Sometimes the classics aren’t required reading
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Have you ever been assaulted by rabid fans pushing their favorite science fiction stories and novels like a drug dealer pushes heroin? Or when reading said classics do you feel like putting it down and saying “What was the point?”
It is these and many more memories which come to mind whenever I meet someone who also happens to be a science-fiction fan. After establishing our mutual interest in the genre we usually start bombarding each other with what we had read. This is then followed by the recommendations, and reproaches, of having, or not, read so and so who had written this and that. Finishing with assertions that you can’t be a real science fiction fan if you haven’t read X (Asimov, Heinlen, Bradbury, etc.).
Does it really have to be this way? Why can’t we talk about science fiction on the bleeding edge. Stories relevant to us now as opposed to classics which held relevance in the ’60’s or ’70’s? A beginning science fiction reader would find themselves mired in classics that hold nothing for the reader and may serve to alienate them from the genre. You know the books I’m talking about. For myself, I found The Forever War to be an abysmally boring and preachy book which made me question why I was writing science fiction at all if this was one of the best the genre had to offer.
In a recent blog post, writer Ian Sales also feels similarly. As a genre which is primarily concerned looking forward, why are we as readers and writers so eager to push fiction from the past? Shouldn’t we be recommending the latest and greatest? Evolutions and revolutions of themes we had read in those same classics?
As an author, I had begun to ask some of the same questions Ian had poised in his entry. Are these classic stories really stories or are they historical documents as Sales asserts? Looking back at some of the Foundation novels I’d read and loved when I was a kid, I can see things in it as a writer now that I hadn’t seen before; a mistake here an expository dump there. Writing errors which I would be taken for task by a critique partner or an editor if I had done the same in my own work.
But I believe Ian was right in the last sentence of his post:
Further, modern sf readers shouldn’t need to be aware of everything which has gone before, but modern sf writers certainly ought to.
As writers we do need to know what came before and build on it. But I think from now on when I do give my recommendations to other fans and readers, I’ll tell people who ask me to read more recent works so they can see the SF of today and not of yesterday.
3 comments
A true “classic,” by definition, is timeless. Thus we wouldn’t have to suffer guilt or force ourselves to read true classics.
I never read A. E. Van Vogt until John C. Wright (who I also had never read) wrote his Null-A sequel. Having discovered and enjoyed Wright’s blog, I decided I wanted to read this novel, so I started with some Van Vogt. Bad move. I can’t stand his writing. Definitely not a timeless classic.
What books do you think perhaps will turn out to be classics? I’d vote for Ender’s Game, though perhaps not the sequels. Any others come to mind?
Interesting point. I wonder if our particular literary passions are linked to the individuality of our experience, rather than the debatable “classic” nature of the work. An old favourite of mine, The Chrysalids, struck a chord with me at a young age and I’ve recommended it to people for years. I recently read it, eyes a little less misty than usual, and finally grasped that while it meant something to me, it very likely would appear strange to those I was recommending it to.
I agree though that true classics don’t change. They are indeed timeless. Provided of course that modern technology doesn’t so far outstrip the contents of the book and render them obsolete or archaic.
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Ender’s Game would be a great example of a new classic. But I would also recommend Peter F. Hamilton’s Reality Dysfunction series as well as Tobias Buckell’s Crystal Rain as great examples of recent science fiction from the 90’s onward.
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