Some quite well known writers are extraordinarily mis-represented. I, as a reader, have sometimes been put off attempting an author for decades, solely to seek out, after I did attempt, that what you get is nothing like what you've got been warned about.
Typically this is often the reader's fault. With Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, I perhaps did my own misrepresenting. I assumed that the book would be steeped within the values of a bygone age and so "dated". Once I actually took the hassle to scan it I used to be struck instead by its timeless quality; it will never go out of date.
With the James Bond books I am not taking the blame. How was I to understand that regardless of all the accusations of sadism and casual violence levelled against the books, as a matter of truth Bond encompasses a basic aversion to killing in cold blood? He is aghast even at the thought of shooting the assassin Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun. And the ladies within the books, despite their stereotypical portrayals in film, are all well-drawn characters, definitely not all the same.
The most astonishing example of misrepresentation by critics which I've got ever return across, issues the master of horror, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937). Certainly there is a aspect of him that conforms to the image given out by the critics. Several of his tales are admittedly of the claustrophobic, disgusting kind of horror story; filled with ghoulish loathsomeness. However there's another aspect to him, and this aspect is completely ignored, therefore so much as I apprehend, by nearly all commentators - except his biographer L Sprague de Camp and the publisher and fan August Derleth. This alternative facet is that the science fictional side.
Lovecraft's output was meagre, nevertheless he was one among the best science fiction writers. Three of his longer tales are unsurpassed in their gift for evoking the awesome, threatening vistas of time and area: At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Out of Time and The Whisperer in Darkness.
Lovecraft's theme is that Earth is not primarily Man's world; there are alternative, far mightier races before us, and our hold on our world is more tenuous than we tend to think. We have a tendency to lead our snug little lives, unaware that our minds may be snatched from our bodies by Time-masters from the Triassic amount, or our brains surgically removed and taken out to Pluto and beyond; or that creatures lie dormant underneath the Antarctic ice-cap, which if wakened might destroy the world. Horror, to be sure, however liberating horror; horror that excites the imagination by way extending its range.
I must mention one alternative great Lovecraft tale, not precisely science fiction, however one that straddles the boundary between science fiction and fantasy. This can be The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The horror of being trapped in a very sinister seaport city, the gradual hints of unholy interbreeding with sea creatures, offers way to the various horror of mental alienage - that one would possibly get to like the idea of adjusting one's species. That's the bit that turns what would are a sensible story into a great one.
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