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Recent events have made me revisit an article idea I had a while back, that the "SFF canon" is no longer a relevant concept.
As recently as the 1990s, there seemed to be this assumption that there were works and writers you *had* to read to be counted as an SFF fan.
As recently as the 1990s, there seemed to be this assumption that there were works and writers you *had* to read to be counted as an SFF fan.
These included Lord of the Rings, Dune, 2001, Starship Troopers, The Dying Earth, Sandman, Watchmen, Ringworld, The Left Hand of Darkness, Lord of Light, Dragonflight, Lord Foul's Bane, The Call of Cthulhu, maybe 40-50 others.
Older SFF figures seem to have taken this as read that everyone was on the same page about this, and seem increasingly confused when young readers show up who've never read most of these authors and have zero plans to do so in the future.
David Gerrold makes a great point about why this might be so. Up until fairly recently - at least the 1980s and probably the early 1990s - it was physically possible to read *every single* SFF novel published in English.
https://www.facebook.com/david.gerrold/posts/10220849171951449
https://www.facebook.com/david.gerrold/posts/10220849171951449
Not that very many (if any) people did, of course, and it became impossible with the backlog later on but it was at least possible to be aware of every single SFF novel published in a given year, given it was in the low hundreds of titles.
Today it's more like four figures, even discounting self-published work (some of it very worthy). It's no longer possible to really stay in touch with everything going on now, let alone works from 70 years ago.
This massive prevalence of material makes it much harder to recommend that people seriously sit down and read stuff from long ago that has massive problems with it, which older fans excused because "they had great ideas," which no longer really washes.
Even in the 1990s I was baffled as to why Foundation was a thing. It's fairly generic space opera which is badly-written, & the central idea (psychohistory) isn't really consistent and has huge logic flaws (which Asimov eventually realised and binned it in the sequels).
OTOH, there are classics which have withstood the test of time: Le Guin's work is still a great read, her ideas really have withstood the test of time and if anything seem more relevant today than they were at the time.
Even Dune, which has its share of clunky writing and cliched characters, has retained its popularity because Herbert did some bold and interesting things even by modern standards (like the fact it's the story of the rise of, not a hero, but a tyrant).
I think suggesting to people in 2020 that there's a huge amount of old stuff they should read "because they're classics" is something that no longer really washes. Older books have to justify their position as "classics" and some will be found wanting. Others will be reinforced.
I think the automatic expectation by older SFF figures that the likes of Campbell, Lovecraft and Heinlein are gods (or "deans") of the genre and this is some unimpeachable fact is now definitely dead and gone.
Obviously not everything that is old is automatically worthless & not everything that is new is automatically amazing: plenty of new stuff comes out that is poor & there is older stuff that is still hugely relevant. But the defining standards of old are no longer immutable.
In fact, there appear to be reassessments going on of older work that is bringing some of it back into the light. Leigh Brackett's work was extremely obscure for many years, but she seems to be having a renaissance.
Margaret Cavendish's role in writing the (probably) first-ever science fiction novel was something people had forgotten about for literally centuries until recently it came back into the light. So there also seems to be a new appetite for re-engaging with older works.
But there is also a rejection of the "because you grew up with it 30 years ago, that doesn't mean the rest of us have to now" idea. And this is not new to SFF lit, of course. We see the same things in music, movies, TV, video games and right across the board.
So I think the idea of an "SFF canon" is going to be reassessed. There isn't really one at all and however people engage with the genre is perfectly fine. And the definition of what the classics are is going to be constantly changing.
We probably need more of a realisation of that from older SFF figures, that no, twentysomethings or teens in 2020 are probably not going to be reading Stranger in a Strange Land or sifting through old issues of Astounding, and that's completely 100% fine.
