Whilst persisting in enjoying relatively well-known status or even in being respected quite a lot for it amongst many?

Isaac Asimov plays Jeffrey Archer, for me.

Douglas Adams and J R R Tolkien.

Douglas Adams? Blimey O'Reilly.

Good call on hobbit-guy, though.

Tolkien shouldn't be graded on his prose, it's about the wondrous evocative imagination of it all, you Scrooge.

I used to be able to do that, but I've got really oversensitive: if the prose is shit I can't read it. Fingernails on a blackboard. Mrs E thinks it's daft as well.

BrunoMaggiore wrote:

QUOTE:
Tolkien shouldn't be graded on his prose, it's about the wondrous evocative imagination of it all, you Scrooge.

Well, yeah, exactly. Which is why I forgive him his sometimes dreadful prose.

As for DNA, it's a similar deal; his ideas and jokes are good enough (usually ... we except Mostly Charmless) to let you forget he couldn't actually write for toffee.

I find Peter Ackroyd affected to the point of total distraction. It's like he's waving a mauve cravat in your face with every sentence. His London book is doubtless great, content-wise, but I simply can't past the chokingly heavy scent of his prose.

I really disagree with that.

With Tiny, that is.

Robert Tressell is a great writer but truly terrible at writing.

Archer is right up there. I've never read Asimov, so he'll have to play off not with another writer, but a school writers; those who used to do prose translations of Greek plays. They squared a circle by being neither free nor literal.

Wyatt Earp wrote:

QUOTE:
With Tiny, that is.

Fair enough. One man's ceiling, and all that. But I always feel DNA was really a sketch writer, and had real trouble hanging his sketches together into anything coherent. Especially in book form; the books are much weaker all round than the radio scripts. IMHO.

And two disagreements: fisrt, I reckon Adams was a brilliant writer - though it must be admitted that his standard declined at a pretty much consistent rate.

And second, I don't think Tolkein had much imagination at all. To me, most fantasy and science fiction writing suffers from the same laziness and lack of imagination: the writer isn't constrained by any real rules and so can just allow anything to happen - usually just for the sake of spectacle - without really having to justify it or properly work it through. Very unsatisfactory to this reader.

WE- fair enough as long as your honed apparatus doesn't then lead you to deprive any little ones of the defining imaginative journey of their fragile young lives.

Maybe children's authors should be exempted. I thought Douglas Adams was a scream when I was 12 but don't know if I'd revisit him as a jaded adult.

Oh, I agree that the structure is chaotic as fuck.