I wonder if it's that it's not Olden Days -- when e.g. Jane (who is seven) reads All-of-a-Kind Family, she understands that this is from Olden Days and therefore attitudes are not those of today. But when stuff set in 2100 bears curiously retrograde attitudes, it doesn't work?
Also, let's be frank--a bunch of those people, many of whom I am quite fond of, couldn't write a page of prose if literary critics were preparing put them to death via the crylon vibrations of the swift-running Bryllis.
Or perhaps all kids are cruddy. Get off my lawn!
I don't think it's the prose -- it was super clunky when it was published and readers managed to get past it. I doubt today's kids are fussier on that front than kids fifty years ago.
But the future sounding like the past could definitely be it.
I don't know if this is an issue with any of the specific stories on the blog, but there's also an issue where old SF was consistently wrong about what's a hard problem. I can think of more than one story with FTL travel where videoconferencing is an exciting big deal. Or cheap and simple robots who can walk and see and manipulate objects contrasted with big expensive computers to do mathematical calculations. That sort of thing gets distracting.
I doubt today's kids are fussier on that front than kids fifty years ago.
I'm not sure about that. For the first review that I clicked on several people mentioned reading it on a computer screen, and I think the expectations for digital prose may be different than the expectations created by the old paperbacks*.
It's not that kids these days expect better prose, but they may be expecting something different.
* I know that, in my own childhood, the degree of yellowing on a book immediately told me something about the era, and was part of the experience.
Maybe the prose only scans well when your brain has significant amounts of lead residue.
Not only are the stories (usually) set in the future, the genre's rhetoric often made a big deal of being forward-looking, adventurous, accepting of change in a way that regular literature wasn't (even if it wasn't literally predictive). Works that congratulate themselves for that attitude come off really badly when the social attitudes displayed in them still seem stodgy and old.
With some of the stories (such as Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?", I noticed that what bothers them is the kind of puzzle-story exposition that forces the reader to spend a lot of effort figuring out what the setting of the story really is.
In classic SF, that sort of puzzle is a large part of the appeal of the genre. It's sometimes abused--there's what Jay O'Connell calls "The Lobster Story" or the Turkey City Lexicon calls "The Jar of Tang", in which the shocking twist ending is that the vaguely described protagonists turn out to have been lobsters or something all along, and that's the whole story, there isn't anything else.
But done well, trusting the reader to puzzle out the details of the setting makes the reader feel smart. At least if they are old SF readers. But I get the impression that young readers today feel that the story is simply wasting their time with these tricks. Or it might simply come across as a means of obnoxious in-group signaling--if you don't get this, you might not be cut out to read this story!
Mara uses "in the 1980s" as basically equivalent to "on the veldt" and so I've wondered what 1984 would feel like in the unimaginable future-past even though it wasn't weird to me to read it about when I was/n't 4. (She still can't handle narrative tension so we mostly read very old books, but not a lot of fantastical ones, though she made it through the first 45 minutes or so of the Wonder Woman movie so I guess there's progress.)
I was trying to think about what the best introductory works would be, and there's some tension between "best examples of the genre of pre-1980 SF" and "best introductions."
I wonder if they would do better with things which were more obviously self-aware.Would they enjoy the Stainless Steel Rat series? (probably not, but maybe).
Or there's the obvious idea of starting with The Hobbit. It's fantasy not SF, but it's something that all the SF writers of the 70s would have read, and is influential on genre fiction.
I also think sex is an obvious space for problems here in particular. Even in modern SF I read these entirely pair-bondy straight stories and it just feels completely implausible as a future vision, but alternatives are often handled so clunkily that they're bad too.
I enjoyed the last of Cixin Liu's trilogy and they do seem different in ways I can't quite enunciate from the Anglophone SF I'm used to. I would be interested in reading more books that are "different" like that.
I've read a bunch of their reviews. Some of what they object to isn't the science, it's the way that SF stories from the past tended to imbue the cultural context of their time in a way that the authors treated as universal, which now reads as anachronistic. Some of that may have been a deliberate attempt on the part of authors to make a strange environment seem more relatable to their readers, which now strikes modern readers as additionally alienating. One that I've noticed, in particular, is the way that characters in Asimov's Foundation series treat smoking as a widely-accepted casual social activity. I still think it's a great all-time series, but that part hasn't aged at all well.
I think the same thing happens (though maybe more slowly) with historical fiction. It definitely seems like we care more about 19th-century authors who wrote in roughly contemporary settings (Austen, Dickens, Twain) and less about ones who tended to write about the past (Scott, Cooper) than their initial readers did. Again, it's presumably because you have to keep track of two different unfamiliar time periods in order to get where the author is coming from.
I guess there are some big exceptions to this rule (e.g., it totally fails when it comes to Elizabethan drama) but it seems more true than not.
Mara uses "in the 1980s" as basically equivalent to "on the veldt" Oh God. I mean, we were all barbarians then, but still.
It definitely seems like we care more about 19th-century authors who wrote in roughly contemporary settings (Austen, Dickens, Twain) and less about ones who tended to write about the past (Scott, Cooper) than their initial readers did.
That doesn't seem right to me. We certainly still love War and Peace and Les Miserables and the historical fiction of Alexandre Dumas. And one of Dickens' most enduring works, A Tale of Two Cities, is a historical novel.
14: Les Miserables doesn't fit with the rest - Hugo lived through the revolution he was describing, even though it was 20+ years in the past at the time he was writing.
But Scott is terrrrrrible. Ivanhoe was nigh unreadable, to the massive disappointment of my Edward Eager-and-King Arthur-loving childself.
Part of the problem with this exercise is that at least one of the readers is a dodohead.
Childe Thorn endorses 16 in its entirety.
Trying to get kids to like '60s SF? Why not try to get them interested in ham radio while you're at it?
7: I assume that's partly because visual media has changed so much in the past 60 or whatever years. The only one at the link I've read so far is the Heinlein one, about a story published in 1957. How many homes had TVs then? Back to the Future informs me that some middle-class places did, but there were probably still a lot that didn't. And apparently a lot of his best-known work is even older than that. Maybe more importantly, how were the sets and effects? Probably comical. Try that in a book now and someone will think, "ha ha, but they'd never get away with that in a movie," but there was no parallel to it back then.
16: Have you read any of Rosemary Sutcliffe's books about Camelot? If so, were they any good?
This is a good line (from the review of "That Only A Mother." Note, the previous reviewer liked the story)
And this is the opposite of a payoff. This is like giving money to someone for safekeeping, and they put it in their pet's litterbox.
10: I just got around to reading that--any other thoughts? There is definitely what I read as a Chineseness to it, where I feel a lot of the tension comes between one person being able to affect the course of history (the protagonist's actions as Swordbearer) versus the a more detached style describing the events of history as almost inevitable (the dark forest, generally most of the changes of humanity that don't involve the protagonists). I've been listening to a podcast covering the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and I get that same kind of tension there--things seem preordained until they don't; humans have agency until they don't. That's surely overly reductive, but I find it inescapable. The closest Western comparison (not counting Ken Liu's Chinese epic pastiche series) is the way Ursula K. LeGuin's style puts some distance between the reader and the characters.
19: My dad invited my children to ham radio field day but I took them to Pride instead.
I hate it when they fall on the same day.
20: Five in six American homes had a TV in 1958, up from a quarter in 1951: http://www.buffalohistory.org/Explore/Exhibits/virtual_exhibits/wheels_of_power/educ_materials/television_handout.pdf
Today, young people just say "Cash me outside" and then steal cars.
And yet this doesn't seem to hold in film - see the success of various long running SF franchises (star trek, alien, star wars, there's even a Blade Runner sequel...)
It would be a new thing if it were widespread. Us lot all read and enjoyed Asimov and Clarke and Bradbury even though it was written thirty years before.
26: Man, that's a rapid transition. In third or fourth grade, a working class kid might not know* a single family with TV, and by the middle of HS, they're ubiquitous.
I guess the spread of the internet was comparable, maybe, but internet usage/access/experience would vary incredibly widely across users throughout the '90s, whereas the only real variation in TVs was color. A big one to be sure, but it was still the same content for everyone, and nobody had a very good set. By contrast, a have-not in '98 might be working an AOL disk on a shitty Windows 3.1 PC while his classmate is on a gaming machine with the full, open web at her fingertips. Although I'm probably underestimating how many of those '57 sets were actually crappy old '51 and '52 sets that had really rounded 9" CRTs (or whatever).
*as in, be likely to visit; presumably some classmate would have one at home
One that I've noticed, in particular, is the way that characters in Asimov's Foundation series treat smoking as a widely-accepted casual social activity. I still think it's a great all-time series, but that part hasn't aged at all well.
That was one of my very first thoughts to the OP. Even in the '80s the Mad Men-like ubiquity of smoking sounded an off note, and my mom was a smoker.
I don't have a good feel for the books in question (I only ever read a handful of them; my SF period was brief and narrow), but how many are extrapolations from our Earth? Even in the '80s it was jarring to read my dad's old SF that was predicated on e.g. widespread manned solar system exploration in the '70s; I'd have to think that, for anyone much younger than us (let alone actual pre-adults), that would all seem ludicrous, like steampunk played straight. I don't just mean, "They predicted X by 19YY, and we still don't have it"; I mean that the basis for thinking such a thing could come to pass seems alien. The proverbial college freshman was entering 7th grade the last time the shuttle flew, and that wasn't exactly "And the world was watching" stuff. Iris is 13, and I'm not sure she has any awareness of manned space exploration as a going concern at all. So anything predicated on the sort of space fever that was common in the '50s and '60s would seem very odd, basically alt-history-ish.
Writers might have been unusually slow assimilating tv.
Color penetrated much more slowly than tv itself. The reception was not good with rabbit ears and early sets.
32: I think rfts is probably referring to Mikayla, who is something of the Simon Cowell of the group, and has consistently pointed out problematic stuff in most of the stories so far that has kept them from enjoying those stories. Mikayla wrote a longer piece last year in response to the feedback they have gotten, and explaining their approach to SFF criticism. Some excerpts:
I've approached the reviews the same way I do Classic Doctor Who. I hold them to the same standards that I do modern stories. Especially because of the point of YPROSFF, I feel that I should be responding them to them as a modern reader. Unfortunately, the reaction I have received from SFF fandom has been drastically different from Doctor Who fandom.
I have been reading the comments (I know, I know) on James's LiveJournal and on Facebook and I have found them extremely frustrating. The overwhelming response has been that I am a grouch and hate everything, and that I'm reacting to the stories "wrong."
I'm starting to get the message. SFF fandom, or at least the part of it that's reading and commenting on these reviews, doesn't want my voice. They say they want to see how younger readers react to these reviews, but in reality they want to be able to tell me that I'm just wrong and irrationally hate things because I expect these stories to be better than they are. I get it, I'm a spoiled millennial who expects female characters to actually be people, and perhaps for the occasional queer character to appear on the page.
I grew up watching Voyager, where women were scientists and engineers and captains, and nobody questioned them on it because they were women. I grew up watching Stargate, and watching Sam Carter prove that she was smart and capable, no matter what the men around her thought.
I grew up reading Tamora Pierce, where girls got to be knights and mages and spies and heroes.
This is the bare minimum I learned to accept. They weren't perfect by any means, but I refuse to accept less.
Mikayla's politics aren't the point; it's that they don't seem like a particularly nuanced or sensitive reader. (Mikayla also doesn't seem to have responded to the stories by Russ or Tiptree, the two most notable feminist SF writers of the 1970s. I would have been really interested in how someone whose politics are Tumblr-era feminist responded to those!) But "Baby, You Were Great!" is a blisteringly angry feminist story, which Mikayla seems basically not to have noticed. (And C.L. Moore's "Vintage Season" is maybe my favorite science fiction short story ever written, and it got this: "If I want to read a story discussing if time travellers changing things would impact their future, and art in different cultures, there are far more enjoyable ones than this.")
I don't think we can say much about whether it's specific to the genre, but I suspect part of it might be that a lot of classic SF/F really doesn't care as much about character development or even creating characters that have interesting personalities. A lot of teen fiction/contemporary fantasy focuses more on the characters, so I wonder if it's part that they're not used to fiction where the characters are secondary ciphers.
Following on to 32, interesting to see Yoon Ha Lee, whose debut novel I really liked, commenting on that post.
I can't decide whether this is a schism between pre-fandom readers and the youth of today (in that stuff written today is expected to be more box-tickingly representational, even if it largely remains as uninterested in telling the stories of marginalized groups as always--lookin' at you, Doctor Who); something that requires some degree of historical grounding that not all the readers have (why is that gross Mr. Tiptree writing a story about a pandemic of men beating women to death? Why is he so ragingly misogynist??); or just up to Mikayla's individual taste and attention.
Mikayla is, in a way, absolutely right; but she's a completely uninteresting writer and thousands of sophomores at semi-exclusive liberal arts colleges could do what she did here better....
23: Which podcast? And which translation? I should read that at some point.
Man, that's a rapid transition. In third or fourth grade, a working class kid might not know* a single family with TV, and by the middle of HS, they're ubiquitous.
Cell phones.
I got my 12-year-old daughter to read I, Robot, which she liked quite a lot. I think some of Asimov holds up middlin' well because he sometimes (as in I, Robot) borrowed the puzzle-solving sensibility from mystery novels.
