/lit/ - Literature

>>11708490
>carriage chase scene
Hahaha damn. I don't think I've ever read a truly rewarding piece of fantasy fiction. Some good lit is de facto sci-fi like Burroughs's Nova trilogy or Pynchon here and there. Most new short-form sci-fi, especially ecological-fiction stuff, seems cribbed right out of Highlights for Children.

>>11708756
Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx is the highest example of drivel like this. Nobody try to convince me that it wasn't written to be children's fiction.

I'd read the hell out of space opera fiction as long as it is written totally straight. Star Trek is a real cultural node of the last century and I'd like to see what a good writer would do with an episodic format like that. So something like sci-fi that critiques or inquires into the conditions that allowed for the surge of production and popularity of sci-fi lit. If you're gonna give me a fantasy, go whole hog -- none of these attempts to more materially-situate genre cliches. "It's swords-and-sandals but in a post-nuclear Montana." No thanks. It ain't good sci-fi unless it actually critiques what people tend to like about sci-fi, its predictive function. Best sci-fi works like an antidote to predictive sci-fi while still talking about history. The corniest most historically-implausible stuff is the real shit. If sci-fi writers want to be prophets, they should be full-on parascientific mystics like Burroughs.

>>10488909
I read it on a dim midnight train to Chicago on a few mgs of adderall. The train was freezing and my brother and I were bundled in whatever mismatched clothes we'd packed. I was wearing a black cowlneck shirt under another two flannels, a denim fishing hat, and a pair of adidas soccer pants. We were surrounded by several Amish families and a few tourists, some junkies and one or two outright weirdos. It was like a refrigeration car.
I think I got the optimal Neuromancer reading experience.

>>10492296
>[William Burroughs'] Naked Lunch, yes.
I knew it! I saw some direct (maybe unintended) references: the mention of an eel's ass (the anus amputates spontaneously on the migratory route to Sargasso).