiman's journal > > > 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. > True, but many do, and even if they do not it is not terribly difficult to put ones mindset at the time in question. I love rereading anything by E.E. Doc Smith, for example. W "Don't be ashamed to add your voice to the universal sound canvas. You give a rather intruiging harmony."