I re-read it myself. Susan Calvin was a bit of a disappointment compared to my memory of her. My daughter liked Powell and Donovan better.
Seconding 7. I think puzzle-solving is a literary virtue in itself, and prizing that virtue is one of the things that sets, or can set, SF apart; of course writers like Asimov possessed that virtue and no others. Impressionistically, modern SF and YA are held to a higher standard, and this is good; but it doesn't follow that the older stories are worthless, which some of these despicable teenagers seem to be saying.
If only there were some way for the kids of today to understand a society in which misogyny the norm among those running things.
Surely a flaw of this exercise is that some of the stuff here probably wasn't very good even in its own time. It's not a coincidence that Theodore Sturgeon, noted for Sturgeon Law, was a science fiction writer.
I wonder how A Canticle for Leibowitz holds up. I don't remember the Bradbury, Clarke and Heinlein pieces cited there, but I suspect they've done better. Asimov's Nightfall was something I found rather silly when I read it 40 years ago, though I know Asimov himself was quite fond of it.
The sampling of reviews I read doesn't really back the thesis that kids don't get that era's scifi. The reviews in general seem quite mixed -- as they would have been in real-time.
I have A Canticle for Lebowitz in my basement. I was trying to read it, got bored, and put it down on the shelf one day when I emptied my bag.
I read A Canticle for Leibowitz relatively recently and it held up very well, until it turned stupidly Catholic in the final section. Like the most important thing in outfitting the interstellar refugee ship is making sure it carries enough ordained bishops to elect a new pope. Or something. I forget. Also, the reader can't reasonably be expected to know Latin.
Cell phones.
I've surely mentioned that, in 1994-5, AT&T or someone provided free cell phones to grad students at what, at the time, was CMU's Graduate School of Industrial Administration*, in order to see if they might be useful. I assume it was mostly a marketing thing--hook 'em early--but it wasn't treated as the equivalent of, I dunno, free laptops or on-call limos. It seemed sort of absurd, like why would anyone want/need them?
Anyway, I don't actually think the transition was nearly as swift as with TVs, but the associated societal change was probably bigger. In '95, they were a rarity, and were phone only. By '00, they were common but not ubiquitous, and had gained function. In '05, it was slightly odd not to have one, and they were starting to be usefully smart. And of course by '10, the iPhone had hit, and the expectation was that you had a mini computer in your pocket that also made calls. That's pretty epochal in 15 years. Overseas, the change was even more dramatic, and more compressed.
*subsequently Tepper School of Business, at which point it went from offering MIAs to MBAs. I remain convinced that there was a qualitative decline associated with the shift, abandoning the idea of well-run companies that made things for ever more cunning financialization and M&As
perhaps for the occasional queer character to appear on the page
It's incredibly hard not to read this as, "any book with even the most token of minority characters is better than every book without at least that many tokens." I'm sure that's uncharitable, but there it is. I find lazy tokenism much more bothersome than non-representational works of the past. I'm sure big chunk of that is my age and privilege, but it's also that tokenism should, if you actually GAF, bring you right out of the story in a way that a dog failing to bark probably doesn't.
Spoiler Alert:
Snape killed a gay wizard.
49: I think you're underestimating the amount of social change that's been driven by being able to connect with just about anybody just about any time. That happened over a decade or so, and I think probably made a lot more difference in people's lives, and especially young people's lives, than ubiquitous TV. Roll in email and the internet over a slightly longer period and it isn't even remotely close.
45-47: It's been a while since I read it, but what feels dated to me in that and other apocalyptic works of that era (eg On the Beach) is that we've gotten accustomed to living with nuclear weapons and they hadn't yet. Doesn't mean we couldn't get panicked again if somebody used one, but we don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.
52.1: Blech. On re-reading, we agree on the impact of phones, but I still think you're overestimating how much change came from tv how quickly. Put it in the context of radio and magazine serials coming before and a path from no tv to one tv in the living room to a bunch of tvs everywhere, plus the development of cable, and it looks like a longer process too.
(IIRC my dad's family got electricity in the 50s, not tv, but they were rural and poor.)
Huh, per wikipedia, the time from invention of the phonograph to mass marketing of it was only 7 or 8 years.
52.1: Did people ever actually get accustomed to living with the Cold War standoff? It's central to Moore's Watchmen, for instance, and that's from the 1980s.
Oh, sure. Of course, we had values back then.
Like seven different values. Maybe eight if we were sober.
Did people ever actually get accustomed to living with the Cold War standoff?
Yes.
When I think of 'old SF' I think of Blows Against the Empire.
More old SF:
Your constant battles are getting to be a bore
So go somewhere else and continue your cream puff war
I've said this before, but I would have really liked to have seen some Dick. And Wolfe. And, I guess they were doing short stories, but Engine Summer (Crowley) was 70s. We all read this stuff, and Asimov and Heinlein too, and plenty of us weren't born before the end of the 70s, much less the 50s and 60s. I guess the typical bad SF writing toughened us up. Kids these days are soft with their Harry Potters and who'sits.
P.S. Mikayla is just the worst. She's old enough to know better too; she mentions being in grade 12 ten years ago. And using the word "microaggression" when writing about literature (from over 50 years ago!) is a microaggression.
the amount of social change that's been driven by being able to connect with just about anybody just about any time
If only some young Baby Boomer had invented a cheap, pocket-sized ham radio, we could have had all that social change fifty years ago.
Oh Christ, yeah. Delaney.
Also, Mikayla's punishment is to read Farnham's Freehold, the book in which the American protagonist emerges into a world ruled by technologically advanced black cannibals who have enslaved the white race, castrating the men and keeping the women in harems, but still manages to be more sexist than racist.
23: yes, that! I also think that the ways parenthood and the ferishization of childhood play out in the last book particularly are somewhat culturally bound, though I don't want to argue that too strongly. Even when an American author might have written the same plot, it felt to me like the focus was often different from what I'd expect.
I only read the responses to Flowers for Algernon and I liked the person who called it the most depressing thing they'd yet read.
I hold them to the same standards that I do modern stories. this is ... kinda comically weird? like if what you're grading the stories on is "how closely do they approximate to my political views" then yes the further away from your time and place you get the less they will agree with you.
23, 10: You might like the Strugatskys, Boris and Arkady. I read Roadside Picnic not long ago, and The Doomed City is near the top of my t-b-r pile.
Over on the fantasy side, you might like Andrzej Sapkowski. A Russian friend recommended him to me about five years ago, and not much (if any) was available in English at the time, but now almost all of his main series is. Interestingly, Sapkowski made his way into English publication via a popular video game, The Witcher. On the one hand, it's fairly standard heroic fantasy, but on the other the substrate is medieval Poland (or rather the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) instead of rehashed England, so there are differences that you might not expect. Also, you can kinda see both the fall of Communism and Poland's WWII experiences lurking in the background of the stories.
The Night Watch series by Sergei Lukyanenko is kinda pulpy urban fantasy, but the main urbanity is Moscow, so the assumptions are different than sparkly vampires in American suburbia. Also pulpy (I am led to understand, it's still in t-b-r-land for me) is Metro 2033 (and a sequel or two) by Dmitry Glukhovsky. Post-apocalypse with everyone living in the Moscow metro.
I tried Stanislaw Lem way back when, and I couldn't then but maybe I could now. I suppose I could also read actual original SF in German to find what's good but not yet into English translation, but that sounds more like work than fun.
Back at the end of last year, I downloaded an issue of Smokopolitan (No. 7, November 2016), a magazine of Polish SF. This issue was all in English. I haven't gotten around to reading it yet, but that could be another pointer. And I'll be at Worldcon next month, so maybe I'll come back from Finland full of more tip.
Slightly adjacent to SF (in that it's kinda alt-history, kinda Victorian detective), the Erast Fandorin series by Boris Akunin is really neat. The first volume is a little shaky, but after that it get really good. Only he never found his market in the English-speaking world and the last two or three books (depending on how you count some collections) have not been translated.
Good God, attendance at an SF/F con in Poznan last year was more than 40,000. I am such a provincial.
As people said above re: impact of social change over that time.
Picking one example of something I still remember, ISTR the setting of 'Nightfall' is a government lab of a sort that that culturally isn't out of place in the 50s/early 60s. Usual lack of sexual/racial mix and so on.
I'm reminded of this article - though I have no idea whether any of the novels chosen were particularly of the ilk talked about:
http://airshipdaily.com/blog/06052014-the-iron-dream
ISTR the setting of 'Nightfall' is a government lab of a sort that that culturally isn't out of place in the 50s/early 60s. Usual lack of sexual/racial mix and so on.
The story wasn't written in the 50s or early 60s, but in 1941. It's an observatory, but at a university, not government-run. There are three main characters, all male: an older physicist, a young astronomer, and his friend, a journalist. A minor character is a fanatic preacher of the Cult of Flame, also male. We get no information about their race or skin colour at all. (One of them has a yellow beard. But, then, hair dye exists.)
re: 69
I have that very edition of the _Iron Dream_. It was my Dad's, and a particular favourite growing up. Particularly delicious because the first time I read it, I think I consumed it fairly straight -- unaware of what Spinrad was doing -- and the second time, in my mid-teens, aware, and amused/disturbed.
71: I saw the 70s Flash Gordon movie three times: once as a kid, once as a teenager, and once as an adult. As a kid, I thought it was amazing. As a teenager I thought it was really stupid. As an adult, I realized it was stupid on purpose, because it was camp.
The first time I read Nineteen Eighty-Four I was completely bored by the excerpt from Goldstein's "forbidden book", and I thought that was deliberate irony - Winston Smith is desperate to read this heretical stuff and it ends up being almost unreadably dull.
But then I listened to the Spike Milligan spoof of it, "1985", and got all the jokes. "England is ruled by the Big Brother Corporation - or, as you knew it, the B.B.C."
That doesn't seem right to me. We certainly still love War and Peace and Les Miserables and the historical fiction of Alexandre Dumas. And one of Dickens' most enduring works, A Tale of Two Cities, is a historical novel.
That may be in spite of being, rather than because they are, old historical novels.
And "War and Peace" isn't actually that historical. IIRC it was written in the late 1850s - so it's the equivalent of someone right now writing a book set in 1978. Would that get classed as "historical fiction" in the same way as something set a hundred years ago?
Further to 70: really, if you read a story in which the race and orientation of the characters are never mentioned, and you assume from that that they must all be white and straight, that says more about you than about the story. There is no sense in which the characters in "Nightfall" are white, any more than there is a sense in which they are vegetarian, or keen rock-climbers, or fathers of large families, or supporters of single-payer health care. Yes, Asimov, writing in 1941, probably envisioned them as being straight white guys. But that really doesn't matter. There's nothing outside the text.
I hold them to the same standards that I do modern stories. this is ... kinda comically weird?
I don't think it's entirely unreasonable, in principle. But you do need to distinguish between holding something to a standard and acknowledging its historical context. To give a slightly facetious example, it would be ridiculous to complain about Classic Who being in black and white, but fair enough to find the acting wooden.
The problem seems to be that Mikayla is entirely conflating the two. But I've not followed the link so what do I know?
Nobody before 1965 predicted the impact of electronic miniaturisation as we know it. Not even Lem, really. Not just phones, they couldn't even imagine laptops: all the future technology relies on super-centralisation extrapolated from the mainframe model they were familiar with. That means that almost all future world building reads like somebody is selling a 2 litre, 100 bhp, 5000 rpm hybrid Model T.
The Strugatskys (let them stand for a sub-genre) still work because they couldn't really give a shit about technology, they wrote about people. Writers in that vein last better than the ones who not only write about Gee-Whizzery but actually want to explain it to us or make us think it's believable.
Heinlein is unreadable, not just politically but he was a terrible, terrible writer who is only tolerable if you're prepared to suspend disbelief and enter into his fantasies. Since you can no longer do that, the whole edifice crashes. Asimov was a little less obnoxious, but smeared equally terrible prose across his pages. The worst of the lot was Fred Hoyle in this regard.
Yes, Delany. Yes, I think, Dick. But they weren't first generation pulp writers, and I think the distinction is important. Only Fred Pohl, up to a point, is still tolerable from that epoch.
We got used to living with the cold war stand-off, because otherwise we'd simply have been paralysed. But it made us very different people from those who were born after, say 1975, and I don't think the impact of that is sufficiently taken account of by people who pop-analyse "kids today".
Not just phones, they couldn't even imagine laptops: all the future technology relies on super-centralisation extrapolated from the mainframe model they were familiar with.
... he typed, on a tiny handheld terminal connected via wireless to the vast centralised farms of "server" computers which ran the Inter-Net of his day.
The Strugatskys (let them stand for a sub-genre) still work because they couldn't really give a shit about technology, they wrote about people.
But, judging by the quotes, they aren't complaining about old SF writers getting the technology wrong. They're complaining about them getting the people-stuff wrong. To use your analogy, old SF stories are "somebody is selling a 2 litre, 100 bhp, 5000 rpm hybrid Model T", and they don't mind that, but that salesman then goes home to his nuclear family in the suburbs and his wife brings him a martini, and they mind that.
that salesman then goes home to his nuclear family in the suburbs and his wife brings him a martini
It's interesting to read this thread and think back on my sci-fi phase, in my early teens when I was still a little closet case (even to myself). Actual descriptions of sex were probably just as titillating to me as for straight boys, b/c puberty, but I distinctly remember authorial attitudes about sex and gender coming through (in a way well-described by ajay's joke here) that I found so unrelatable that they took me out of the story, even though I had no insight about why.
