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Or you'll like what you fine when you thaw out? Corpsicles in Sci Fi

I specifically remember reading Larry Niven's "Rammer."

Cheers,
Dave

http://www.jessesword.com/sf/.

I'm going to disagree with you too, and it's not just because you're getting older--I've been reading SF for nearly four decades myself, and I think the average quality of SF has been improving my whole life. Of course, you have to keep Sturgeon's Law in mind.

There is one qualification I'll add: when I was young, fantasy was even more of a ghetto than Sf, and today the situation seems somewhat reversed. A lot more good new writers seem to go into fantasy these days, since it's a little more prestigious, which is too bad because I much prefer Sf in general. The flip side of this is that a lot more bad writers go into fantasy, so the shelves at the local bookstore are covered with dreck.

But really, the problem is simple. Sf (and fantasy) are both much more popular (and acceptable) than they were twenty or thirty years ago. Which means that there's a lot more people writing it. Which means there's a lot more third-rate crap being churned out, and it can be hard to find the gems. That doesn't mean they're not there--in fact, there's more high-quality Sf (and, yes, fantasy) than ever these days--but because of Sturgeon's law, there's so much more crap that it is harder than ever to find the good stuff. Which is probably why you think that there isn't as much good stuff any more.

Me, I haunt the awards-nominees lists to try to ferret out new authors worth reading, and I discover wonderful new authors that way just about every year. Not all award-nominated authors are good, but there's a much higher percentage of good ones than you'll find just randomly browsing the shelves at your local bookstore. I also have a couple of first-rate specialty Sf/Fantasy bookshops nearby where I can get good recommendations. If you don't have that, you can at least check out some of the better review sites: I like SFSite (which I found recommended in one of the Best SF of the Year anthologies a few years back), and SF Revu (which I discovered when it was nominated for a Hugo at a Worldcon I attended).

Quite honestly, the overall quality and especially the peak quality of Sf has improved so much over the last twenty years that I frequently find it hard to stomach some of the old classics I used to love.

Yup. Some further details for anyone who doesn't know:

Ursula K. Le Guin coined the term "ansible"; it first appeared in her novel Rocannon's World in 1966.

James Blish used a similar (but not identical) device, called the Dirac transmitter; that term first appeared in his 1957 story "Beep."

E. E. "Doc" Smith had a faster-than-light communications device called the "ultraphone" in his Skylark of Valeron in 1934. I'm pretty sure there were a variety of FTL communications devices in pulp science fiction.

But yeah, Le Guin was the originator of the term "ansible." Card and others got the term from her.

I'm not going to try to apply the "hack" label to Heinlein. But I do know the man hated pretense, and he certainly would have sneered at anybody who described his work with pretentious labels like "speculative fiction".

"Speculative fiction (I prefer that term to science fiction)..."
-R. A. Heinlein

With the exception of some guy in 1889 (it didn't catch on), that prick was Heinlein himself.

First use of various words in Sci Fi:

http://www.jessesword.com/sf/home

"I knew every chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the `Cyberspace Seven', but I'd rebuilt it so many times that you'd have had a hard time finding a square millimetre of factory circuitry in all that silicon."

Clarke's First Law applies.

Hmm... How long can a word be in generic use before someone can claim ownership? It's not even as if DC or Marvel even had the first use of the word...

Except they didn't coin the term. Earliest cite is 1942, Supersnipe Comics.

I repeat:

I refer you to Sturgeon's Law(more accurately called Sturgeon's Revelation).

I don't get why so many people seem to think that endless sequels are some phenomenon that Hollywood recently invented.

Lord of the Rings was a sequel that Tolkien was encouraged to write to cash in on the success of The Hobbit.
Ditto Huckleberry Finn as a sequel to Tom Sawyer.
Ditto Bride of Frankenstein as a sequel to Frankenstein.

All of these are pretty widely considered to be superior to their originals.

Then there are the endless Pink Panther series, the "Thin Man" movies, the multiple history plays by Shakespeare, various sequels built into the books of the Hebrew Bible, and even the Aeneid and the Odyssey, both of which are sequels to the Iliad.

Sure, most sequels don't approach the level of artistry of many of the above. But a sequel per se, even one motivated by the desire to cash in on the original, is not a priori a bad thing. The judgment cannot be made till after the sequel is made.

I refer you to Sturgeon's Law (more accurately called Sturgeon's Revelation).

I bet poor old Shirl was wishing for a skyhook to come along in his last moments ...

*g* it's called planet buster, download here.

Please note that the OED is only able to include quotes from dateable printed sources, typically books and magazines, but also physical copies of movie scripts, dated programs from cons, fanzines, unpublished papers, etc. However, Web pages, E-books, Usenet posts, movies themselves, and similar sources can not be quoted directly. Web pages may have useful historical information that will allow us to track down print examples, or a prominent use in a movie may lead us to the script, a novelization, or the like, but we ask in general that you do not send in examples from this kind of source.

Submitting Science Fiction Citations to the OED:

Please note that the OED is only able to include quotes from dateable printed sources, typically books and magazines, but also physical copies of movie scripts, dated programs from cons, fanzines, unpublished papers, etc. However, Web pages, E-books, and movies themselves can not be quoted directly. [...] we ask in general that you do not send in examples from this kind of source.

So, unless you have a physical copy - e.g. a game manual, story booklet, etc. - OED won't accept it.

I've been helping to research science fiction terms like 'little green men' for the OED, and I can only gasp and drool and wait for UCalgary's army of cataloging librarians to make the collection accessible to the public.

This will be a great source of information on how and when science fiction words came into use in English, and if I had a sabbatical-type job, I'd have just found what I wanted to do with my next sabbatical.

We still need help, by the way, so please help the Oxford English Dictionary learn more about science fiction and fandom.