"Poking the Discourse Bear Re: 'Classic' Science Fiction"

[kane_magus]

I present this post from John Scalzi with ambivalence. I totally get where he is coming from (he is, himself, a modern writer of science fiction, after all), and, yes, some of the "classic" science fiction is very dry, very much a product of its time and... also rather problematic (like the tiny bits of Heinlein I've skimmed when my sister would have one of his novels sitting on the hamper in the bathroom... whoof). I also don't give a shit at all about the so-called canon of science fiction, for good or for ill. In any case, I'd easily recommend John Scalzi's stuff itself, among other stuff, before I'd recommend most any of that older stuff, what I've read of it.

But at the same time, it's like... if the person on Reddit had been asking for fantasy rather than science fiction, would it be okay, too, to castigate people for recommending, say, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe or The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or Alice's Adventures in Wonderland? I don't know. Maybe? *shrug* I don't think that anyone must read Narnia or Oz or Wonderland or whatever. But, with that said, I also don't think that anyone suggesting them should be told to "for fuck's sake sit this question out," or whatever, either, just because those books are hella old and newer fantasy has been written since.

A bit of a tangent, and it's not science fiction or fantasy, but I recently read Jane Eyre for the first time, mainly because I'd never read it before and I just wanted to and I'd had it on my Kindle for years now without having touched it. I liked it quite a lot. There were parts I didn't care for (like some of Rochester's antics [even aside from his Big Secret™] and the whole thing with St. John trying to convince Jane to be his missionary wife), but on the whole it was good. It still holds up, for the most part. Wuthering Heights, on the other hand... maybe not so much. Though, to be fair, I'm only about halfway through that one so far, so... maybe I'll have a better opinion of it by the time I finish it? *shrug* Possible, but so far, pretty much every character in that book, dead or alive, is a vile piece of shit, with the possible exception of the POV character acting as the framing device to whom the history of the people living at the titular house is being told, and even he's kind of dumb, too. I'd probably recommend Jane Eyre, but maybe not Wuthering Heights, at least not based on what I've read of it to this point.

Comments

[goldpseudo]

While I get what Scalzi is saying here, I think it's unnecessarily dismissive of sci-fi readers who have grown with the medium. Like, I've read a fair bit of modern science fiction, enjoyed most of it, but frankly I would never recommend something like Three Body Problem to a ten-year-old; I'm a grown-ass man, and the sci-fi that I read now doesn't tend to be the sci-fi that's targetted towards children. If I'm asked to recommend something to a child, I'm gonna be thinking of stuff I enjoyed as a child.

That said — pending a re-read with adult eyes as Scalzi wisely recommends — I'd probably point any prospective readers towards Ender's Game. I reckon it has aged rather well (even if OSC himself has not).

[kane_magus]

Yeah, say what you will about Card (he had a column in a local birdcage liner that is, thankfully, no longer actually printed and is only available online now, so I would occasionally see his spew, which was more than I ever cared to), Ender's Game is still pretty good. Granted, it's been over 18 years since I last read it (for the first time, at the time), but I don't recall anything that 2007 me found to be too glaringly bad. I still have yet to read anything past that, though. I keep hearing that the sequels that follow Ender himself are... not so good, but that the one about Bean, Ender's Shadow, is pretty okay, since it's basically a retelling of Game, and the ones that came after that following that thread.

For me, when I think of "old science fiction," I think of really old stuff like H.G. Wells (War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, etc.) or any number of Jules Verne novels and such, or even stuff like Dracula or Frankenstein, rather than Heinlein or Lovecraft or whoever. That said, it's been who knows how long since I've read any Wells or Verne, so I have no idea if there are any problems with them (aside from shoddy English translations, in Verne's case). I know Dracula has a problem with trying to convey "low-class" vernacular, which, if not necessarily "problematic," is simply difficult to read and understand, period. (Which is also a problem I have with Wuthering Heights at the moment, every time that fuckhead Joseph opens his goddamned mouth. At least with Jane Eyre, whenever Adele would spout some gratuitous French, I could at least have my Kindle actually auto-translate that, or else that would have been pretty aggravating, too.)

And yeah, I would count Dracula as much in the realm of science fiction as fantasy, given that Van Helsing is talking about "modern science" stuff like blood transfusions and the like. (And that's why I liked The Dracula Tape, by Frank Saberhagen, which retold Dracula from Dracula's point of view. One of the things it had was Dracula calling Van Helsing a moron because he didn't have a clue about blood types and was just doing transfusions on Lucy willy-nilly. To be fair to Stoker, blood types weren't discovered until a few years after Dracula was published, but still.)

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I wound up posting a whole discussion on my blog so as not to overwhelm comments here. Thanks for pointing to the Scalzi post.

OY to the exponent VEY!

[dialecticdreamer]

Scalzi has a problem. His attitude, loosely paraphrased as, "the old stuff isn't worth bothering with; go read new stuff" really, totally ticked me off.

The Tom Swift series of books were published before my mother was born, largely, yet I still suggested that my older son and I read the one that inspired the term "taser" for an electrical self-defense weapon.

We got derailed, ranting and sniping over all kinds of -isms that rose like miasma from every page.