So maybe being a homo kid reading old-school sci-fi in the [decade redacted]'s was a preview of what it feels like to be any kid reading it today.
39: The creatively named Romance of the Three Kingdoms Podcast. For the most part, I think the narrator is just translating as he goes--he's a Chinese-American who immigrated in his early teens and was first exposed to it in Chinese. In one episode he apologizes for having mispronounced a city's name, saying that one of its characters can be read two ways and he picked the wrong one. However, he does occasionally read translations of poetry that scan well enough that I doubt he did them himself. It's about two thirds of the way through now (120ish episodes so far) and he updates most weeks.
That being said, I have a copy of the first volume of Brewitt-Taylor's translation and will give it a go afterwards. I feel like I have a much better handle on the scope and flow of the epic now.
63: I can see that. Also the feminized, peaceful era--I can't imagine a modern Western writer writing that. It works in a Chinese context-or at least I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt due to my ignorance--but in a Western one it'd be irritating at best.
67: I've had Roadside Picnic recommended to me many times and it remains shamefully on my Goodreads to-read list.
It may be a function of the sci-fi I happened to read growing up (esp. LeGuin), but I feel "old" sci-fi was a lot less heteronormative/sexist than most "old" non sci-fi, unless you're specifically talking about, say, Joe Orton.
I hold them to the same standards that I do modern stories.
This also strikes me as a bit strange. When I took Victorian literature in college, we didn't gloss over or ignore the ways in which the attitudes and assumptions of the authors and characters differed massively from our own and how that influences the stories. But at the same time, we didn't spend the class patting ourselves on the back for the amazing moral achievement of having been born in the late 20th century and scolding the novels: "Bad Victorians! Bad!"
It's one thing to notice how the attitudes of the society in which a story was written differed from your own. But if that's all you're doing, I'm not sure what the point is. "Wow! I had no idea that popular acceptable attitudes regarding race and gender were different in the 1950s than they are today. Thanks for enlightening me!"
78: Care to elaborate?
82: Thanks!
I think even stuff that's working on being unheteronormative/sexist is still going to come off that way to a modern reader who's not working hard at appreciating the context. Frowner's mentioned that in her SF reading group/class/thing -- stuff like "When It Changed" making her readers annoyed because it failed to address the obvious fact that even a society where all the men had been removed and the next generation was produced by cloning women would have had men in it because there'd be trans people. (This actually doesn't seem like an obvious criticism of that story to me, nor one that even most present-day readers would come up with, but that sort of thing -- an attempt at non-heteronormativeness/sexism is going to still clang hard if it doesn't get pretty close to modern standards. Heinlein was, I think, consciously trying to be non-sexist throughout everything he wrote, but really didn't get close enough that a present-day reader is likely to, or should, give him much credit for it.)
82: It's weird, not in the way that early Miéville is weird, but weird like Viktor Pelevin but even more so because it's taking commonplaces of Soviet experience (which are alien to North American readers) and then riffing off of them in SFnal ways. So it's going off at a tangent to things that are skew lines to our norms. If you like your head good and scrambled, with the sense that a coherent explanation is just out of reach, it'll set you up nicely.
The Foundation Pit by Viktor Platonov could be read as post-apocalyptic SF. In the Soviet Union of the 1930s, the line between history and apocalypse is awfully thin in some places. There's a lot going on in that one; I've picked up Happy Moscow and Soul, but they have not yet made it to the top of t-b-r.
@75
Yes, I think my memory was shaded in part by memories of the book shading into memories of other Asimov books I'd read.
Having said that; growing up in a fairly multi-lingual setting I was semi aware that some names sounded like made up English/Romance Language, and some names didn't.
83. It would be interesting to see the readers at that site take on "mainstream" novels of the 50's and 60's. John Updike, John Cheever, maybe look back at some lesser Hemingway, even some of the real shlock "bestseller" stuff (Jacqueline Susann is the only one that comes to mind at the moment, alas).
I haven't followed the link yet, but did they read "The Cold Equations"?
I always assumed that a future advanced civilization might be able to create cigarettes that were non-cancer-inducing. (Or maybe it was actually reefer -- lots of people seem to believe that's what "pipeweed" in LotR was).
The people selling vape supplies think the future is now.
Another thing that strikes me about the commentary here and at the linked site (yeah, I clicked through) is that we and they comment a lot about how the past works are thoroughly of their time and therefore don't include characters much beyond white heterosexual males. What makes us think our present's imagined futures will seem any less quaint to them?
We are no less of our time than Asimov et al. were of theirs.
As an aside, my favorite future-totally-wrong thing is Heinlein's novel ("Starman Jones," I think) where interstellar hyperdrives exist but navigation is still done with slide rules and the CRC tables.
interstellar hyperdrives exist but navigation is still done with slide rules and the CRC tables
There's another Heinlein (Space Cadet, 1947) which has my favourite example of this: one of the main benefits of cheap atomic-powered space flight is that you can build much more powerful computers, because they work so much better in free fall without gravity putting a strain on all the axles and cams.
What makes us think our present's imagined futures will seem any less quaint to them?
The class of 2028 will have never known a time when Snowpiercer was not quaint.
On the other hand, as an example of SF predicting/ imagining a significant breakthrough, I remain impressed that Clarke foresaw the importance of the geosynchronous orbit.
My recollection is several Heinlein stories had 3D cams and such. When I first read them I thought they were made up and only found out many years later that they were real things actually used in WW2 era navigation systems.
93: Doesn't Bong June Ho have another movie out, about a GMO pig? ... yup, "Okja," on Netflix.
that salesman then goes home to his nuclear family in the suburbs and his wife brings him a martini
This sounds like a Dick short story -- in which Dick finds it just as odd and disturbing as the contemporary reader (though I will note, I have one friend who permanently swore off PKD on feminist grounds after reading "The Pre-Persons")
93: Doesn't Bong June Ho have another movie out, about a GMO pig? ... yup, "Okja," on Netflix.
Indeed. Supposedly excellent. I'm planning to watch it at some point this week.
It would be interesting to see the readers at that site take on "mainstream" novels of the 50's and 60's. John Updike, John Cheever, maybe look back at some lesser Hemingway
The Great Mid-century Male Narcissists genre does strike me as one that probably hasn't aged so well (I don't include Hemingway in that, I think he's more his own genre).
I recall reading C.J. Cherryh's Merchanter's Luck, and being struck when one of the characters piloting a FTL space ship looked up some information she needed using microfiche.
(Or maybe it was actually reefer -- lots of people seem to believe that's what "pipeweed" in LotR was)
As somebody pointed out elsewhere recently. Tolkien went on the record as saying that pipeweed was tobacco.
94: and the same Heinlein novel predicts mobile phones and some of the etiquette around them...
Tolkien went on the record as saying that pipeweed was tobacco
It's also called tobacco in the books themselves. The characters refer to it as "pipe-weed" but the narrator's voice calls it tobacco on several occasions.
93, 97 I've also heard it is excellent and I'm trying to get my family to watch it with me.
I've not yet read Roadside Picnic so can't judge it as an adaptation but Tarkovsky's Stalker is a masterpiece and long one of my favorite films.
102 True nerds would give you the proper name for it in Adunaic since it has a Númenórean origin.
I have now read some of the linked site, against my better judgement - some of those reviews are really ploddingly literal. This from the review of "All Summer in a Day", the Bradbury story about a world where it stops raining only once every seven years...
"As for the setting, this story requires more headcanoning than I care to do to explain away Venus as a cold, rainy world. I feel like never seeing the sun would probably be the least of the problems for people actually living on Venus. I'm not sure what the understanding of Venus was when this story was written, but to me this just sticks out as blatantly wrong."
I have a vision of her watching Swan Lake and thinking "but this makes no sense. How can Odette be turned into a swan by Rothbard? Swans are much smaller than women. It violates the law of conservation of mass. What happens to all the excess material? Does she turn into a giant swan? Or are there just leftover bits of flesh lying around? Sorry, I just don't find this credible at all."
The leftover bits are held on account with a tissue bank.
I'm more outraged by the incorrect usage of headcanon.
On the Cold War culture subthread: I was born in '72 and was very aware during the Reagan-era nuke fears: missile protests in Europe, "The Day After", etc. It was post-detente, and Stalin was long, long gone, but there was no sense that the Cold War, and nuclear threat, wouldn't be permanent. But I still remember watching "Failsafe" on PBS in the late '80s and thinking, "Holy crap, no wonder everyone back then was so scared all the time."
That is, there is no doubt in my mind that the first generation that experienced the Cold War had a much different response than those subsequent. By the time 1970 rolled around, it was evident that the US and USSR were not on an inevitable collision course, nor that nuclear war was just a hair trigger away. When your car starts making a noise on the highway, you worry; when the noise is still there 10,000 miles later, you worry less.
Yes, eyeroll emoji to the quote in 105. Good grief.
101. Of course it was tobacco in LotR. Every nerd knows that. If one can imagine it was reefer, one can imagine Asimov's future has hi-tech cigarettes.
I should have mentioned vaping, except in my mind it is a special sub-category of cigarettes: "stuff people do to annoy everyone in their vicinity, without the consolation that they will die from doing it."
By the time 1970 rolled around, it was evident that the US and USSR were not on an inevitable collision course, nor that nuclear war was just a hair trigger away.
Sure, if you were lived through the Cuban missile crisis I suppose, but not at all evident if you were in nursery/elementary school at the time. We still had air raid drills well into the mid-70s (not quite duck and cover, but get into the central hallway, head down facing the wall with on your knees with your hands crossed over your head.
I read a few of the reviews of the person quoted in 105 and I think my issue with them is that they don't seem to be asking what they as a reader bring to the table. The story provokes some emotions in them--okay. But why do they feel that way? Would someone else feel that way? Is it good or useful that they had their response, and would they grow as a reader to challenge that response, or is it in fact a mature and appropriate take?
I do somewhat sympathize with the view in 105 in that an old understanding of science sometimes is distracting. But when that happens, you need to adjust your view just as you would with anything else--treat it as fantasy. I'm echoing AcademicLurker in 84, but if all you can get out of it is "people in the past weren't as enlightened socially or scientifically as my people are" you aren't adding much. Which is unfortunate, because that's the first step towards actually analyzing that difference.
(But really: if you have trouble with Venus being fantastic in old sci fi, it's probably not the project for you. Heck, sometimes it's still fantastic in new SFF, e.g. Cat Valente's Radiance.)
105 was Mykayla again, who has all the shortcomings of her generation and is also independently not good.
112: The Vapers will have you turning Japanese.
Kids today won't get that because the average Japanese person has less mass than a westerner.
But this fact is racist, and will prevent them from enjoying your joke, independent of violations of physical law.
111. I did live through the Cuban missile crisis. I was 11 and fucking terrified. I remember watching footage related to the Tonkin Bay "incident" a few years later on TV and getting up and leaving the room saying, "Well, looks like that's it then." It was the sword of fucking Damocles. You got on with eating your dinner because there was no alternative, but you didn't necessarily assume you were going to live to cash your pension.
Oh hey, the DPRK says it has an ICBM.
""As for the setting, this story requires more headcanoning than I care to do to explain away Venus as a cold, rainy world. I feel like never seeing the sun would probably be the least of the problems for people actually living on Venus."
Possibly this is as pedestrian as you suppose, but people are brought up on a particular diet of popular media, and perhaps this is what someone brought up on the discovery channel and a million programs about planets would actually think?
A fair amount of sci-fi inhabits the same region as a God of the Gaps.
120. Everyone else says they don't. It only went 600 miles, similar to some of their previous launches.
A fair amount of sci-fi inhabits the same region as a God of the Gaps.
Frederik Pohl tells this story about buying Larry Niven's first story which is relevant to the entire discussion and says a lot about the Pohl, and how SF thought of itself at the time.
So it was on just such a train ride, somewhere between Newark and Matawan, that I pulled out of its envelope a slim little manuscript called "The Coldest Place," by some previously unknown person who said his name was Larry Niven.
That manuscript didn't get mailed back. "The Coldest Place" wasn't a great story. But it had a number of good things going for it. It started with a clever science-based idea -- the "coldest place" of the title, paradoxically, was on the dark side of the very hottest planet in the solar system, Mercury -- and the writing was competent enough, and besides the story was beautifully short. (I was always particularly looking for short stories, because -- since we paid by the word -- all those savvy professional writers had learned early that they ate better if they wrote long ones.)
So I kept that story out, and wrote a letter to the author saying I would be happy to buy it (for very little money, to be sure), and asked him a few questions about himself. And by return mail he answered that he'd take the offer and, yes, he had never sold a story before so I could call it a "first." I put the check through and marked it up for the printer, and all was well.
Or so I thought.
You never know, though, do you? There was a wholly unexpected development. Just at that time some busybody scientists, who should have found some more productive use for their time, were conducting radar studies of Mercury. They came up with the surprising (and just at that moment really unwelcome) information that the planet did not always present the same face to the Sun, as everyone (including Larry and I) had always thought. The damn thing revolved. It didn't have a "coldest place."
