The Manifesto

This is just the manifesto of what The Bodhisattva is intended for. First and foremost, I am a avid reader of speculative fiction, including Fantasy, Science Fiction, and works of Horror. I will use this blog to offer my thoughts on the genre news, and happening, and books I read. It is however my personal journal as well, thus it will include any other thing I want, which I don't apolgozie for. What defines work in some of subgenres is often a topic of debate there is also present, many schools of thought regarding the gerne, as can be shown by the various, and numerous movements among authors, and even among the fanbase themselves. So in esesnce this will be an always expanding posts of various quotes I see that mirror my own thoughts, and are just interesting. To begin with, I have to quote Theodore Sturgeon. His revelation, which became Sturgeon's Law, which at first stated "'Nothing is always absolutely so", was extended in this proclamation: "I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of sf is crud."The Revelation: Ninety percent of everything is crud. "Corallary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and if is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere. "Corallary 2: The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field." - Theodore Sturgeon "What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish". - Thomas Wolfe "The multitude of books is making us ignorant". - Voltaire "I don't have a sense of a so-called ideal reader and certainly not of a readership, that terrific entity. I write for the page". -Don DeLillo "Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I'm 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I've seen the study of literature debased. There's very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. My research assistant came to me two years ago saying she'd been in a seminar in which the teacher spent two hours saying that Walt Whitman was a racist. This isn't even good nonsense. It's insufferable." - Harold Bloom "I have always imagined that Paradise would be a kind of library". - Jorge Luis Borges "Don't say the old lady screamed -- bring her on and let her scream". - Mark Twain "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them". - Flannery O'Connor "The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can't help it". - Leo Rosten "I don't mind someone telling me that they think a book is shallow if they can substantiate that argument by pointing out its flaws. But they have to read the book at a certain fucking level to be able to tell me that those flaws are real flaws and not just the blind spot caused in this particular reader by the crayon jammed up their nostril and pressing into their forebrain. If it just comes down to me saying this book is gnarly and interesting for X, Y and Z reasons, and the answer is that I'm "reading too much into it", well then, mes amigos, that's the answer of a mindless dweeb who projects their own intellectual inadequacies onto others, plastering over their own lazy vapidity with a self-serving delusion that nothing is really beyond their understanding, and if it appears to be so why then that must be an illusion. And I say unto them, brothers and sisters: You are the weakest link. Goodbye" - Hal Duncan "I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters". - Frank Lloyd Wright "The commercial genre which has developed from Tolkien is probably the most dismaying effect of all. I grew up in a world where Joyce was considered to be the best Anglophone writer of the 20th century. I happen to believe that Faulkner is better, while others would pick Conrad, say. Thomas Mann is an exemplary giant of moral, mythic fiction. But to introduce Tolkien's fantasy into such a debate is a sad comment on our standards and our ambitions. Is it a sign of our dumber times that Lord of the Rings can replace Ulysses as the exemplary book of its century? Some of the writers who most slavishly imitate him seem to be using English as a rather inexpertly-learned second language. So many of them are unbelievably bad that they defy description and are scarcely worth listing individually. Terry Pratchett once remarked that all his readers were called Kevin. He is lucky in that he appears to be the only Terry in fantasy land who is able to write a decent complex sentence. That such writersalso depend upon recycling the plots of their literary superiors and are rewarded for this bland repetition isn't surprising in a world of sensation movies and manufactured pop bands. That they are rewarded with the lavishlifestyles of the most successful whores is also unsurprising. To pretend that this addictive cabbage is anything more than the worst sort of pulp historical romance or western is, however, a depressing sign of our intellectual decline and our free-falling academic standards." - Michael Moorcock "The "golden age" of Campbellian science fiction is one of the worst things that ever happened to the genre. It's right up there with Star Trek and Star Wars as a cataclysm, its after-effects still causing pervasive damage, killing off transgressive fictioneers with sneers of demented nostalgia. In the resulting post-apocalyptic landscape, Campbellian SF rules despotically as the exemplar against which all new SF must be measured." - Claude Lalumière "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say". - Italo Calvino "The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation". - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "I love fantasy because the world is a place of great beauty and horror, and fantasy is the only way I can fully express what I know about this contradiction. Fantasy, and world-building, then, is