It's a soapbox thing of mine that general critical thinking and information evaluation be taught in schools. I'm sure one of the reasons it isn't is religion.

Agreed. When I was in school, it was only taught in enrichment classes. Only the smart shall be taught how to think!

HG Wells, tho.

Nope

Nope

I'm not talking about who gets the "father of sci-fi" label because a couple of books are arbitrarily named firsts of the genre. If you read through Asimov's short stories (of which there are an awful lot, and which I did because I was a nerdy dork kid), you start to realize that he is bigly responsible for establishing the mainstream definition of what science fiction is in much the same way Tolkien did for fantasy or Christie did for mysteries. All of the individual elements were there before, and many others both explored the same themes and took them to new places, but his body of work - mostly from the 40's and 50's - is like the platonic ideal of science fiction as a genre.

Name one element of Agatha Christie's work that doesn't appear in Poe's detective stories?

Also to defend my previous post The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man are clearly works of speculative fiction, and since the futurism and pseudoscience are the only things that distinguishes the genre I'm not sure how Asimov can define it when he was at least 50 years late to the party.

What? Asimov was very good, but lots of people were writing sci-fi things during the golden era of pulp sci-fi.

Big ups for Kilgore Trout. Sometimes I wish Vonnegut had dedicated sometime to writing an anthology of the collected works of Kilgore Trout. The premises he floated always fascinated me.

zz, you claimed he wrote all the sci fi things first in your original post. That was the only area of dispute from me.

That is entirely my point. When people think 'detective story' they imagine something like what Christie or Doyle wrote, even though Poe was there before both of them. I'm not talking about who was first, I'm talking about who was most responsible for developing the form as we understand it today.

A hard boiled example would be Dashiell Hammett, who preceded Raymond Chandler (but also was not first). The Philip Marlowe character has become the archetype more so then Sam Spade, and far more so than the Continental Op.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-the-things

Poe is still responsible for the form as we understand it today because those who came after him are little more than plagiarists who changed settings/characters. While mysteries/detective stories can be fun the genre is as deep as a thimble. Hell, an episode of Scooby Doo will cover most of the common plot devices.

Now I will grant that if we were to play a game of word association with a random person and we gave them "detective novel" that few would be educated enough to answer Poe, but I'm guessing no one other than olds would say Agatha Christie. If I had to guess the most common response would probably be James Patterson (may he get gonorrhea and rot in hell).

I'm watching CSPAN right now, which I almost never do. It's a replay from Thursday with FBI and DHS, and this rep from Pennsylvania (Scott Perry) is going hard at them over keeping Sharia law out of the country and stopping ANTIFA. It's a complete joke

Speaking of Vonnegut, I'm in the middle of "Kurt Vonnegut Complete Stories" which is about 100 short stories mostly from the early 50s written for science fiction magazines. I can't compare it to Asimov really, but it does cover a lot of ground.

I think I would have said Chandler, maybe Doyle.

GOP's most valuable donor list breached

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/...-senate-196238

by other republicans

Agree with zikzak regarding Asimov.

Chandler +1

Probably agree with Asimov too.

Most prescient author? Ballard.

L RON HUBBARD, dude is a literal cosmic god

/discussion

I always thought the Fahrenheit 451 idea where people get absorbed in their devices and completely ignore books and the world around them was amazingly prescient, but there's also a decent chance that people always ignored books anyway

Arthur C. Clarke

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke

I spent roughly the last 18 waking hours absorbed in one of my devices lately

lately i've had a really creepy feeling deep in my bones that Trump is actually in charge.

Book reading is at an all-time-high, IIRC.

Not for long, I think.

Is that true? I don't think I've been doing my part. I used to be as high as one a week, but I'm down to like maybe a half dozen per year now.