GoodReads Review: Space

[bobquasit]

Space by James A. Michener


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I'd never read any Michener before. For some reason I thought he was supposed to be a brilliant writer, one of the giants of American literature.

My mistake! Space was surprisingly dull, and not at all well-written. Simply put, it plodded. It's a fictionalized story of the space program, with some references to some actual astronauts thrown in - plus a fictionalized US state, which was one of two things which stuck in my memory from the book.

The other thing was a rather nasty assessment of golden age science fiction writers, all of whom (I'm sorry to say) were more talented writers than Mr. Michener.

Space had the feel of one of those potboilers that sits on the New York Times best-seller list for many weeks...something written for the lowest common denominator. It wasn't awful, mind you, just dull and awkward. Shogun, which I'd put in the same general class of "giant best-sellers" is far better written than Space.

View all my reviews >>

Comments

[klyfix.livejournal.com]

Quick thoughts based from my very distant memories of when the novel first came out, amongst other things: When a "Real Writer" does SF there is an assumption/implication that they can do it better than the people who've been toiling in the SF Ghetto for years. The reality is, well, not so much.

And of course there's perhaps the notion that if it isn't written by an SF writer it isn't "SF" but "Literature."

Remember the one season show from maybe twenty years ago, Earth 2? The creators of that prided themselves at being ignorant of SF (I think one of them hadn't even seen Star Trek) and that because of this they would be able to do SFTV in a new and better way. In reality, they didn't cover new territory and made mistakes that the average SF writer would not have made.