not escapist for me--or, I imagine, for other world creators. Instead, it's about realistic people. It's about the fact that this place we live in is full of unexpected marvels and things that are strange and alien even if we don't always realize it". - Jeff VanderMeer "I write for the same reason I breathe -- because if I didn't, I would die". - Isaac Asimov "A corollary (supply-side this time) can be found in the current state of fantasy: bad fantasy drives out good. Writers aren't stupid. They can see what sells. Derivative hacks get the large contracts, promotions and pushes for their series work, while truly original, ground-breaking, stand-alone novels either languish in obscurity or don't get published at all. It's a rare writer that's strong enough to swim against such tides. Many stop writing fantasy altogether, while weaker writers (or those with bills to pay) give in and join the herd. Never underestimate the power of avoiding a day job." - Lawrence Person "Fantasy writing is no more inherently inessential than any other variety, and no more inherently escapist, either. What makes writing escapist is not a matter of whether or not it involves magic but whether or not it involves something meaningful. Fantasy writing is if anything increasingly relevant because it involves building and representing the whole world, fantasy worlds, sci-fi worlds, hidden gnostic horror worlds. This proliferation of worlds seems to me to be bound up with the extent to which the world has become immersed in trademarked representation." -Michael Cisco "I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape. After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes. You should have a more complicated relationship with fiction than simple entrancement. If you read for escape you will never try to change your life, or anyone else's. It's a politically barren act, if nothing else. The overuse of imaginative fiction enables people to avoid the knowledge that they are actually alive." - M. John Harrison "Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent".- Ernest Hemingway "So why is SFF as a literary genre doomed to failure? Quite simply, it’s the Fans. If you’ve been to a convention lately, you’ve seen it. Fandom runs amok; but it’s the wrong kind of fandom. The majority of convention goers could give a shit about literary SFF. They’re out to claim allegiance to whatever skiffy project has caught their fancies, be it Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape or what-have-you. Fandom has evolved so radically, most SFF writers, editors and publishers can’t even comprehend them, much less appeal to them. " - Gabe Chouinard "Our Sci-Fi slut mother is a crack whore who gives blowjobs for ten dollars a pop. That’s what genre fiction does. That’s what pulp fiction does. It gets down on its knees, unzips your fly and uses all the sensual skills of its slick tongue to give you a few minutes of loveless but ecstatic pleasure". - Hal Duncan "Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood". - Friedrich Nietzsche "In with that leaden and literal style so perfectly abhorrent to the literary book buyer. The golden mean of an SF jacket since 1976 looks, well, exactly like the original poster for Star Wars. Men of the future were once again thinking with their swords - excuse me, light sabers. This passive sellout would make more sense if the typical writer of literary SF had actually made any money out of it. Instead, the act is still too often rewarded with wages resembling those of a poet, an untenured poet, that is. " - Jonathan Lethem "But given that the pleasure of fantasy is supposed to be in its limitless creativity, why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies?" - China Mieville "Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers." - T. S. Eliot "What’s most striking about these authors is that I can identify each one simply by reading a piece of their fiction without their name attached to it. This is a little like being blindfolded and knowing the sound of your mother’s voice, or the way your father coughs. No one else laughs like your best friend does. You can pick her laughter out of a room full of laughing strangers. But I can’t really tell the difference between some writers and others. These are the writers whose sentences are very sturdy, very normal, very efficient and emotionally safe. These are the writers who make competent narratives that are easily forgettable. I’d name a few, but I’ve already forgotten them". - Chris Barzak "Too many writers and readers prefer their literature spoon-fed to them, in portions similar to the last, with the same smells and colors, served to them on the same worn dishes, and accompanied by the same polite conversation" - Jeff VanderMeer "Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that". - Pearl S. Buck "The sad fact is, we cannot ignore commercial genre work. Some people would like to; they maintain that they are not affected by the cookie-cutter blobberies that others call 'novels'. I envy their views. Ignorance is, after all, bliss. I cannot see it that way; every time I try to look past commercial genre work, my view is blocked by an appalling stack of Terry Goodkind novels roughly the size (and weight) of Mt. McKinley. They say you can't see the forest for the trees; well, you can't see around a stack of Goodkind novels either. Commercial genre work is the antithesis of true speculative fiction. It is the shadow of Moby Dick floating beneath the waters, ready to swallow the industry like so much plankton." - Gabe Chouinard "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them." - Mark Twain Bodhisattva Science Fiction & Fantasy Reviews and Interviews