On Thu, 8 Jul 2004 12:02:02 -0700 (PDT), Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> wrote: > It's not clear to me that this expectation is generally justified. I > suspect that in SF it's rarer to see monotonically improving writing than > a sharp improvement followed by a slow decline. In poetry certainly > people often just run out of experience to draw on (at least until they > hit late old age). Why Silverberg or Zelazny (or LeGuin after say _The > Dispossesed_; or Wolfe after the New Sun; or...) peaked early I can't > say. > Maybe something about ambition and careers and life. Poets often get most of their acclaim at a late age. One poet got a Nobel for prose, then served in the legislature and finally wrote the poetry that he is best remembered for. Zelazny is kind of a special case. When he knew he was dying, he decided to write fast and furiously for money. He decided his legacy was his family. -- Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/