“Play some old!”
The British music magazine Word had a discussion on its site a few years ago about a common phenomenon in gig-going. Your favorite band releases a new album, but it’s not as good as the stuff they did 3 or 5 years ago. Nonetheless, you go along to see them play live out of a sense of loyalty or somesuch. Inevitably, they insist on leading off with a series of songs from the new album. You feel grumpier and grumpier because their attitude seems to be about disdain for their history – the history that got you interested in them in the first place. And the heckle rises in your throat: “Play some old!” (Word used to have a T-shirt bearing this slogan, but no more, it seems.)
All this came to mind earlier today when I saw that Jonathan McAlmont had tweeted, “If SF isn’t dead then why is 50% of Tor.com made up of posts about really old books? Someone called Leigh Butler is reading Robert Jordan.” Since a good 90% of my work for Locus is made up of writing about “really old books” – at least those more than a few decades old – I thought this might be the time to do a post about the why and how of that. I can’t speak for tor.com , of course, or even for Charles Brown and the rest of the editorial team at Locus. And to be fair to Jonathan, a) he may have been exaggerrating for rhetorical effect; b) the 140-character format of Twitter doesn’t allow for much nuance in argument; c) there was a further exchange with Niall Harrison in which he modified his position a bit. Niall: “I like Jo Walton’s re-reads, but I do find the re-reading LOTR/Jordan/rewatching Trek/etc stuff interminable.”; Jonathan: “Jo Walton’s just good value all round. she’s the only reason I bother to check the site. The rewatching thing is weird tho”
I started doing the “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”[1] column for Locus in the summer of 2006 at the suggestion of Charles Brown. His rationale was that he wanted a sense of whether the classics of science fiction stood up to reading now by a relatively young reader. (How I got to count as someone “relatively young” is an issue we’ll pass over, thankyou very much.) From my point of view, the rationale for doing them has been slightly different. As a reader of sf and, in particular, a reviewer, there’s a kind of compulsion to keep up with the state of the field at present. One of the reasons I took on the column was that I thought, beyond a certain point, this was unhealthy. I don’t make any prescriptions for readers in general, but I’m certain that as a reviewer the more you augment your sense of the history of the field you’re working in, the better.
That’s all very well for me, but what value is the column, then, for readers? My sense, from those people I’ve talked to, is that it’s useful for people because they want an idea of the way into the canonical works of science fiction. It’s for that reason I’m glad I get to write about an author’s body of work rather than just a single novel – I like to try and give a sense of how someone’s career evolved, how things changed, and what works were turning-points for them. I often have to write the column in a state of what I call willed innocence – ignoring, for instance, the secondary literature that’s sprung up since a given author published. (You need to make exceptions every once in a while, though; my next column is on van Vogt, and I don’t think you can read him without talking about Damon Knight’s famous attack on him.) I’d note as well that several other people are doing similar work in looking back at classic sf. Jo Walton’s posts on tor.com are indeed terrific (here’s her latest one on Samuel R Delany’s Nova), and there’s also Sam Jordison in the (UK) Guardian, covering all the Hugo novel winners in chronological order, and Robert Silverberg in his Asimov’s Reflections (scroll down). So us lot at Locus HQ are clearly not the only people who think this kind of work is useful.
None of this, though, answers Jonathan’s real question: what does it say about sf if we’re spending all our time looking back? Well, from my point of view, I’m not that worried, so long as it’s not the only thing we’re doing. My column is only one of half a dozen in Locus, and all the others talk about more contemporary work. I personally don’t follow the posts on tor.com covering Robert Jordan or Star Trek, but that’s because I’m not especially interested in Robert Jordan or Star Trek. Sf is a broad enough church that you ought to be able to tolerate someone liking different stuff from you. And I think there’s a reason specific to science fiction for doing this kind of retro reviewing. More intensely than any other genre I can think of, science fiction tends to be about critiquing and revising predecessors. So, say Charles Stross revises and intensifies much of what’s in Bruce Sterling’s work and Sterling in turn revises Bester, and so on and so on… (Or, indeed, Firefly builds on Blake’s Seven, which builds on Star Trek, which builds on van Vogt…) So even more than with most fields, in science fiction you don’t know where you are unless you know where you’ve come from.
The problem with “Play some old!” as a slogan is the assumption – in the story I told at the start – that the new album isn’t as good as the older stuff. That’s not an assumption I share. The one thing I will say about tor.com is that a critique of them for being backwards-looking seems a little odd given that Tor’s main business is putting out a bunch of new books every month. Presumably they have some success with that, since they’ve been doing it for a few years; which in turn suggests that the sf community is perfectly open to reading new works. But new works get discussed all over the place. If Tor and Locus and a bunch of other venues find that their readers want to pause and reflect and look back, why not provide a space for them to do that?
The final thing to say on this subject – since I’m here, and since it’s relevant – is that “Yesterday’s Tomorrows” will slowly be moving to cover more recent authors. This is a change I discussed with Charles Brown last year but, given lead-times and backlogs it’s only happening slowly. We both felt that we were running out of “Golden Age” authors to cover, and so moving to more recent authors was a logical step. The column in the June Locus on Octavia Butler was a first step in that direction; more will follow (subscribe!). If there are any authors you’d especially like me to cover, comment away.
