Reprint: Scientists

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Angela Carter, C.P. Snow, Carter Scholz, Charles Dickens, Charles Harness, Clifford D. Simak, Connie Willis, Don DeLillo, Frank Herbert, Gregory Benford, Iain Pears, Ian McEwan, Ian Watson, John Banville, Jonathan Swift, Lucius Shepard, Michael Crichton, Nancy Kress, Pamela Zoline, Piers Anthony, Rafael Carter, Roger Zelazny, Russell McCormmach, Thomas More, William Boyd

Another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. This one first appeared in Vector 211, May-June 2000.

Reprint: Magic Realism

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Adolpho Bioy Casares, Alejo Carpentier, Angela Carter, Carlos Fuentes, Franz Roh, Gabriel Garcia Marques, H.G. Wells, Isabel Allende, John Campbell, John Crowley, John M. Ford, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Lucius Shepard, m john harrison, Mircea Eliade, Neil Gaiman, Peter Carey, Robert Graves, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Salvadore Allende

The recent death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez reminded me of this Cognitive Mapping piece I wrote for Vector 191 (January-February 1997). I’d probably view magic realism somewhat differently if I were to write this column now. But then, I’d probably do all of these columns very differently.

And the winner is

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Adam Roberts, Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard, Keith Jeffery, Martin Amis, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Richard Cobb

Shortly after reading Adam Roberts’s excellent post on awards, Maureen pointed out a passage in the current TLS. It is a review, by Keith Jeffery, of My Dear Hugh: Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and others edited by Tim Heald. Cobb was the chair of the Booker Prize in 1984, and, as Jeffery quotes him:

There he claimed to have done “a little NEGATIVE good” by keeping Martin Amis and Angela Carter off the shortlist, “and manoeuvred so that Ballard did not get the prize”.

My dilemma is that I am a great supporter of awards (given my history, you wouldn’t really expect much else), but I can’t help seeing problems with them.