It was evident that Larry Niven read the same journals as I did, because a day or two later I got a worried letter from him to say that he'd just discovered his story had turned out to be scientifically wrong, and should he give the money back?
By then I had been giving the question some hard thought at my end. There was a kind of moral question involved. I believe that science-fiction writers have a duty to be careful about the science in their stories (and over the years I rejected a good many otherwise good stories, most of which sold elsewhere, because of scientific flaws).
On the other hand, I don't believe that science-fiction writers have to be more right than scientists themselves are. Larry had done his homework. At the time he had written "The Coldest Place" the science in it was fine; it wasn't his fault that the scientists had changed their minds. (We can still read, for instance, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom stories with as much pleasure as ever, in spite of the fact that the Percival Lowell picture that he based them on of a somewhat habitable Mars turrned out to be all wrong.) Besides, for any writer his very first sale is a major landmark and I didn't have the heart to ask him to unsell it.
122: 2800km apogee, though. The guys at the Arms Control Wonk blog seem happy calling it an icbm. With that sort of performance it would have an operational range of over 6000km. That counts.
If you live in Istanbul, every missile is an ICBM.
My kids are flying to Japan via Seoul in a couple of weeks. With impeccable timing, the Japanese government has just started broadcasting a 30-second public service announcement (apologies for the lack of subtitles) with cartoons illustrating what people are supposed to do after the siren sounds to announce a missile attack: viz., run indoors if you can, crouch down if outside and hold your handbag over your head, and go into a windowless room if possible. It's accompanied by creepy nursery-rhyme-esque piano music that is probably meant to be reassuring, but sounds like something straight out of Scarfolk.
All those cartoon characters look really European. Brown hair etc.
122: I'd be really interested to read any links to people who are saying it definitely wasn't an icbm.
128. CNN and UPI were guarded about declaring it an ICBM. The first reports I read didn't include the details about it having a "max altitude" trajectory, or that it was "probably" a two-stage ICBM (from "US military analysts").
So we click over another ratchet to war with NK.
Incidentally, the following episode of the War Nerd podcast was posted for non-subscribers, and features David Forbes (of the Iron Dream article above):
https://www.patreon.com/posts/rwn-ep-64-repost-12256665
So, apparently we get to relive the mythology of the end of the Cold War. We'll read about how Reagan stood tall in 1981-83. They always seem to forget that what happened in 1985 is that he realized his predecessors had been right, and that the right position with the USSR was benignly standing back, and letting it slowly wind down on its own.
OK, maybe not actually benign. But the talk of rolling back and such tapered off.
Oh, man, Pelevin, especially _The Yellow Arrow_.
I like _Ivanhoe_, though not the way I suspect Scott expected me to like it. I wonder if anyone has written the tempting alternate sequel in which Rebecca takes Bois Guilbert (sp?) up on his offer to marry her and move to the lands of the Saracens.
Standard warning that the War Nerd really does not know what he is talking about.
Okay, I could read all 134 comments that have accrued, and I will, but - young people who read old SF might have more luck with it if they are first capable readers in general. Srsly, the part where the one dude is all "uh, I didn't like Joanna Russ because she doesn't like men?" and then goes on to say that the problem with "Baby You Were Great" is that it's creepy, almost like a horror story - could the author be trying to make some kind of point rather than tell the story of an exciting new technology? Reader 3 seems to be pretty competent; a bright future in any industry which requires interpretation of words presumably awaits her.
But I dunno, science fiction only "dates" if what you're reading it for is whackadoo novelty of technology. Rather like The Age of Innocence "dates" if you are only reading it for insight into the social consequences of divorce.
The science fiction book club that I sometimes run did a whole bunch of pre-Soviet Russian SF and a little bit of Soviet SF, for instance, and it wasn't because we wanted to ooh and ah over the technology, per se. Mostly, we wanted to read what it had to say about the issues of its time, and we wanted to see how it fit into science fiction as a genre. (The part in the What Is To Be Done dream sequence (not that What Is To Be Done) where everything in the future is aluminum, more precious than gold! was pretty amusing, but actually the dream-future was very interesting and pleasant, and the stuff about gender was also interesting.)
I mean, the main thing that people intend when they say "does old SF date" is "can the kids of today enter into an imaginative reality in which not everyone has smartphones and the internet" - that's what everyone always points out as the big deterrent for the KOT. But the KOT are a bit smarter than they get credit for being - most of them - and they've read books and seen movies in which there are, like, no smartphones all their lives. Some of them may be like "this isn't Captain America, there are no cell phones but little shopping, it's bad SF!!" but that's not because they're having a unique insight into failings of science fiction, it's because they're being teenage dicks, like I was when I insisted that only punk music was any good and was generally an asshole about music to my friends.
Were there things like this when we (for the Olds on the blog) were young? I mean, in the eighties and nineties I read tons and tons of fifties and sixties SF, and had relatively little access to contemporary stuff since I didn't have a lot of money and the library didn't have too much modern science fiction, and I don't remember the world clutching its pearls over whether "I'm in Marsport Without Hilda" was too lo-tech for me to grasp. Maybe this is because the Xers are still the forgotten generation.
For which I am sometimes grateful, tbh.
"Relevancy" was ... the baby boomers being putatively unwilling to read anything they couldn't immediately "identify" with?
There's a particular cloth binding in dull colors that libraries used to get classics-of genre fiction in, and I remember hunting out the SF in 1980s Florida libraries. I think it went back to Bellamy and up to probably the 1950s. And quite recently I saw the same binding in Davis and it was classics-of Westerns, and now I quite like a lot of Max Brand.
There's a reasonable amount of Scott Ivanhoe fic on Ao3 but the only one that looks like it might leave Christendom is in Russian.
"Anachronistic Social Attitudes" is an Ao3 tag, often found with "Historical Inaccuracy". Aww.
Also, I'll quote from 66:
I hold them to the same standards that I do modern stories. this is ... kinda comically weird? like if what you're grading the stories on is "how closely do they approximate to my political views" then yes the further away from your time and place you get the less they will agree with you.
I know this is an Old thing to say, but it took me until I was about thirty to be able to enjoy things that were not totally in line with my politics. I'm with Mikayla on this, actually, in that reading a book which is really hateful toward women/POC/single people/queer people/etc is a downer and not how I want to spend my free time. It's a murky process, but I generally read only fiction that is sanitized by distance (Austen, and then Said perpetually in the background) or tolerably left wing. But "exactly in line with whatever I think is correct at the moment" was a bad criterion, both because it was super restrictive and because I have to admit to myself that at any given point a chunk of my political ideas are probably really dumb. That is, I know I had really dumb ones in the past and I have no reason to believe this has ceased.
In terms of science fiction, my whole project has been to trace various feminist, anti-racist and left wing geneaologies, precisely so that I can read left/feminist/anti-racist science fiction from a variety of eras. Some of it isn't palatable. Cordwainer Bird wrote some ostensibly pro-civil rights SF, for instance, that gives one the squicks. And I'm not actually that into "Venus Plus X".
There's a really subjective part to this. Craig Strete, fascinating Native SF writer of the seventies, sometimes isn't that awesome on gender, but his work is interesting enough and his failure-to-be-awesome is small enough that I read his work. Someone else might not. Joanna Russ, who later apologized for it, wrote a part of The Female Man where the most immediate reading is really transphobic*. Just as the feminist SF community does not want to deal with James Tiptree's ableist murder of her husband, it also does not want to deal with this about Joanna Russ.
But at the same time, "I don't like the SF of the past because it sure is fucked up, and this is specifically about SF of the past" seems to suggest that SF of the present is doing just fine. When former-occasional-commenter Felix Gilman's extremely accomplished and interesting Half Made World books, for instance, do not do Native history well at all, and it's pretty unpleasant to read China Mieville's FreMade through a disability studies lens, etc etc etc. Fiction that has bad politics has bad politics. Some fiction that has bad politics in some areas has really good politics in others. Some fiction that seems totally acceptable to you now will make you cringe later, and it's because you're ignorant now.
I am old enough now to see the left darlings of my youth get called to account for not being from 2017 when writing in 1990, and this has given me some skepticism about our ability to judge fiction in the present.
My thought too is that you're not going to enjoy old SF if you don't generally enjoy old books, and a lot of people don't. I know tons of educated people who have zero interest in fiction set before they were young adults, and really only read contemporary books about contemporary people. I would be interested to know how many of the young readers of old SF regularly read other old fiction, because the enjoyment you get from old fiction is about time and pastness, and if you don't enjoy figuring out time and pastness, you probably won't enjoy reading old books.
If you're not interested in SF as a genre, too, you're not going to be interested in old SF. Like, either you think "hm, I wonder how the idea of the environmentally-sound utopia has evolved between 1920 and now" or you think "what an utterly boring question". The pleasure of reading old SF is seeing how ideas and prose work their way through the genre.
I think a problem with being a young opinionated reader is that it's super easy to Dunning Krueger yourself into awful positions because you haven't read enough but you don't realize. I look back on some of the stuff I said when I was 18ish where I was totally, totally wrong and yet convinced that the adults around me were stupid liberals and it was basically because I had a really weak sense of history and hadn't read enough.
*I personally think it's more "I am totally not thinking about trans women at all, only about how the patriarchy will force someone into an inferior position if women aren't around to exploit" thing, and that the text bears this out, but it's not a book I recommend except to people interested in feminist SF and even then with caveats. And in general I adore Joanna Russ.
I know that there are major differences between "classic" and New Wave SF, but it's been so long since both I think they both count as old/classic, and the well to draw from is much improved if you incorporate the latter.
140. I have over time found that reading SF (or fiction in general) that went quite counter to my political, philosophical, etc. views is often worth the time and energy. Obviously, your mileage may vary, but I feel that if I only read stuff that agrees with my views, I'm unlikely to learn anything or be challenged.
I agree completely that if you aren't interested in SF, you are unlikely to be interested in old SF. I've been interested in SF since I was a kid, and I remember liking the Tom Swift books. My grandfather had several of the "old" Tom Swift books and gave them to me. They were boring and horrible. ("Tom Swift and His Giant Aeroplane"-type stuff.) Later I of course realized that the "new" Tom Swift books were equally boring and horrible. (I guess, as the fella said, "the golden age of science fiction is twelve.")
I loved the old SF at the time (not just Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein). I loved Bradbury. I re-read "The Martian Chronicles" not that long ago and still tear up at the end of "The Million Year Picnic" even though the science, the technology, the characters are all wrong wrong wrong even at the time.
I re-read Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" recently as well, and it still has that sensawonder.
I also read tons of the new stuff and like it. I'm also kind of afraid of re-reading some of the old stuff I loved back then.
ps: I hated those Cordwainer Bird stories too, even back then.
In terms of reading science fiction that "goes against" your politics - it depends very much, I think, on the politics in question, and your experience of them. The more on the right side of structural inequalities you tend to be, the easier it is to read books that go against your politics - as I've realized as I've gotten older and poorer. Then, the politics are safely abstract.
And I think even a book that is frankly in opposition is different from a book that's in opposition in passing - I'll read your classic "the women are in charge and it's a nightmare" stories, sure, but the stories where it's casually assumed that women are dumb and disposable, or that a detailed rape scene is necessary for character development, etc, are much harder to take. As heebie observes, those things make it much harder to lose yourself in the story, because you spend your time wondering if you, in the world of the story, would have been raped and murdered, etc etc.
Back in the dark ages of the eighties, when there was very little widely available feminist science fiction, I used to be able to both read the story and accept that women were, like, pointless unless they were sexy and subservient, but this was actually bad for me and I don't do it any more. If I can't ignore the bad politics enough to suspend my disbelief, I don't bother, usually. (Conservative fantasy writer Gene Wolfe is pretty much the only exception, but he's an amazing writer so I try to ignore the creepiness.)
SPOILER FOR AN OLD ROBERTSON DAVIES NOVEL FOLLOWS
I mean, everyone's tolerance is different and changes over time. I was thinking about this a bit since I was remembering a non-SF book, Robertson Davies's The Rebel Angels. When I was a teenager I loved that book, even though I was not super into how Davies wrote women. Now I read the murder scene and, because I am an Old and consequently am less caught up in "how do I live in the world, how do I be myself", I find it too horrifying to tolerate. I can't maintain any interest in the villain guy. He's a torturer and I feel only repulsion, so the philosophical blah-blah that he spouts and the upending that he brings to the staid university are totally uninteresting to me. That book is, at least for now, utterly dead to me.
And yet I loved it so much when I was younger! I was super into the university world it depicted, the weird people, the odd kinds of knowledge.
In reverse, I've gotten much more into older science fiction as I've aged, which is part of why I don't buy into the "youth of today don't like older SF because older SF is dead now". I used to think anything before the New Wave was stupid and retrograde, but have become very interested in Bester and other proto-New Wave writers, and in the oddball stories of the thirties and forties. Basically, I needed some historical and genre grounding before I could find it interesting or get anything out of it.
And one more comment, since everyone else is at dinner or watching fireworks: What's weird about the "young people read old SF" is that the young people don't seem to read the stories as anything but very straightforward narratives of the world. With one exception - someone mentions that Lorimer in the Tiptree story is an unreliable narrator - none of them seem to understand any of the stories as critical or satirical. Even with the Tiptree story, this seems to escape them - it isn't just Russ from a man's point of view, it's a depressing and a bit heavy-handed critique of a certain kind of man's point of view.
