Thread by @seananmcguire

As a community, SF fandom seems to be terrified that if we don't sit every spaceship or dragon-enthralled child down with Asimov and Heinlein and Tolkien, they will all instantly go out of print and be forgotten forever.

Firstly, let me say: nope. Not being read by absolutely everyone does not cause a book to disappear. Thankfully, as that would cause all books everywhere to wink out of existence. Not good.

Secondly: Everything in existence is a product of its time. EVERYTHING. That includes books. It also includes readers. Expectations and narrative languages change, evolve, and grow. They cannot be stopped.

Being told "you must read this pantheon of ancient white dudes who don't seem to believe you could possibly exist" nearly lost me as a wee babby SF/F reader, and that was twenty years ago. TWENTY YEARS.

Asimov and Heinlein and Tolkien were dated and awkward and unwelcoming to me as a little girl who desperately loved the genre TWENTY YEARS AGO. How do you think they feel to those little girls today?

Yes, there is absolutely value in the foundational texts.
Yes, there are people reading them for the first time today for whom they will be treasured favorites.
Yes, I advocate keeping them as part of the canon.

But "part of the canon" should not mean "the only true canon," or "the books you must read to call yourself a true fan," or "the test of your literary education."

I literally cannot count how many times I've been told that my relative disinterest in Heinlein is a sign that I'm somehow intellectually inferior by people who haven't read Tiptree, Crispin, Kagan, McKinley.

"You don't like Asimov, but you read that trash?" was the sentence that preceded one of my more exciting breakups.

And sometimes appreciating something that's not written in the narrative language of "now" requires building enough of a base in the topic to see the story in the context the author intended, despite the language of "then."

If I want a modern reader, new to the genre, to understand and appreciate how incredibly important Tiptree is, I don't shove her anthologies at them and run away cackling.

I hand them Valente and Bear and Brennan and Wong. I show them what modern feminist genre fiction looks like. And then I tell them "I have a secret, I have the map to where we started, do you want to see?" So very often, they do.

Do you want people to care about the genre? Then you hand them books that let them see themselves as part of that genre, treasured and wanted and having adventures. You make them WELCOME.

This is not "burn your elders." This is not "censor your past." This is "give people a present they can breathe in, and then show them how we got there."

It is so much easier for me to read and appreciate and honor the foundational texts now that I know the genre wants me to stay.

(Also, for the sweet love of the Great Pumpkin, can we stop pretending that three or four dudes wrote EVERYTHING that matters? Why is Bradbury so rarely on these lists? Where's Wyndham? LeGuin? McCaffery?)

(And isn't it interesting that of the first four "they should be foundational" names I hadn't already mentioned, two were women and two wrote remarkably diverse, inclusive books again, for their time? By modern standards, not so much. And yet.)

Standards change. I love Shakespeare and Austin and Bradbury and Tiptree and Bull and King and Wilson--all "foundational" authors, in their own way. But if I were making a new reader list, none of them would be on it at the top level.

"Here is something accessible, that speaks to things you already like. Great. What part did you enjoy? Ooo, I have another book about that..."

Ease them in. By the time the water's over their head, they'll be too far from shore to swim back.

This has been a public service announcement from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Sirens Book Club and Shipwreck Society. We'll see you at our next meeting, where everything is on the rocks.

By everything, I mean "mostly your ship."