James "Kibo" Parry (k
...@world.std.com) wrote:
> I can think of several sci-fi novels that are worse than "Attack of the
> Rockoids" (even ones with real covers printed in color and everything)
T Nielsen Hayden (t
...@panix.com) wrote:
> Let me also recommend =Black Body= by H. C. Turk, published in a
> beautiful hardcover edition by Villard (a respectable trade house).
> =Black Body= has a word of mouth reputation among combat-hardened
> slush-reading editors as a singularly awful book, off the scale of
> normal judgement.
Jonathan W Hendry (jhen
...@ux1.depaul.edu) wrote:
T Nielsen Hayden (t
...@panix.com) wrote:
> No one knows. Don D'Ammassa said he liked it. Perhaps it has some
> inscrutable appeal to a tiny fraction of the reading population, and the
> editor who bought the book happened to be one of them.
I shall restate the theory which will someday win me The Nobel Prize For
Understanding Science Fiction Fans Or Any Other Kind Of Fan For That Matter.
Kibo's Law Of Fandom says, in plain English:
The fewer fans there are who like something,
the more those fans will like it (to compensate.)
Thus, we all know that there are a lot of people running around playing
dress-up at "Star Trek" conventions. But there are plenty of people who
like "Star Trek". Now thing about fans of "NBC's seaQuest DSV". There
are maybe a hundred of them. And at this very moment they're all running
around shouting "LA LA LA LA! I ARE A TALKING DOLPHIN!" And somewhere
there are two or three people who liked Year Two ("NBC's seaQuest") better
than Year One ("NBC's seaQuest DSV") or Year Three ("NBC's seaQuest 2032").
Those people like Year Two A LOT.
Relative unpopularity breeds obsession.
This theory explains a lot of things. In fact, it explains everything
in all facets of human behavior. What personal preferences were
previously puzzling are now perfectly predictable. (Although still creepy.)
Billions of people enjoy the taste of strawberries. Because they are
good, lots of people like them. Because lots of people like them, they
don't need to go around advertising that. You don't hear about people
going ape over strawberries. However, almost nobody likes durians.
But among the people who do like durians, there are sad stories of people
whose lives have been destroyed by their addiction to the world's worst-
tasting, most-expensive fruit-like sticky, spiky, stinky object.
Most people like dogs. They don't act weird or anything. (The people,
not the dogs.) Many people like cats. A few of them get a tad catty
about cats. A few people have ferrets. They talk about ferrets to
their ferret friends and buy ferret costumes for their ferret pets
while living the ferret lifestyle. About a dozen people own pet centipedes.
And you just know that they avoid bathing because that would cut into
the amount of time they could spend staring at their centipede sitting there.
Think of this sliding scale:
Windows -> Windows NT -> Mac OS -> Linux -> OS/2 -> AmigaDOS
...and the increasing degree of screaming geekdom of as the size of the
community shrinks inexorably towards a single nerd whose life revolves
around being the only guy anywhere who likes The Michigan Terminal System.
Because someone, somewhere, has to like anything. And if he's the only
one, he is indeed Very Special.
-- K.
I like orange traffic cones.
