Mmmmmmm Yes! (was Re:Kate writes Great...)

[katefans@world.std.com (Chris'n'Vickie of Chicago)]

Richard posted this and it's worth re-reading carefully:

>    Now to define _good_ science fiction.  The conceptual 
>    dislocation -- the new idea, in other words -- must be truly 
>    new (or a new variation on an old one) and it must be 
>    intellectually stimulating to the reader; it must invade his 
>    mind and wake it up to the possibility of something he had 
>    not thought of.  Thus "good science fiction" is a value term,
>    not an objective thing, and yet, I think, there really is
>    such a thing, objectively, as good science fiction.

>    I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University 
>    at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true 
>    protagonist of an sf story is an idea and not a person.  If 
>    it is _good_ sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, 
>    probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction 
>    of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-
>    speak unlocks the reader's mind so that that mind, like the
>    author's, begins to create.  Thus sf is creative and it 
>    inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large 
>    does not do.  We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, 
>    not a writer) read it because we love to experience this 
>    chain-reaction of ideas set off in our minds by something we 
>    read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best 
>    science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration
>    between author and reader, in which both create -- and _enjoy_ 
>    doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science 
>    fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.

>                                           Philip K. Dick
>                                           May 14, 1981


> ...science fiction.  In the process I think he touches on some ideas that 
> apply just as well to other forms of art and specifically to Kate's 
> music.

Mmmmmmmm Yes!

Vickie (one of Vickie'n'Chris)
katefans@world.std.com