"The Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist came out. Christopher Priest, who you may remember from The Prestige, does not approve of it no way no how.
"Now, I actually like his post. I’m not going to call it a rant because I don’t enjoy that word–it seems to downplay the possibility of Getting Mad on Your Blog having any style, craft, or critical merit and it’s not really a rant when it’s reasoned, clever, and passionate. Whether you agree with Priest or not, it is all of those things. In fact, “Have we lived and fought in vain?” his comment on Greg Bear’s latest, is one of the great oh-this-fallen-world zingers I’ve heard in lo these many years.
"Way back in grad school, one of my professors said he felt quite fondly toward Harold Bloom, though he found many of the man’s ideas toxic and wrong-headed. “We need,” he said “somebody to go on TV in a leather jacket and cry about the death of literature. Somebody has to do that for us, as a culture.”
"Well, it looks like Priest has taken up the leather for us this year. And I’m fine with that because someone has to do it. Someone has to move the Overton Window ever so slightly toward high art. High art gets crapped on all the time, and even the phrase is basically a self-reflexive accusation/admission of elitism. But things get shitty, Sturgeon’s Law applies, the center cannot hold, and very occasionally, as high-maintenance lunch-to-literature conversion machines, we need Mommy and Daddy to not be proud of us to spur us on to write better books, to synthesize the high and the popular a little better every time. You will find a thousand authors arguing that what is popular is ipso facto good and anyone who says otherwise is a pseudo-intellectual heel. One guy should be able to say the opposite.

[nice essay snipped]

"No one is going to go: hey, you know, he’s right, I am terrible and Imma fix it! The whole nature of books is that they speak to some humans and not others. The point of shedding tears about literature is not to stage some kind of intervention that moves everyone over to your way of thinking. That trick never works. It’s to piss people off so that somewhere somebody–probably not the people he lit into–thinks to herself: I’m gonna write something so good even that Priest jerk will bow low before my might. And the world is made better by that unspoken challenge.
"Whatever the ballot looks like next year, whatever trends and sales and celebrity and chance do to the state of the field, whatever cringing and wincing I have done this morning on behalf of the authors you have deemed unworthy, Mr. Priest, I can tell you one thing:
"You have neither lived nor fought in vain. I promise."

Even if this were a complete travesty of the Greek text (and how would I know?), I am pretty sure that the book would be awesome.

"My problem is, I've seen Carnivale.
Carnivale, for those of you who don't know, was a criminally short-lived television show which was also about a Depression era circus, and also about a hapless and orphaned young man who gets hired on when the show sweeps through his town. But it is also about the death of the magical medieval world and the birth of the nuclear century, about the scars of WWI, about a peculiarly American mythology full of ghosts, boom towns, and wastelands, about magic, death, incest, and religion, about avatars of light and dark--but so deftly written that even in the end you were never sure which was which. It was about family and the road and show business and each character was fascinating, even when the hero was onstage. And Water for Elephants is about a kid who falls in love while working for the circus and then complains about everything in a nursing home."

So, how much is this dream worth to us?

_My_ plans for global domination were always pure exercises in strategy and whimsy, thank you _very_ much.  And one ex shared _her_ plans with me on our first date.  (It involved seizing control of shipping in the straits of Malacca.)  But, yeah, pretty much straight on.

I have no idea at all whether this is fair, but it's a glorious rant.

Well, that's one book I won't have to bother with.