17 Epic Burns Given to Classic SF/F Authors

“How to read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.”
~Harold Bloom on J.K. Rowling
“He would not blow his nose without moralising on the conditions in the handkerchief industry.”
~Cyril Connolly on George Orwell
“Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people… The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”
~Stephen King on Stephenie Meyer
“An unmanly sort of man whose love-life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.”
~W. H. Auden on Edgar Allan Poe
“An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”
~Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe
“A monster, gibbering, shrieking, and gnashing imprecations against mankind.”
~William Makepeace Thackeray on Jonathan Swift

“Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.”
~Samuel Johnson on John Milton
“Huxley, who is perhaps one of those people who have to perpetrate thirty bad novels before producing a good one, has a certain natural—but little developed—aptitude for seriousness. Unfortunately, this aptitude is hampered by a talent for the rapid assimilation of all that isn’t essential.”
~T.S. Eliot on Aldous Huxley
“Brave New World was a great disappointment to me. A writer of the standing of Aldous Huxley has no right to betray the future as he did in that book. When thinking about the future, people seem to overlook the logical progress in education, in architecture, and science.”
~H.G. Wells on Aldous Huxley
“All raw, uncooked, protesting.”
~Virginia Woolf on Aldous Huxley

“The stupid person’s idea of the clever person.”
~Elizabeth Bowen on (yes, people loved to hate this guy) Aldous Huxley
“Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can’t ignore it, so don’t even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there’s a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien’s clichés—elves ‘n’ dwarfs ‘n’ magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was ‘consolation,’ thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.”
~China Miéville on J.R.R. Tolkien
“Tolkien is much closer to Lewis than Williams, though markedly less snide and unpleasant.”
~China Miéville, on how C.S. Lewis is even worse
“The cheap, driveling non-entity!”
~Ayn Rand, writing in the margins of a C.S. Lewis book

“Simply padded, occasionally with startlingly ingenious gimmickry… often with coruscating cascades of verbal brilliance, [but] too often merely with words.”
~ The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
“Nothing but a pack of lies.”
~Damon Runyon on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
“[W]e saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my life.”
~Samuel Pepys on William Shakespeare