I mean, I think that all the readers seem to see the purpose of SF primarily as describing "new" technologies in a straightforward manner, with people's reactions described in a very straightforward and truthful way. This particularly stands out in their responses to "That Only A Mother", which is a very strange little story, and which is not a negative depiction of women but rather a story about the threat of domestic violence and the dismissal of women's perspectives.
I feel like my English classes in HS emphasized reading for tone and meaning more than maybe English classes do today? I remember having a really dumb reading of Wuthering Heights (a book I still dislike intensely) but I also remember that I could handle Golden Age SF like the Merrill pretty well.
Yes -- I think that last one is right about what they're doing. I'm not dead sure of why they're doing it, but I think something about the genre is throwing them (even though they're readers of modern day SF). I can't imagine they'd be missing the point of non-genre fiction in the same way. Do you think maybe the datedness is signaling lack of sophistication generally to them, so they're not seeing the way in which the stories are complex?
none of them seem to understand any of the stories as critical or satirical
Honestly, life is making it hard to learn what satire is lately.
I think part of it is definitely the way older stories are structured around a "big reveal" - even when it's a pretty good big reveal. (You know what has the best big reveal I have ever read in an SF novel? NK Jemisin's widely and correctly praised Fifth Season. I am telling you, I thrilled to just about every aspect of that book, from its grim and sad politics to its creepy send-up of children's schools for magic to its incorporation of trans characters (or trans-for-that-world anyway) to the big reveal at the very end.)
What I notice about SF today is that there's a lot more stuff that is accessible/"mainstream" and good. Like the NK Jemisin - that book is super accessible - it's fast-paced, it's written in flowing, contemporary, straightforward prose, it doesn't make you guess about what the characters are thinking or feeling. It's an extremely innovative book which packs a tremendous amount about grief, rage, race and loss into one of the most interestingly built worlds I've encountered. I mean, it's just that good.
It belongs on the shelf with Delany or Russ, but it's different from them - Delany and Russ are drawing really heavily from, for example, the modernist writers, their books are more weirdly structured, their language is trickier. Jemisin seems to be far more in dialogue with contemporary SF and contemporary fiction (most obviously Toni Morrison) Delany and Russ are not "big reveal" writers generally, but their work requires effort to read. (A little more like Sofia Samatar in this regard.)
I think that the issue with, say, pre-mid-90s SF is that the audiences are either people who want the difficult-weird (people who are very into a lineage of SF that would include Bester, Delany, Russ) or they're into fantasy-sensawonda. Either way they're nerds. Right now, the SF audience is much broader - there's lots of the difficult-weird, but there's also the smart-accessible (Njedi Okorafor, for instance). So people who would previously have been interested in the difficult-weird are not in fact a primary SFnal audience anymore.
I feel like I should do something to celebrate America and dystopia. But in my neighborhood you fire a few rounds into the air, nobody even stops to ask if it was just birdshot before calling the cops.
I have no fireworks. I do have rocket engines, like the kind of kids to use to make cardboard rockets. Can you use those without rockets?
I'm going to a baseball doubleheader with fireworks afterward.
150: Wow, will that even be through by this time next year?
My neighbors - in my crowded urban neighborhood of wooden balloon frame houses - are setting off rockets.
Do we have police around to tell them to knock it off? Of course not. Do we have police available on a day to day basis to, like, harass homeless people? Sure!
And of course, my room is at the back of the house, second floor, so the rockets are are basically exploding just above my window.
When I was younger, we shot rockets over our backyard. But they went too far and started a fire in the hay field behind our house. We didn't get in trouble because a friend of ours noticed the fire and put it out before anybody called 911. He didn't even know we started the fire. He was just really civic minded.
I was driving through Missouri just over a week ago. It was hard not to stop and pick up illegal fireworks.
The foul balls are sponsored by Carl's Jr.
teo! So sorry didn't email or reply on other thread re kid's summer plans but work roiled up as it does - kid is working on caribe-Fr dictionary and having a lovely time - he's putting caribe & fr from scan of manuscript into a spreadsheet then adding his own translation of the fr all destined to eventually end up in some database. cannot remember name of author of dict, some moine dude I imagine. the reading for the history of fr lang course is interesting and amusing. The Fr have a tortured relationship with their language from the perspective of linguists, that's for sure!
Re op - I continue to be puzzled by my own enjoyment of hist fiction (p Fitzgerald, s townsend-warner, h mantel, f spuffird, a gazillion others i am sure) whilst not being able to muster anything other than "nope" for science fiction. Anyways, the h mantel reith lectures are interesting listening.
How much to they have to pay to get a batter to hit a foul?
143: Wolfe is a good case. The politics of the Sun books are shitty, but they're just so sublime I will not give a fuck. The politics of his recent work are just as deplorable, but I won't put up with it, because the stories are shitty. So what do I really care about: the work, or the politics? Furthermore, it's not even a case of separating the art and the artist: the politics and the worldview are inherent to the Sun books.
157: Judging by how much these guys foul, must be a lot.
I get the impression that young people aren't all that good at making inferences in their reading. I say this having read their reviews on that site and from my work tutoring high school students. Young people really find it annoying if the author fails to explain everything for them in easy bite size chunks. I find modern science fiction annoying, because everything has to be spelled out explicitly which gets tedious fast.
Young people also aren't used to putting things in context. It's one thing to judge the author or the society for which the author was writing, but there's a great deal that can be learned by exploring the context. That's often half the fun. Of course, this involves making inferences, something young people aren't taught to do these days any more than they are taught the parts of speech.
I always appreciated John Patrick Shanley who said, "There's a certain kind of faith that you get from reading science fiction. It often starts with something like, 'Botar hit the Ella button, and Gima appeared at sunset.' And you're like, I have no idea what they're talking about. But I know that I will. And that serves you very well when you go on to read French philosophy." Modern science fiction obviates this.
First game done. They only went seven innings for some reason.
147: Only don't read the back cover of The Obelisk Gate, because that gives away the same information with a lot less art.
I put down The Obelisk Gate about two thirds of the way through because of the pointless horribleness of one character's actions (interestingly, not the one who has essentially destroyed the world). I was just done. I haven't felt that betrayed by a book and character since Stormbringer.
It's a very strong book -- it wouldn't produce that kind of reaction if it weren't -- but it was no longer for me.
I think the first woman with a speaking role in A Canticle for Leibowitz shows up more than halfway through and is identified as "Lady Reporter". I read it recently and there some lines along which I think it held up well.
I've gotten much more into older science fiction as I've aged, which is part of why I don't buy into the "youth of today don't like older SF because older SF is dead now".
See, this is basically the reverse of me. I took a kind of Haeckelian approach and recapitulated the history of SF - so the first SF I think I read was Verne, "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", and Conan Doyle "The Lost World", then some HG Wells short stories that were lying around, then Asimov and Clarke and Bradbury and Heinlein, then Le Guin and Niven, then the British Space Opera wave...
Frowner makes a lot of good points here - but I wonder if the difference is that these children have been trained to think that, if they read something that they disagree with or that they don't like or think is unrealistic, it is perfectly OK and indeed laudable to switch to "immediate and total disapproval" and refuse to read any more. No-platforming, etc.
See, this is basically the reverse of me. I took a kind of Haeckelian approach and recapitulated the history of SF - so the first SF I think I read was Verne, "Journey to the Centre of the Earth", and Conan Doyle "The Lost World", then some HG Wells short stories that were lying around, then Asimov and Clarke and Bradbury and Heinlein, then Le Guin and Niven, then the British Space Opera wave...
Pretty similar for me, though I think Asimov was the first I read in any depth, and Verne I only absorbed through film adaptations. I didn't read any contemporary/new release sci-fi until my late teens, I think. I still don't read a lot, if you don't count comics.
77: the future technology relies on super-centralisation extrapolated from the mainframe model they were familiar with.
This part of why I was quite impressed with Poul Anderson's "Epilogue" from 1962--humans return to an Earth of silicon life evolved from autonomous ocean-going mining vessels. Review and synopsis here.
"Siri, what is the 'Butlerian Jihad'?"
I started out with what my father had on his shelves: Wells, Verne, and lots of the wonderful cosy catastrophes from the 1950s and 60s. Those still hold up better for me than Asimov and Clarke or all the 1970s stuff from the library I then devoured as a young teen, probably because John Wyndham and John Christopher were more interested in the effect of a given situation on their characters' relationships and development than in its scientific implications. It's a difficulty I have with some of Charles Stross's books, for example - although I enjoy the world-building, you get pages and pages of what feels like extended note-taking on "so how WOULD this work in practice?"
if they read something that they disagree with or that they don't like or think is unrealistic, it is perfectly OK and indeed laudable to switch to "immediate and total disapproval" and refuse to read any more
I do that now. Not that I don't ever read things that I disagree with, but why read something fictional if you don't enjoy it? I don't have book reports anymore. If there is a piece that you need to understand for cultural/civic reasons, you can just read the Wikipedia entry on it.
When I was a kid, the local library was so small that I really was desperate for things to read. I'm very happy the internet killed that situation.
t's a difficulty I have with some of Charles Stross's books, for example - although I enjoy the world-building, you get pages and pages of what feels like extended note-taking on "so how WOULD this work in practice?"
Sounds like I should read some Charles Stross.
RGB Mars are both character and scientific-implicatiion driven. Although I don't think of them as any kind of literary masterwork, I've always been fond of them.
I don't know what you're talking about, but it made me think of "Ruth Baden Ginsburg on Mars." Somebody needs to write that. Because what did she do before being on the court?
Bader. Unless she wore a scout uniform.
I should write some non-fiction today.
143. And I think even a book that is frankly in opposition is different from a book that's in opposition in passing
I really like that distinction. In passing, your comment about the Davies book is one reason I hated "Hannibal."
147. I haven't read much Jemison, but that sounds intriguing. Onto the "to-read" list it goes.
165. My first SF (not counting the previously mentioned Tom Swift) was Heinlein juveniles, and then Andre Norton (starting with "The Time Traders"). I also took a giant detour towards Edgar Rice Burroughs when they started reprinting the John Carter books. Even at my tender age I could see they were awful writing but nonetheless... (If there were five pages left in the book you knew that Dejah Thoris would be kidnapped and rescued again before the end.)
169. you get pages and pages of what feels like extended note-taking on "so how WOULD this work in practice?"
If you read Stross's blog you will see he does exactly that, followed by hundreds of reader posts critiquing his ideas, many of which he responds to.
173: It's better when you read more of KSR's works and realize that he's been refining the same story (or maybe two or three stories), over and over again, polishing out the rough edges to make it more human. He's become a bit more pessimistic as he's aged, I think, though.
Now I read the murder scene and, because I am an Old and consequently am less caught up in "how do I live in the world, how do I be myself", I find it too horrifying to tolerate.
I had the same reaction with that overhyped Swedish whodunnit writer whose stuff was published posthumously and whose name I can't remember. Somebody gave me all three one Christmas and I gave them to Oxfam with the second and third unopened. Gratuitously nasty. (There were other things I disliked about the one I did read, but that was up there.)
On the other hand, I read The Obelisk Gate maybe not happily, but I was fine with it, because the nastiness didn't seem gratuitous.
165: On zero-platforming:
Honestly, because of the disingenuity of the right, the zero-platform discussion always gets to be as stupid as possible. Normal humans with decent values could probably agree that unless there's a specific reason, one ought not to be required to read or listen to material that is substantially premised on hatred of women/POC/queer people, etc. That is, if I'm going to say, "hey everybody, let's read some interesting science fiction to interest you in science fiction!", there's no reason for me to choose something that has a substantial transphobic section (a la some 70s feminist SF) or has, as a major plot point, the only character of color being a sort of earthy, primitive madwoman who is full of terrible ideas (like the otherwise very interesting Benefits, by Zoe Fairbairns - seriously, I can see what she thinks she's doing, and it's an interesting book, but I can't in good conscience recommend it for casual reading.)
And what's more, I'd argue that people of normal values can agree that where there's solid alternates to racist/sexist/hateful "classics", it's better to choose the alternates for general purposes, because you avoid minority stress and the tedious need to go through and point out that yes, here's another story that uses rape as a character development moment for the rapist, etc. So if I were doing a science fiction survey (something which is necessarily limited, because you can't, like, read all the important books) I'd choose important books with minimum hateful content. You don't want to be actively misleading - Joanna Russ was huge, for instance, and so was Kate Wilhelm, but Josephine Saxton was not. It would be reasonable to do a survey which foregrounded major women and/or POC writers; it would be misleading to do a survey which suggested that Josephine Saxton was a major writer.
I had an interesting experience a few years ago when a trans woman friend joined the class that I ran and pretty much immediately pointed out all the "woman-born woman" stuff that is implicit in most seventies feminist SF. I like that SF! I was surprised by how defensive I got, actually, and by how much I wanted to minimize her views. (You don't get much "man-born man" stuff in science fiction, because frankly since cis men don't want to fuck us and cis women don't want to be us, we are a surplus quantity and there's no reason to put us in books.)
