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From: rose@sdcsvax.UUCP (Dan Rose)
Newsgroups: net.books
Subject: Re: Wu and Fabricant (actually Alexei Panshin)
Message-ID: <1162@sdcsvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 25-Oct-85 03:31:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcsvax.1162
Posted: Fri Oct 25 03:31:25 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 26-Oct-85 07:28:53 EDT
References: <392@bocklin.UUCP>
Reply-To: rose@sdcsvax.UUCP (Dan rose)
Distribution: net
Organization: EECS Dept. U.C. San Diego
Lines: 42
Summary: 

In article <392@bocklin.UUCP> Alan Wendt (wendt@bocklin.UUCP) writes:

>If you haven't read the Anthony Villiers series (by Alexei Panshin),
>drop the baby into the bath and go out right now and buy 'em.  You
>can clean things up later.

I couldn't agree less.  Probably my favorite SF book of all time is
_Rite Of Passage_ by Alexei Panshin, which won the Hugo AND Nebula
awards when it came out (ten or fifteen years ago).  For those of
you who haven't had the pleasure (I've read this book at least five
times), it's about the coming of age of a young girl, Mia Havero,
in a far-post-apocalyptic society in which technologically advanced
people live in "ships" which drift from colony planet to colony
planet exchanging knowledge for natural resources.  The ship society
requires that before becoming an adult, every thirteen-year-old
must survive a month on a planet.  To say more might spoil it, but
this book has something for everyone.  If you don't have one,
GET ONE AND READ IT RIGHT NOW!

With that for a preamble, I decided Panshin was the greatest writer
and searched for years to find anything else by him.  One day,
miracle of miracles, I came across three books:  _Masque World_,
_The Thurb Revolution_, and _Starwell_, which were supposed to
be a kind of James-Bond-in-space series with hero Anthony Villiers.
They were listed as being by Alexei and Cory Panshin.  I bought
ALL of them that day and read them in order.  They weren't just
disappointing; they were poorly written, extremely short (~150pp.
and in larger-than-average print), and in general seemed to be
the work of an amateur pulp SF writer.  I don't know who Cory
Panshin is -- son, I suspect -- but I bet he or she wrote 95%
of this and got Alexei to agree to add his name to the cover.
I thhink these were supposed to be funny, but to me they were just
kind of stupid:  campy and silly but not enough, or too much,
depending on what tone they were aiming for.

I guess this is the old problem of who finds what funny, but
my vote is a strong NO.  Stick with the masterpiece.


-- 
			Dan (not Broadway Danny) Rose
			rose@UCSD