But that was the POINT.

It's nice to know where the word "taser" originated, but it's even better to know how much has changed in the day-to-day world, and reading what was considered acceptable storytelling is a fairly safe way to point out how WIDELY our societies and subcultures have diverged.

I suggested "The Secret Garden" to a friend's daughter when she was six, because she could fly through the pages with ease, AND because it brought up topics that I was willing to discuss with her, as her interests led.

Scalzi has missed this point entirely. Reading CAN be a social activity. It can spark discussions that take hours to wind through. That's one of the best parts of reading with kids, or well-organized book clubs.

Harry Potter was being released in print as my boys were growing up. The oldest was reading at high school level years before he would've been eligible for that mythical Hogwarts letter, and he won an argument to be able to borrow the first book from the library.

We read it together.

We talked about the things that were unfair, or seemed unfair, what the differences might be, and, increasingly, how little actually changed in the world, even as the main characters grew up.

We talked about the difference between the author and their work. We talked about symbolism, representation, lies of omission, political structures, all kinds of other -isms, too.

Sometimes, suggesting a book is a way to hold out a hand.

I'm going to post this reply over on Ysabetwordsmith's thread, too, to help encourage discussion.

Re: OY to the exponent VEY!

[kane_magus]

My main problem with Scalzi's stance in his current post is that while he (thinks he) is correctly railing against gatekeepers who try to say that the so-called "canon" must be read, and that if you don't read it, you can't consider yourself a true connoisseur of science fiction, Scalzi seems to be going beyond that now and is just doing the exact same thing as them, except in the opposite direction. He's being just as belligerent in his own way as he perceives the ones he's railing against to be. He's gatekeeping just as much as he claims the others are, if not even more so. In this particular case, he's literally telling people that they should sit down and shut up "for fuck's sake," merely for making recommendations (in a Reddit thread that was specifically asking for recommendations), simply because he doesn't agree with said recommendations.

I think he made his point a little better in that previous post that he referenced in the current one, which was more along the lines of "read the classics if you want, but don't feel like you have to read them, and don't let anyone try to force or guilt you into reading them, simply because they are 'the classics.'" In the latest post, though, he sounds like he's just saying to avoid old science fiction altogether because it's inherently bad, or whatever, when I think what he's really trying (poorly, in this case) to say is that "classic" science fiction is not the be-all, end-all of science fiction that some, ostensibly, would have it to be.

As he said in that older post:

Make the work and writers stand or fall on their own merits, to the modern writers and readers comprising who the science fiction field is today.

You know what will happen? Some works and writers will rise, some will fall, some will be rediscovered and some will be consigned to the archives, possibly forever. No canon, just a field forever in conversation with itself, choosing its conversational partners from its past rather than having them assigned from a list.

Because, again: that’s what’s actually happening. We might as well own up to it.

Personally, I say people can read whatever the hell they want and also can recommend (or recommend against) whatever the hell they want. If another doesn't agree with said recommendations, they're fully free to state that, too, and give their reasons why or why not. However, both sides (i.e. John Scalzi and whatever nebulous "they" that John Scalzi is ranting against) need to realize that they're not the sole arbiters of what is or is not "worth reading," and telling one side or the other to "for fuck's sake... sit this question out" isn't a good look at all.

Re: OY to the exponent VEY!

[dialecticdreamer]

Opinions on a particular work can change over time. Not just culturally, but as an individual reflecting and re-reading. A good example for me is "A Wrinkle in Time," which was published years before I was born, enraptured me when I was eight. When I was twelve, I identified even more strongly with Meg, but at twenty-two, I thought more about the characters sitting off screen, like the principal who tried to help Calvin in a clumsy way, or the gossipy postmistress. I thought about what they said and did to affect the central characters. At thirty, I thought about risk versus gain, and the assumption that if the adults haven't solved a problem yet, then a teenager (or group) with GUMPTION could succeed where everyone else failed.

And so on.

Scalzi's suggestion implies that there is NO merit in picking among books old enough to drive, or run for President, or collect Social Security. If books which are twice as old as our country are still considered an important part of our social fabric, who the heck does he think he is to throw verbal abuse at people who like those books?

It's his casual verbal violence that makes me less willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, or read his words (I did read the original article before commenting; that's only fair).

It's his arrogance and dismissiveness that make me want to clap back.

But those same qualities make me feel that my effort is better put to use here, discussing alternatives.

Back when my boys were in the early years of elementary school, they were DIE-HARD Star Wars fans. So, we talked about Campbell's hero's journey, discussing archetypes and plot beats. I put in Alexander Nevsky, and let me tell you, I would've had an easier time buying it overseas and having it shipped, than I did finding it at a video store. We bought a copy of Kurasawa's Seven Samurai, and played "Skin, I mean Save, the Cat" picking apart every detail between it and Star Wars.

Yet, every single thing that I cited illustrating that period of about six months' interest is older than they are, by decades. Seven Samurai is older than I am, and Alexander Nevsky is older than my mother.

They are links, connecting the present to ideas and foci.

They are stepping stones, though it's hard to see much detail about where the path we're building will lead.