And the funny thing was that she wasn't even all "let's not read these", she was just sharing what she noticed and experienced, and the fact that it made her feel (very reasonably) excluded from the "women's utopia" world of the books.
I think that one reason the left is pushed into zero-platforming is that the right's idea (and the defensive person's idea) is that problems should not be mentioned at all - there's no middle ground. Another reason is that it's tedious to be like, "here is another worthy and interesting feminist SF story which is also transphobic!!!" I kind of zero-platformed much seventies feminist SF for the class after that, because we only had a couple of hours and we couldn't really get to everything if the whole class was "let's deconstruct this", and I didn't feel great about saying "hey, now that there are several transfeminine people in the class, would you please agree not to mention this aspect of your experience so that we can read classics of feminist SF".
Basically, I think almost everyone with normal moral sensibilities would agree on something like, "when there's no particular reason to assign or read something that has substantial hateful content, people should be free to decline to read it, and when it makes sense to read something as part of a survey or for other reasons, people should be prepared to read and discuss troubling material, while acknowledging that it is troubling. Also, we should all contextualize what we read, so that we can distinguish, for instance, a book that was gay-friendly for 1970 that seems kind of weird in 2017 from a book that was homophobic for 1970."
Obviously, there's going to be a certain amount of argument about what "substantial" content is, and what a good reason to assign something is, but it still involves accepting that we take a text's racism/misogyny/homophobia/etc into account when choosing what we assign, and that's what the right doesn't like.
Eventually I'm going to develop and teach a seventies feminist-SF centric course, and when I do that, I'll explain in the course description that we'll be reading some implicitly transphobic material and that white seventies feminist SF writers were well-intentioned about race but not totally awesome. I'll also emphasize the "accidentally transphobic" work rather than the "I am aware that trans women exist and actively want to demonize and exclude them" work.
(A side note: one reason that transphobic seventies feminist SF causes minority stress is that it is the direct outgrowth of threats against trans women in the feminist movement - and in the main stream of the feminist movement, not the TERF fringes as today. You can't just bracket that stuff if you know that it grows from a violent and hateful part of the movement, particularly if it was aimed at you. It's kind of heavy-duty to ask someone to read that stuff - not quite on par with asking a Black viewer to sit through, say, Birth of a Nation in a film studies class, but not totally removed from that, either.)
It's a shame I'm not local for your (past and future) classes -- it sounds as if you're covering a lot of stuff I read as a teenager, and that I'd be interested in looking at again from a my current perspective.
Are you thinking of having a mid-life crisis and reverting to teenage-ism in general?
The whole ethos of obviously corrupt, horrible authority figures demanding everybody demonstrate "respect" for them is making me want to act like the protagonist in the horrible 80s movie instead of a responsible adult.
I don't think I used "ethos" correctly. Maybe I meant "zeitgeist"?
182 makes a lot of sense - but I'm talking about taking the attitude and applying it not only to stuff that is actually deliberately hateful, but to anything that you disagree with in any way. So yes, absolutely "one ought not to be required to read or listen to material that is substantially premised on hatred of women/POC/queer people" and such should be not set aside lightly but hurled aside with great force (/parker), but the cited reviews seem to take the same attitude to "This author has got something wrong about the climate on Venus" or "this is a story about four straight Anglo guys". Too unforgiving not only of hatred but of error or changing culture.
The whole ethos of obviously corrupt, horrible authority figures demanding everybody demonstrate "respect" for them
In the Darkest Timeline, America groans beneath the rule of Evil Aretha Franklin.
I usually regret it when I take a contrarian attitude around here (not because people are mean to me or anything, you generally aren't, but just because the hive mind is usually right), but I want to defend the kids of today.
they don't seem like a particularly nuanced or sensitive reader
This was originally said of Mikayla, but could apply equally well to several others. To which I'd say: yes, and? Young people generally aren't very nuanced. I assumed that a non-nuanced view was expected in this experiment. And yet, as people have said, plenty of teens loved this classic SF when it was new and it was mainly marketed to them. Clearly something has changed. It could be that the kids of today are dumb, but given that that gets used to explain thousands of positions and most of them are reactionary, I wouldn't start by assuming that.
I hold them to the same standards that I do modern stories. this is ... kinda comically weird? like if what you're grading the stories on is "how closely do they approximate to my political views" then yes the further away from your time and place you get the less they will agree with you.
True, and this is a good defense of most works set in the present day or in the past, but a lot of the SF we're talking about here is set in some version of the future. Being wrong about how some technology will work is merely quaint, but being wrong about what kind of things matter is ridiculous. Most of these writers seem to think that everyday life would be changed more by atomic rockets than by feminism and racial equality. It's not like social change was unheard of in the 40s and 50s, either, or like everyone was equally wrong about and surprised by this stuff. It grates on me a bit when I read old SF. Not "I'm offended by this," but makes it harder to care about the story or take its message seriously.
Disclaimers: Mikayla is the worst, agreed. And I'm assuming that most of the readers are high school students or college undergraduates. Someone upthread said that Mikayla was in 12th grade 10 years ago, but I have no idea if all these young people are the same age or in the same place in their lives. The blogger says that 1980 is "well before any of my volunteers were born", which puts an upper limit of 37 on them, which is still a big range. If they're actually all grad students or otherwise more adult, I'd be less generous to them.
Young people generally aren't very nuanced.
Young people are the worst, except for old people.
183: You could always move to Minneapolis! I am told that it's much cheaper than NYC, and we have light rail now.
Actually, I was thinking again about Heebie's first contention that SF dates more than other fiction, and I think that in one way it definitely does - not because of the sense of wonder, but because SF is essentially a didactic/mobilizing literature.
I would argue that you need to grow as a reader - or at least shut up about science fiction - if your response to, say, Red Star is "but we know Mars isn't like that, also that's not how spaceships work, this sucks". Or if you read, say, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand and can't experience the old sensawonda because, like, technology hasn't developed in the real world as it did in Marq Dyeth's. You experience the wonder through Marq Dyeth or Rat Korga, not as yourself, because this is fiction, about characters. Just like if you read, say, James Herriot's account of how he was totally blown away by the power of antibiotics when they came on the market and how amazing it was to be able to draw animals back from the brink of death, and the changes this made for small farmers, you are kind of a dumbo if you respond by saying "but antibiotics are old hat, this sucks". You experience Herriot's wonder and that's the whole point.
But because SF is intended to be a mobilizing literature, once it has mobilized, some of its power goes, and I think that's the key. And that's why its power sometimes comes back - consider The Handmaid's Tale. When I first read it in the nineties, I really wasn't very impressed - the premise seemed so unlikely, the religious right seemed substantially discredited and of course, the US government seemed as solid as a rock. It seemed really boring as both science fiction and moral tale. Even in the age of AIDS, "lesbians get put into camps and then sent to clean up toxic waste until they all die", seemed really unlikely. Now, of course, it feels very different - I'm not experiencing it as I would have in the early eighties, but I really no longer feel 100% certain that I won't end my life in a prison camp. (It's not something that I'm seriously worried about, but both that and 'getting shot randomly because I am visibly queer' are things that I have started to believe could happen to me given a lot of very, very bad luck.)
I think that some science fiction kind of does die, if it's only animated by ideas that are discredited. My group read "The Lake of the Gone Forever", which appears in the more historical of the Women of Wonder anthologies, and while we found it interesting as a historical piece, it's mostly dead as SF, since it rests on ideas about romance and foreignness that really do seem to be products of the early 20th century West. Oddly, the discredited science is what makes it appealing - the weird lake, the snowy planet, etc. But it's a very period appeal.
I also think that SF is far more likely to die when it's written by, eg, a white person to get other white people to sympathize about racism, because there isn't much there there, except the mobilization, and that is so dependent on the understanding of the moment. It's really difficult for straight people, for instance, to write viewpoint queer characters - and when they make the whole story about homophobia, the viewpoint queer characters are more likely to be defined by their queerness and thus even less realistic. Like, I can accept that any given queer person might have really atypical experiences and viewpoints, but it's a lot easier to accept this when the bulk of the story is about how they're an astrophysicist instead of about their musings on their sexuality.
You have only to compare how Marge Piercy writes Native people in her early work with how Craig Strete writes them to see this in action. (With some exceptions - for instance, an excerpt from Terry Bisson's excellent Fire On The Mountain was included in Octavia's Brood, and I think that's the only piece by a white writer that they chose. But then, it's an awfully good book by a writer with long experience as an ally to Black liberation projects.)
Evil Aretha Franklin
At the head of a "Natural Woman" dystopia?
184: Thinking about it? I've been sulkily muttering "You're not the boss of me" at everyone I have to deal with for a year now.
193: That last paragraph lost a sentence, which is why it appears that Terry Bisson is an exception to Marge Piercy and Craig Strete.
The thing that's irritating about the whole "Young People Read Old SF" thing is that "young people do Old People Thing" is always framed as a referendum on the old thing. Like, if the moral of the YPROS deal is "young people are not always nuanced readers and don't always have the cultural background necessary to enjoy older work; but also, the audience for science fiction has changed, and so has the most common style; and also, some of the biases that were either normalized when the Olds were reading or that the Olds did not have cultural traction to protest are objectionable to the kids today", that's modestly interesting, but no one puts a blog together to draw that conclusion. It's always, "Ha, that dumb thing is for OLDS, look at the youth reveal its failings!!!!", which produces nothing but hatred and internet garbage. Incites hatred, really, because it takes groups of readers who could probably say interesting things to each other and sets them at stupid generational loggerheads.
In re Mikayla: at least she cares about what she's reading. You could say that about all of them, actually. I guess I'd much prefer that Kids Today be vigorously and maybe sorta-excessively critical of books than indifferent. Also, memory seems to suggest that I was kind of similar as a young reader except that I didn't have a blog.
consider The Handmaid's Tale. When I first read it in the nineties, I really wasn't very impressed - the premise seemed so unlikely, the religious right seemed substantially discredited and of course, the US government seemed as solid as a rock.
I'm envious of that aspect of your experience of the 90s. We were a Rush Limbaugh household.
One of the reasons I enjoyed the YPROSF blog is that Nichols' relative invisibility resolutely avoids both the "why are millennials killing Applebee's!" and "Gen X-ers, your childhood memories suck" framings. He picks stories and provides some straightforward background and lets the kids get to it, staying out of the way.
Applebee's is O.K. at frying onions, but that's a really low bar. It probably needs to be killed.
Young people generally aren't very nuanced.
I feel like I want to push back against this a bit. In the Victorian literature class I mentioned way up thread, we were a bunch of 18-20 year olds. We were able to engage with the novels and stories in a way that went beyond "Ohhh! Bad racist sexist Victorians! Bad!" Even while acknowledging that there were a lot of implicit and explicit racist and sexist attitudes on display.
There's not some iron clad law stating that you must take the bluntest possible approach to reading until you turn 25.
consider The Handmaid's Tale. When I first read it in the nineties, I really wasn't very impressed - the premise seemed so unlikely
Well, unless you're Iranian or Afghan or something.
Am I misremembering, or did Atwood actually explicitly say that The Handmaid's Tale was partly inspired by what happened to educated Westernised women in Iran in 1979?
I've recently read The Clansman, the novel that the (1st) Birth of a Nation movie is based on. There is the deliberate, overt racism. And then there's stuff where I'm not even sure Dixon realized he was being racist. He'll talk about what society thinks of some character, and it's clear only white folks count for that.
201: But the point is, it didn't have mobilizing power for me at that time, because the political situation it described seemed unlikely. And it's very obviously about the dangers of American fundamentalism - it's intended as a warning book, like Animal Farm. That's not all that it is, but it's far more intended as a warning book than, say, A Tale of Two Cities, another book about political crisis in a society not the author's own. The Dickens is critical of the trends that produced the French Revolution, but he's not really trying to say "this more or less literally could happen in England in the medium term future given the way things are going".
Atwood isn't just thinking "this was something extreme that happened in the Middle East in the late seventies, let's set it in the US because that would be dramatic since it's so unlikely!!!" And she isn't thinking "how can I best dramatize these events that took place in Iran", either. She's extrapolating American trends as a warning and a criticism.
To me that's what's exciting about less recent books - they have to potential to spring to life again, or to spring to life elsewhere, and that's part of why I'm so skeptical of the whole "oh, that's just boring garbage for Olds, it could never speak to the youth of today with their internet and innovative musical stylings". Not only do I think this is literally untrue, but telling ourselves that it is true is politically bad - kids today aren't stupid, but dinning into their heads that of course the politics of the past are completely discredited, retrograde and bad, and the artistic forms of the past are so old as to be virtually incomprehensible is an attempt to reduce their ability to read and repurpose.
If it isn't important enough to have a detailed plot summary on Wikipedia, is it even "literature"?
Am I too late to ask whether "dated" and "tuned to different consumer sensibilities" are distinguishable? Which one might call a roundabout way of pitching a new website: "Hip Millennials Read Jack Reacher and Other Father's Day Classics."
I tried Jack Reacher. It was just too Gary Stu for me to read again.
I find them very realistic, he typed, flexing.
202. I haven't watched the new Handmaid's Tale but word of mouth reports indicate that the treatment of women and gays in it is even more extreme than in the book, in ways that indicate they've been following the latest trends in misogyny in the ISIS-controlled part of the Middle East and Africa.
