Sci-fi is the only literature
It’s not really tonight’s topic, I just wanted to get it off my chest.
Note to Christine: The Fellowship of the Suit sounds like it was ripped off from “The Wonderful Ice-Cream Suit”, one of Ray Bradbury’s better-known short stories (and he’s a man known for his short stories). Bradbury used to write a short story a week; I think he did it for years. I tried it; it lasted for a couple of weeks. Anyway, the Ice-Cream Suit isn’t really sci-fi, but that could be said of a lot of Bradbury’s sci-fi proper. It’s all a bit fantastic, like “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed”, one of his many tales of endangered Martians on a Mars that’s like a bit of the Old West, oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and all.
One other note on something Christine said in her zendom article, and that Lori agreed with by blog: what’s so wrong about Godawful? Yes, it’s a questionable honor to be chosen as Worst of the Web, but I’ve known a couple of people who held that dubious distinction, and they didn’t stop writing. Her friends rallied around one of them, and still revile Godawful whenever it’s mentioned. The other one admitted that her story was, in a word, Godawful. It was an ill-conceived round-robin that she knew deserved its place on that infamous Worst Of site.
Stop by Godawful sometime and ask yourself, is it really so bad to scare these people off writing? They put their fic up in public where anyone can stumble over it, read it accidentally and be squicked in their sense of literary propriety. If we can have rec pages, why not anti-rec pages? Silence is not enough to protect the innocent.
Besides, Godawful serves an educational purpose, just like Bad Fanfic! No Biscuit! claims to. I’ve never quite understood why it’s acceptable to mock bad writers on BF!NB! but wrong to quote them directly (getting them far more hits than their fic merits) on Godawful. In either case, the lesson of Don’t Try This At Home is one that can’t be overemphasized. Not every newbie knows the difference between good and bad fic - else whence the hordes of fluffy-pairing-fic fans?
Even BOFQ’s can appreciate the occasional fic that’s so bad it’s good. Don’t tell me you haven’t read your share of bad, bad fanfic - I was there in fluffdom with you. I heard you squicking.