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[1] Only after it had been running for a year or two did I realise that I’d unconsciously filched the title from a Kate Wilhelm novella published a couple of years before. I hope to atone by covering Kate Wilhelm in the column before too long.
Don’t worry about the title. Before Wilhelm’s novella, there was Alexei Pahsin’s 1975 collection _Farewell to Yesterday’s Tomorrows_, and since your column, there’s Joseph Corn’s _Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future_ (referenced in the CNN.com story currently linked at Locus Online).
Clearly, great minds think alike.
I’m staggering from an 18-hour stretch of travel, but think I have enough wit left to point out that one doesn’t complain about attention to works of the past in literature-in-general, or in any other long-running artistic tradition. In fact, tradition requires maintaining an awareness of the past, and a willingness to revisit it constantly. Art doesn’t wear out, and (as Graham indicates) its components also recycle very nicely.
I’m not sure you’re comparing apples with apples here. The problem I at least have with Tor.com’s series on Trek and LOTR is not that they are revisiting older works per se, nor that they are revisiting works I’m not interested in (I like both), but that they’re dissecting a very limited selection of older works in excessive detail, and older works that have not been under-dissected to date, at that.
The other thing I’d take issue with is your statement that new works “get discussed all over the place”. Or really, not so much take issue with as flatly disagree. There are, of course, plenty of reviews, which are a kind of discussion, but the amount of actual dialogue going on about works that are less than, say, five years old, is close to nil. Now, there are good reasons for that, but I’d be far more interested if Tor did a series that encouraged discussion of, say, this year’s shortlists for the Hugo awards, or Nebula awards, or World Fantasy Awards — particularly if they were the sort of informed discussions that can give these newer works the sort of contextualisation that you quite rightly praise.
I realized that I never actually commented here.
The LotR re-read was a personal project that I solicited Tor.com to do, if it matters, not a grand scheme to turn the site into retrospective central.
(And its level of detail, accordingly, is no-one's responsibility but my own.)
Which leads to a more general point: I am aware that there has been some recruitment of bloggers by the Tor.com staff, and I think that if someone said, hey, I'd like to do a series on this year's award shortlists, they'd likely be welcomed–but the pool of people who write that kind of thing _generally_ is pretty small already, and the pool who would want to do it there as opposed to, say, at their own site, is smaller still.
(I'm not going to offer, as there are significant portions of the Hugo ballot this year that I refuse to read. In case you were wondering. Though I may be giving them first refusal on some non-LotR reviews in the future.)
Vectoreditors: there's a semantic issue here – I do consider reviews to be discussion of works *and to be establishing a dialogue about them*, hence my comment. And I'd note that you modestly don't mention that you're practising what you preach and hosting discussions of Hugo-nominated fiction at Torque Control.
Kate: thanks for stopping by. As I say, the LotR stuff isn't for me, but there are evidently plenty of people who enjoy it, and I understand that tor.com has to encompass as wide as possible a range of tastes in sff. Out of interest – and I realise I'm taking things offtopic – would you mind saying why you refuse to read parts of the Hugo ballot this year? Apologies if I've missed a post where you talk about this.
Graham, some people I'm not able to put aside my feelings about them as people enough to give their fiction a fair shake. Other people I've just decided I'm allergic to their fiction.
So not reading Stross, Scalzi, Resnick, and Bear puts a pretty decent gap in the ballot.
Kate: though I don't share your views about those people/their work, that's fair enough. (I'd thought it might be objection to a particular kind of subject matter or something.) And I keep meaning to do a post about, as you say, being allergic to someone's fiction – it really does feel like that, both the strength & suddenness of the reaction.
Kate, I apologise for "excessively detailed"; I don't really think there is such a thing as "excessive" when it comes to close reading.
Graham, it's not a dialogue if nobody replies.
Niall: thanks, but no need; YMMV and all that, and besides, _I'm_ perfectly willing to believe there's such a thing . . .
On the point of more variety at Tor.com– Though I am not in any way involved except as a very occasional blogger if something calls out to me, I do know that the people who do it are very interested, as Kate says above, in getting proposals for new dimensions to add to the mix.
I say, let a thousand Waltons bloom.
Kate: It is your right to choose what you read, but your repeated declarations (here and elsewhere) of who and what you aren't going to read are rude. Please stop it. This kind of thing is what private email is for.
Kathryn: since Kate was responding to a direct question from me, and since I wasn't aware that she'd said this elsewhere, I don't feel it was at all rude. As I said above, I disagree with Kate about these authors, and am sure that that they can survive despite her disapproval/dislike.
Tor has nothing on the Usenet rec.arts.sf.written group, which consumes about 50% of its bits endlessly going over Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov (in that order). I know Usenet is a dying animal, but this is just an exaggerated case of the general backward-looking stance that seems so common in the SF genre. "Hey, let's do something really daring, like…like…New Wave! But with Cyberpunk overtones! Yeah, that's the ticket!"
There are plenty of neglected works that could stand a re-reading, but those tend to stay neglected. And unfortunately the same types of works are still being neglected when they're published now: ones by authors who are not big names and usually not prolific, that try to do something a little different with a bit more careful crafting, that are not about establishing a new multi-book series franchise, etc. Too bad, when we're still wasting electrons on nostalgia-fests.