147 last: Indeed. Which led me to realize his books are written in exactly the voice of his blog, and his blog contains everything that goes into the books, just delivered more efficiently. So I stopped reading his books. Then his blog turned into an echo chamber, and I stopped reading that. And now I have more time to complain about non-fiction instead.
143: Robertson Davies's The Rebel Angels. When I was a teenager I loved that book, even though I was not super into how Davies wrote women.
I liked that book (and the whole trilogy) as well. I think Davies' limitation isn't simply that he can't write women as that he has a very hard time writing in the voice of anyone other than a comfortably well settled middle aged bachelor. Someone much like, say, Robertson Davies. You don't so much notice it when he's writing middle aged bachelors, but when he attempts the inner voice of a 23 year old female graduate student, the effect is odd.
193: I've read hardly any SF since I was a teenager but sometimes have oddly specific memories of those books. I remember thinking, while reading Heinlein's If This Goes On..., that the set-up seemed very implausible, i.e. that religious theocracy was not the sort of thing any significant number of Americans would be drawn to. And also finding implausible the bit in Methuselah's Children where the scrupulously libertarian society (that replaces the theocracy) promptly throws civil liberties out the window when it imagines that the the secret of the Howards' extended lifespans might be something that could be prised out of them by torture. "There's no way that rules against torture would be eroded so easily!" You live and learn, I guess. (Also shows that writers whose views generally get up one's nose can have moments of insight.)
But who is the Tolkien of the Gen Zs?
...Sorry, I've been spending too much time on Twitter without reading books and can't comment other than in one-liners anymore.
Surprisingly, turns out it's Tolstoy as well.
Tolstoy is also the Dostoyevsky of the Russians.
Dostoyevsky, on the other hand? The Dostoyevsky of the Albanians. Or at least one of the Dostoyevskies of the Albanians. It turns out there are several.
Dostoyevsky is the Dickens of the Russians.
What is Uber for Dostoyevsky, though?
Great. One more thing I got to look up.
That's certainly where I got it from.
The answer to "Who is the Shaka of the Russians?" is "Putin".
213. Some brave soul should read (or re-read) Heinlein's 1970 novel "I Will Fear No Evil." It has (IIRC) a sort-of-trans person (via brain transplant!), gay Supreme Court justices, lots of squick-inducing sex, and barrels of "philosophy."
I'd be interested in seeing Mikayla's reaction to it.
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The Amazon multipart documentary on the Dead is really very good indeed.
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The Amazon multipart documentary on the Dead is really very good indeed.
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Better, even, than a multipart comment would suggest.
But, on the original topic, has anyone else read Jo Walton's "Amongst Others" in which the heroine reads all of the classic SF and gets it, although this takes place in, I think, the eighties.
And what do today's kids make of the Gibson sprawl trilogy (the pay phones ringing all in a line as the hero walks past them in Istanbul airport)? I am not allowed to use the nearest teenagers for the experiment because they would be put off by the fake Japanese bits.
I really liked Handmaid's Tale when I read it in the 80s, but I scoffed at people who thought it told us anything about what would really happen. I'm now embarrassed at how certain I was.
I don't think that there's anything wrong with not wanting to read old fiction because lack of representation. It's just not interesting to read about.
lots of squick-inducing sex, and barrels of "philosophy."
Aren't these sort of gimmes for Heinlein?
233: If there is one way in which I was really, really politically wrong for most of my life, it is having underestimated the way that people would really rather have kind of a horrible time than a nice one. I mean, The Handmaid's Tale isn't even that fun for the people at the top of the heap - certainly not as fun as being rich and powerful in a normal society would be. I get the "I would like to be as rich as possible so I can do whatever I want" thing, because I too like to do as I please. But I did not account for the instinct of the right for creating a horrible time for all concerned - that repression, poverty of outlook, actual poverty, boredom, boring culture, boring food, lack of access to sex and relationships, uncomfortable clothes, no dancing and so on would be things that many Americans would actually want for themselves when other options existed.
I mean, that was basically why The Handmaid's Tale didn't chime for me - at the time it seemed that the forces of good times had won, and that the worst we had to expect was regular extreme capitalism.
it is having underestimated the way that people would really rather have kind of a horrible time than a nice one
Yes. In graduate school, instead of something only marginally pointless like philosophy, I spent time looking at game theory. When they do the prisoner's dilemma games, they always present the failure to get the best outcome as the result of difficulties in achieving and monitoring cooperation. They do allow for players who are willing to pay a cost just to punish the other player, but they teach it as being a matter of punishing non-cooperation to ensure future cooperation as opposed to "I'll pay a cost to punish that guy because fuck that guy."
"Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven"?
Literature really does get some important insights into human nature.
It's just some of it is way too wordy.
It's why I only read high quality literary criticism.
Certainly easier than reading thousands of lines of blank verse.
229, 230: On the other hand, there are also reasons for hope. I wouldn't have thought that there would be a mass-market for multi-part documentaries about a short story by Joyce.
162: I read The Obelisk Gate recently and I have no idea what horribleness you speak of.
232: I liked the parts of Among Others that weren't just a tedious list of all the books the protagonist just adored, which is to say maybe 10% of the text.
243: In rot13, just in cast someone is still reading the thread, and wants to read the book.
Jura Anffha xvyyf rirelbar ng gur Nagnepgvp Shypehz.
It's around page 268-270 in the edition that I have. It's not even the most horrible thing in the two books so far, and I'm not pretending that my reaction is anything other than idiosyncratic. But it put me right out of the book.
In regard to Among Others, which characters other than the narrator are real?
I think the all of the goings-on in that plot thread are meant to be unsettling. The story is almost like a twist on Star Wars where Yoda may be worse than Palpatine.
That's a really good comparison.
I haven't put The Obelisk Gate downstairs with the finished books yet, so there's a chance that I will go back to it. I don't doubt that it's a really strong book, maybe even a great one. It just may not be one for me.
I am not allowed to use the nearest teenagers for the experiment because they would be put off by the fake Japanese bits.
That's putting it a little strongly, darling. It was a prediction rather than an interdiction.
Dostoevsky is one of those cases where you really have to try to separate the person from the work. Anti-semitic, Islamophobic, anti-democratic, pro-theocratic, and a relentless womaniser, he'd fit right in with the present US administration. If somebody told you that the cabinet member you personally hate most was one of the greatest novelists of all time, would you give his stuff a try? Could you put what you know about the guy out of your mind sufficiently to judge the books entirely on their own merit?
Anti-semitic, Islamophobic, anti-democratic, pro-theocratic
Well, he was a 19th century Russian. That's sort of par for the course. I mean, Marlowe and Shakespeare thought it was perfectly OK to stab someone in the throat if he disrespected you.
Anyway, this thread leads me to renew my call for a 1 to 1 Trump:Culture balance in future posts.
Trade Surplus
No More Mr Nice Guy
So Much For Subtlety
Unfortunate Conflict Of Evidence
A Series Of Unlikely Explanations
Just Another Victim Of The Ambient Morality
Refreshingly Unconcerned With the Vulgar Exigencies of Veracity
247: OK unable, not forbidden
244: I think that all of them are -- or did you mean, which ones are credible, to which I would reply that it's told from a teenager's POV so of course no one else is properly real.
My bias is pretty obvious since the books that Jo Walton squees about are largely the same ones I do or did. I spent a lot of money after reading her collected blog posts of enthusiastic criticism and I regret very little of it.
236: The technical term for "because fuck that guy" in experimental game theory is "strong reciprocity". I used to think it was basically benign, but it really is a big part of the hostility towards something like the ACA.
255.2: That's what I thought at first, too, but then I wondered things like: Does the boyfriend character really see the fairies, or does he just say he does out of ulterior and prurient motives? Does the mother do all of the magical things, or is the narrator being unreliable there? Do we readers trust that the narrator is having magical experiences? Do we trust that the narrator had a twin sister? It got to be an interesting rabbit-hole.
I, too, have spent a good bit based on What Makes This Book So Great, and do not regret it either.
229 It is. Darker than I was expecting. Not that I shouldn't have expected dark.
257: Huh, I had a pretty strong assumption that we were supposed to give all of those questions but one a no. I don't remember the story well enough to be sure why I feel sure, though.
Does the boyfriend character really see the fairies, or does he just say he does out of ulterior and prurient motives?
I sort of want to read this book to see how seeing fairies gets you to where you can advance prurient motives. But I probably won't.
261 is pretty much the plot of Little, Big
The further in you go, the bigger it gets.
I don't think the mother does do the magical things, and the boyfriend -- not sure. Lust can surely provoke hallucinations and grant entry without an exit visa into another person's imagination.
Little, Big is an intensely annoying book. The world-building is interesting, the language is great, it's vivid and unique, and yet the whole thing has this masturbatory-material feel that pervades even totally non-sexual scenes. Every once in a while I try to reread it because I remember certain bits of it so vividly, but then I get to one more sleazy, improbable scene and have to stop. I would say that Little, Big contains some of the worst, most unrealistic depictions of female characters that I've ever read in a fantasy novel.
Unlike Gene Wolfe - a conservative writer whose work I generally enjoy - he doesn't really seem to hate women. It's weird. Wolfe obviously distrusts most women and believes that pretty much all of them are natural liars, no good at careers, constantly self-serving, etc, and yet I am not nearly as uncomfortable with how he writes women as I am with how Crowley does.
Now that I think about it, I have very few novels of any kind by male authors who write a lot about women's interiority, and most of the ones I can think of screw it up. I mean, there are many male novelists whose work I enjoy - maybe not as many as there are women novelists, now that I think about it - but they tend to write women characters from the outside and with some caution. In SF, Samuel Delany writes pretty good viewpoint women characters, but not that many of them - most of them, I think, in the Neveryona books. China Mieville isn't that good at interiority in general, IMO, and although I appreciate that he made Bellis Coldwine the viewpoint character in The Scar, she is not really a success.
Having seen what wish-fulfillment hay men (especially straight ones) tend to make when they're trying to write women, I am as a result deeply skeptical of white people's attempts to write viewpoint characters of color, etc. It's not that writing from a standpoint very different than your own can't be done, but it's much more difficult to do well than people are willing to admit to themselves.
However, if anyone is looking for a successful yet rather odd book by a man who writes pretty good women characters (at least in my opinion as an AFAB person; it's a funny position to be in for this kind of thing), I recommend City of Blades, by Robert Jackson Bennett. City of Stairs, the first book in the series, has a tragic gay character with a physical disability who dies needlessly as a plot point, so while it's an inventive book I'm not as enthused about it. But City of Blades is really pretty weird - I like the viewpoint woman character and the Fantasy World Silicon Valley Entrepreneur woman character, and it's a book that gets surprisingly serious for a basically light fantasy adventure.
I read four pages of Little, Big before I said "What is this shit?", and stopped. I don't remember why, exactly.
See, I can write as compelling literary analysis as any teenager.
265.3: Frowner, what do you think of Anthony Trollope's women? The virtuous young maidens are an easy lift, but I like Miss Mackenzie, and several of the mothers of the maidens, and Madame Max Goesler before she becomes too infatuated with Phineas.... actually I'm never convinced by Phineas' charisma, although that happens to me with real people so it doesn't seem like a failure of the novelist.
Not SF/F but what do folks think of Patrick O'Brien's women? I think I prefer no women characters to poorly written ones. His early books didn't really have many women which was great. I have mixed feelings about Diana and Sophie - they don't quite ring true and I can't figure out why. I did love that one lady with the skeleton who turned out to be a real person.
She had a special skeleton that Maturin wanted. Well, she had the live animal first and then the skeleton.
269: Speciesist.
Diana and Sophie were enough to be part of what put me off the Aubrey/Maturin books entirely. It's too long ago for me to back this up with chapter and verse, but Diana particularly seemed howlingly anachronistic. (Not that she was sexually immoral, that could have been perfectly fine in period, but that she was doing it wrong.)
I like my women like I like my coffee, able to fit into a bottle and smarter than most vertebrates.
I don't find much coffee that meet my standards.
267: I have read very little Trollope, although since I'm pretty desperate for decently written period novels with basically happy endings, maybe I'll start. (It's either novels set safely in the past or browsing eBay; almost everything else fills me alternatingly with panic and fury.)
It's funny, because now that I think about it, Dickens's women characters are absurd as women and yet I really like Dickens...but then all his characters are absurd as actual humans, so it doesn't matter. Perhaps this is why I like Gene Wolfe - Severian is ridiculous if you try to imagine him really existing but wonderful on the page, and the same holds true with Valeria and Dorcas and all the other women. It's like a novel written about figures from the Tarot.
I'm very fond of Trollope, and I don't mind his women at all.
How to put it -- he's completely invested in the gender roles of his time. It's not unquestioned background, it's a topic he goes off about: he's really interested in how a good, pure woman should behave and feel. And most of his women are either idealized good. pure Victorian women or are interesting to him because of how they're failing to be a good, pure, Victorian woman.
But in the context of people who were raised with a set of values that they and the author mostly aren't questioning, they're psychologically not jarringly unreal. They do things and want things -- not things I or anyone I know would be likely to do or want, but I wasn't raised in the context of the rules they were raised with.
There's no "Dirtbag Trollope". I looked just now.
