[ExI] Fan of Sci-Fi? Psychologists Have You in Their Sights

[John Clark]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 2:12 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

* > I believe you meant 'fiction' -- not non-fiction.*
>

I did.

* > I believe comes down to, as I mentioned in another post, what's
> acceptable entertainment by some person or established taste. What's not is
> considered escapism.*
>

Somebody said drama is real life with all the boring parts edited out, the
only sort of novel that would not be escapism would be a novel about an
average day in an average man's average life; and I don't want to read a
book about that because even if I wanted such a slice of life for some
reason I would not need a book to get it, I could just talk to a random
stranger sitting next to me on the bus.


>
> * > By the way, I wouldn't make a hard line between stuff like _Finnegan's
> Wake_ (okay, I haven't read that,*


You are not alone, few have read all of Finnegans Wake, if you open the
book at random and read for 20 seconds you can see why. Joyce critic Lee
Spinks wrote that Finnegan's Wake "*has some claim to be the least read
major work of western literature*", and it's the only classic novel that I
can think of that was never popular in any culture in any age, it was
unread when it was published 80 years ago and it is still unread today. To
my mind it's greatest claim to fame is that it gave us the name "Quark" for
the subatomic particle that makes up protons and neutrons.

 John K Clark
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