Seeing discussions of the SF canon on twitter, I’m realizing now that I read much of the canon back in the day because I began reading SF about 50 years ago, and *there wasn’t a lot else on the shelves*. Most of the field today is newer.
/1
/1
A lot of the golden age SF authors were *terrible* writers. Lots of vision, but wooden characterisation, poor descriptive skills, emphasis on melodrama over structure, and so on. They’d be unpublishable today unless they upped their game enormously.
/2
/2
I’ll give them a conditional pass (mostly) on social/cultural change—if you live in a society where pervasive sexism and racism are the norm and you’re not the target of discrimination, it’s difficult to notice and avoid replicating it to some extent. But …
/3
/3
This doesn’t mean we need to keep reading the bad old classics. The Suck Fairy is real (she visits old favourites and sprinkles them with magic dust that makes them suck mightily when you re-read them)!
Also, we have a body of SF/F lit-crit now. You can read lecture notes!
/4
Also, we have a body of SF/F lit-crit now. You can read lecture notes!
/4
Also? Authors often have long careers. They learn new tricks and often get better over time. If you’ve *got* to read Asimov, at least read his later novels rather than the early ones. Etc. (This is not true of all writers: some are good right from the start.)
/5
/5
I think expecting new SF/F authors to be familiar with the canon today is like expecting all mainstream lit-fic authors to have a degree in english literature and to have studied Beowulf: it’s snobbish gatekeeping. (It *is* OK to expect them to try to avoid genre cliches.)
/6
/6
The usual advice applies: read widely, both within and outside your chosen field. Try to stretch your boundaries. Expect to fail, but try to discover new ways to fail—fail *interestingly*.
And don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t succeed.
/ends
And don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t succeed.
/ends