I guess I find women characters who are supposed to be "realistic" far more annoying than women characters who are supposed to be paragons of one kind or another. Like why I dislike Little, Big - in a way the women are "paragons" (of female sexuality that just by coincidence perfectly matches the desires of their male partners) but we're really supposed to believe that their romantic and sexual yearnings are like those of actual women who live in the world.
Esther in Bleak House is a paragon - and the annoying kind of paragon who just doesn't know how beautiful she is, etc - but she's consistent on her own terms and bears relatively little relation to women in general. No one really expects to marry (or be) an Esther - she is a figure of a certain kind of moral aspiration, but that's about it. Whereas it's only too, too clear that Crowley would like to settle down with Daily Alice and Sophie, preferably to have threesomes.
I endorse LB's survey of what's likely to work with the caveat of course that fabulous fiction gonna fabulous. A Trollope and the world of possible femininity is kind of fascinating bc of his mother and the whole running off to a commune, supporting the entire family by her pen thing. I read somewhere years ago that when A Trollope's wife was pregnant F Trollope gave her a heads up re childbirth and A Trollope was pissssed off, told her to nevermore mention anything below the waist/under the petticoat again for face banishment.
Frowner, what do you think of the women in the Aegypt books?
Frowner, while we're grilling you, have you read the Max Gladstone books? I would never have bought the first had it not had a black woman on the cover (and been in the final markdown $1 bin) and by making it not our world I think he mostly manages.
There's definite irony here. Supposedly, people read science fiction to explore new worlds and see things through different eyes, but one of the big problems with young people reading old science fiction is that it was produced in another world and presents things as seen through different eyes.
282: I read the first one, Three Parts Dead, on LB's recommendation (I think her phrase was that it "captures the BigLaw atmosphere so well that it almost ceases to be enjoyable") and I liked it a lot; bought the second one (Two Serpents) on the strength of that, and couldn't finish it.
Better archival Trollope:
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2012_09_09.html#012452
You who amongst the deepest stacks lurks,
Searching for great authors' more obscure works,
Will quite often find, to your certain dismay,
A book by a writer who has gone astray.
Though intrigued a little, hey what the heck,
You can't look away from this awful train wreck.
In for a penny -- in for a dollop
Of bad minor novels by Anthony Trollope
Alan Warner often gets praised for his writing of female characters.
I'm not female, but both Morvern Callar, and The Sopranos felt true to my experience of being the boyfriend of girls/women in their teens and early 20s.
281: I like a lot of Crowley; heck, I remember talking to a book rep in the early 90s about how much they liked him too, but how his audience was so diffuse it was hard to keep the books in print. But I found all of Aegypt just barely readable, and I still haven't managed the fourth.
I really enjoyed the first of the Aegypt books, but thought the later ones got tiresome. The John Dee/Giordano Bruno story line remained interesting, but the present day stuff became less and less so.
I've not read the Aegypt books or the Max Gladstone ones - although due to sanctified off-blog communication, I have reason to suspect that Natilo in particular might like the Gladstone ones (and they look interesting to me, too - might check one out this weekend).
In re Crowley:
The thing is, Little, Big is for some reason really difficult for me to deal with. There's just so much ick - the sleazy passages sexualizing little girls, the gross ways that the young women characters are described while sleeping, the fauxbian hookup that is described in a super-straight-dude way. Wolfe makes me angry when I pause to think about how he writes women, but at least he has a theory. Little, Big is a view of women as angel-fairy watercolor porn. That's not all it is, but I find it uniquely exhausting.
And then I tried to pick up another Crowley book, because everyone says he's so good, right? And maybe some of his other books will be also good but less ew! It was one of the early ones, but whether it was Beasts or Engine Summer or another I don't remember, and it started off with the male protagonist having some conversation with a woman that was obviously intended as a slam on feminism, and I thought, this is a job for my stalwart nopetopus.
Crowley is certainly an author where the reasons to read him are at least as good as the reasons not - he's not some pointless misogynist hack. But I have pretty much no desire to give his work another shot unless for some reason he has totally changed how he thinks about and writes women.
289.3 sounds more like Beasts than Engine Summer. The latter has a pretty weird infatuation in it, and is saturated with drugs.
I read all the Aegypt books and mostly liked them, but then I also read Stephenson's Baroque Sagaand liked those doorstops, too. Not to mention being the only person ever who liked Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. I am strangely drawn to books about esoterica.
290: That's two of us for the Eco, then. I tried several times when it was new, and it didn't take. Then I borrowed a copy in Istanbul and was totally hooked. Unfortunately, the lenders took the book with them. So I caught up with them in Hungary and finished the tale.
289: You might like "The Great Work of Time." I forget whether it's novelette or novella; it's interesting in the ways that Crowley is usually interesting, and I don't remember much (any?) sex in it, icky or otherwise.
I liked, or at least finished on my first go, Foucault's Pendulum.
289: Huh. I've always felt weird about _Little, Big_, because there are bits of it that I thought were great, but I somehow couldn't ever quite focus on it enough to actually figure out what was going on. And come to think, the angel-fairy watercolor porn aspect of it might be why. It's not that I get a strong 'ick' reaction exactly, but I do involuntarily skim when I'm getting bored -- if I find myself in the middle of a several-page description of landscape, I don't actually mean to skip it, but I don't actually read it, just sort of look at it enough to see where the book is going to pick up again.
And _Little, Big_, there was definitely stuff along the lines you describe that I was skimming past because it's super dull if you're not the intended audience, and I wonder if that was enough that the bits of the book I actually really read didn't hold together coherently. That finally makes some sense.
I read it after The Name of the Rose. I have an uncle who wanted me to read widely and was willing to put his money there for Christmas gifts.
My unread copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, let me show it to you.
|| Update: another game, provisionally titled Virtu, is now at prototype stage; you play the leader of a political faction in an Italian city state and your aim is to become as loved and feared as possible (as per Machiavelli) while building the support of various factions in the city by your apparently noble but in reality self interested responses to various political events. For example: a famine strikes the city! Player 1: I will import grain from overseas and dole it out to the masses! (Become more loved; lose some money; win support of the dock labourers who will now have lots of work) Player 2: I will seize the granaries of the rich and open them to the poor! (Become loved, but lose the support of the grain merchants) and so on. Every now and again you can accuse one of your fellow players of Treason to the Republic and try to get them exiled. Bribery, slander, backstabbing and conspiracy are not only possible but encouraged.
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Be sure to have appointments to minor sinecured offices by (optionally rigged) lot. And construction of overcompensating defensive towers. And exile to neighboring bandit strongholds.
296: I play neither computer nor tabletop games, but would play that game.
Be sure to have appointments to minor sinecured offices by (optionally rigged) lot.
Good idea. Functionally it'll basically be "bribery" but it's a nice bit of colour to add.
And construction of overcompensating defensive towers.
You mean stirring up fear of an invasion in order to allow you to channel public funds to your mates the stonemasons? Got that.
298: thanks! No dice involved; it's all card based. (There will be a board, but really only to put markers on in order to help you keep track of who has which supporters and how loved and feared everyone is; no moving around the board.)
296 Where does art patronage fit in here?
Art patronage is a massive part of the game. The Artists are a faction by themselves, whose support you can win; you can also, say, become more loved by commissioning great works of public art, or win the support of the Church by paying for a fresco in the cathedral.
299.2: No. The major families in each city built towers for themselves, within the walls. Initially they were defensive (against internal enemies), but later they built higher and higher, just for phallic purposes. A lot of cities banned them because they collapsed so often. One place imposed a height limit; one family built twin towers, each an inch shy of the limit. Almost all the towers have been demolished/collapsed, except in a couple of small towns. You can see them in old engravings and things. If I'd ever gotten round to writing essays for that course I would have references to give you.
I'm in. I hope I don't get poisoned to death.
299.1: There was almost enormous subtlety in the bribes and kickbacks and backscratching, mostly revolving (as far as records can show) around minor public offices. You could build a whole game just out of that if you wanted.
You could do that with the PA Turnpike Commission if you wanted to avoid any possibility of having money to go something aesthetically pleasing.
303: San Gimigliano, right? I didn't know it was so widespread.
304: no fatal poisoning. I have two core beliefs about game design and they are "it must be impossible for any player to be kicked out of the game early, because that's boring" and "combat, if it occurs, must always be a negative-sum event".
305: hmm. So you would have a setup where it would be obvious that Signor X had been bribed (because he'd acquired a nice sinecure), but not necessarily by whom? That could be interesting. I will need to think about how that could work.
bribes and kickbacks and backscratching
Crowdsource municipal corruption with my new website, Kickscratcher.
For details on this stuff read Dale and F.W. Kent (latter link on art specifically). I've only read excerpts of their early work, and remember it as kind of bewildering, but there's bottomless material to use in there.
14th C Florence. If you zoom in you can see lots of little bristly towers between the city walls and the big churches.
That sounds like fun. How long do you expect a game session to take? Is this a 40-minute game or a 3-hour game?
311 is now the box lid illustration.
312: haven't done any playtesting yet, I'm still working on a prototype to test, but I reckon a game should take about an hour.
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NickS, I'm episodically reading Ruling the Void and agree it would make a good reading group.
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I don't think you can do Machiavellianism without at least the occasional assassination. Maybe you should have it as an option, but ration the murders and make them very high-risk events? Like, if you play the stab card everyone else gets a free destabilising intrigue?
You could poison Dustin Hoffman's grapes. I saw that on the TV once.
Other than the iPhone atlatl game/TV pitch have you done any others and I've missed it/forgotten about it?
315: oh, you'll be able to murder, just not to murder other players.
317: the armoured-train one is also approaching prototype stage.
296: Card texts to be in terza rima, I hope.
303: So widespread that examples can still be seen in Georgia, particularly Svaneti and Tusheti, and to a lesser extent in Khevsureti.
318.2 Coincidentally I just finished watching an armored train zombie anime with my nephew.
319: I have identified a relevant bit of the Divine Comedy for a lot of them.
319.2 confused hell out of me, until I realized this wasn't the travel thread.
I trust you've worked in the Guelphs and Ghibellines too.
Make sure it comes with a pasquino in every box. You can put it in the middle and stick post-its on it.
320: Waffle Tower Georgia, დიდი მადლობა.
324: We will spend the rest of the internet trying to come up with a Unified Thread Theory.
Some maps of Florence, showing the density of family structures (shitty screengrabs). From this.
the fauxbian hookup that is described in a super-straight-dude way.
I don't even remember this at all, I think, even though when I last re-read Little, Big (only the second time I'd read it), I did manage to identify lots of other places it was not at all as good as I'd remembered.
I did think it came together really well in the end, though.
296 et seq.: I would absolutely want to play that game as a tabletop game. The whole eurogames era is much too namby-pamby about cooperation and peace and love and stuff. (Admittedly some great games, great games.) But bring back the glory days of Diplomacy and Judge Dredd!
Please tell me "fauxbian hookup" refers to a tryst between two Fabians-in-name-only. (Oh god, one of those books, haven't we all read like seventy?)
Science fiction for the "Lost Cause" crowd.
332: Freedom and Necessity? Which I really liked, and am mildly afraid to re-read in case of the Suck Fairy.
333. Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Barsoom/Mars was also John Carter of Virginia, a Confederate veteran, before being magically teleported to Mars.
Isn't Confederate veteran a trope from Westerns? In its own stupid, ham-handed way, the message of the first three Barsoom books is anti-racist. The racial politics of the books are fucked up (most red Martians are good, most green Martians are bad), but the third books ends with Mars in multi-racial unity.
People who have wondered "hey, what if Timecop was a salvager instead of a cop?" should read Time Salvager. People who haven't, shouldn't.
307.3: Skimming Rubinstein, it's dense as all hell, but the Medici built their principate largely by gaining control of the officers responsible for sorting the names of eligible citizens into the bags from which office holders were drawn by lot.
The terminology of this stuff was of course fantastic: signoria, balia, parlemento, accoppiatori, pratica, squittino, tratta, divieto, Tre Maggiori, Sedici Gonfalonieri, Dodici Buonuomini, imborsazione, borse, quartiere, uffici de intrinseci ed estrinseci, dieci di balia. You could make a tarot-like card for each. The mechanics of the thing would be gnarly.
Nice! Thank you... colour is always good!
My pleasure. Nice to salvage something from that course. I might actually read the books this time round.
305:
Reminds me of the stories I heard from somebody in the public sector in rural Ireland, about what happened when the coalition led by everybody-knows-they're-cronyists party was replaced in 2011 by one led by the who-us-we're-pure-as-driven-snow party. The latter party had been out of government for over 20 years and my acquaintance was gobsmacked by how unsubtle they were. The old crowd knew to do things like have the job applicant come from another part of the country (with tit for tat back there) and that the thing to do was to leak them the scoring criteria for the interview panel so they could hit every point. The new crowd thought they could just straight up appoint their guy to the job and had to be disillusioned.
341: A similar concept underlies the handle of a former commenter here.
It does seem that generally, whenever there are two factions, one a corrupt incumbent and the other in some sense "reform" minded, the latter is worse when they gain power. The Optimates and the Populares, or, from the viewpoint of a fool, the Democrats and Republicans.
343 Another one much missed and who I last saw at Fresh Salt IIRC.
I miss that commenter also. No idea about the source of the name until now.
