Narrow horizons and frozen minds — or sf/f shouldn’t be an old boys’ club

[claudeb]

Here’s a blog post I wish I had written myself:

The tired cliche that there are certain “classics” of sf/f that one must have read in order to be a real fan has reared its ugly head. The current iteration is an assertion that writers of sf/f (aspiring or otherwise) who have not read the classics are not able to write good sf/f. And specifically the “classics” one is supposedly required to read and love in order to be a good writer of science fiction and fantasy are the usual suspects: Heinlein, Asimov, Clark, and so on.

Poppycock!

I’ll see your Shelley and LeGuin and raise a Diane Duane plus a Lois McMaster Bujold. Or even if I was to stick with old white men, how come nobody ever seems to mention Michael Moorcock and the bizarre exuberance of The Dancers at the End of Time? (Too bad all his other stuff is the same old grimdark wank everyone else was writing.) At least Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams have fans, though I’m not sure how many of them truly understood either author. But as the same blogger quips later:

Just as one can learn to drive a modern car without first mastering the horse and buggy, you can learn to write without memorizing a specific set of books from a very narrow set of writers who were working 60+ years ago.

Amen to that. Broaden your horizons, sci-fi fans. That’s the whole point.

Comments

[fred_mouse]

Indeed. And actually, I'd go further than that, and argue that the good writers of SF/F are reading what is coming out now. They are engaging with fandom *as it is now*, the genre as it has matured and changed. Every now and then I attempt to read something that is meant to be genre by someone who typically writes elsewhere, and it is so far behind the conversation that is happening that I suspect that the author hasn't actually read anything in the field, they just think it is easy to write.

And there are a lot of classics that deserve to be ignored.