New editions of Algis Budrys and Samuel Delany critical works, and some quivering puppies wave hello to Thog...

from something I wrote today for the librarian-heavy Fiction-L list, and posted around...

David Langford produces the important literary/fannish newsletter/fanzine Ansible on a monthly basis (it will surprise no one here that Dennis Lien is a frequent contributor/resource there), and one of its recurring features is of bad prose quotation under the heading of "Thog's Masterclass" and variations (the origins explicated at http://thog.org/), but Langford is not shy about pointing out others' efforts in highlighting the high?lights in favored sorts of prose, such as the improbably-tagged Paul Goat Allen, who contributes to the Barnes & Noble online sites among other fora, and his recent "Quivering Puppies: When Good Paranormal Fantasy Sex Scenes Go Really, Really Bad". 


Langford, among other activities, also publishes a few books under an Ansible Editions imprint, and has, with similarly critically-minded Greg Pickersgill, done the world a favor by producing the first of a projected three volumes collecting the critical columns of Algis Budrys for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction from the mid-1970s into the 1990s..a similar collection of Budrys's Galaxy magazine columns from 1965-70, Benchmarks: Galaxy Bookshelf, had been published by Southern Illinois University Press in 1985, and was widely hailed (I certainly gave it a deservedly glowing review in my college newspaper at the time; fellow fiction-writer and critic Barry Malzberg has noted that the column that deals with how sf has helped color our understanding of the world, through the example of Budrys's own experiences at the periphery of several of the riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., is a better analysis of that historical moment than Normal Mailer's much more famous one), but the later, similarly impressive series of critical review essays has been awaiting collection for some time (SIU Press hit some difficulties not long after publishing their book, and no one had picked up the baton till now). Benchmarks Continued: F&SF "Books" Columns 1975-1982 has just been published, and is eminently worthy of attention.

Likewise, Samuel Delany, another startling talent to emerge in the fantastic-fiction field, a decade later than Budrys and similarly seeming to be ready to advance the art from the beginning of his career (Budrys essentially began his review of Delany's relatively early novel Nova by suggesting that with this book, Delany has become the best sf writer extant), has also been contributing valuably to the critical literature since the late 1960s, and some of his work, both fiction and nonfiction, has been systematically been reprinted by Wesleyan University Press of late, and their just-published entry in that series is the second volume of Delany's collected critical writing, in a revised and expanded edition: Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction.

You could do worse...