Forum Overview :: Mischief Maker's Maker's Mark :: Re: Well ... that's just sci-fi, right?

[quote name="Zsenitan"][quote name="Worm"]We had to read Ender's Game (and Hominids and The Stranger and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) for my one joke class in college (Law and Literature) because the professor had an autistic child. Wait, I mean that we're all neurotypicals and his son wasn't. I'm not a real avid Sci-Fi reader, but what I have read is one form of mary sue or another, I just kind of take that as part of the genre. In Dune he falls from his perch of royalty to become king of the indigenous sand people and fulfill no more than three prophecies in the first book. Hominids is all about having a massive cock, super strength, and yet being perfectly peaceful and libertarian (Taurens? Anyone?). I'm just going to guess a ton of sci-fi is like that (also fantasy).[/quote] Please read Stanislaw Lem. Not just because he's the king forever, but because his self-insertions carry his faults as well as his fantasies - pages upon pages of brilliant, caustic, insensitive, deeply neurotic scientists and mathematicians whose successes are always curdling into tragedy. Even Pirx The Pilot plays with this trope, since it's always running at the fine edge of satire and homage. Further, Lem has written several rather catty essays which lambaste the entire sci fi genre for exactly the reasons you state here, among many others. He is the king and just thinking about the end of Fiasco makes me want to clone him. Also, you know, Philip K Dick's heroes are always Human with a capital 'frailty'. [/quote]