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Update: I have ordered a cheapo copy of Damia and when it arrives PREPARE TO BE SUBJECTED TO ITS HORRORS https://twitter.com/fozmeadows/status/1356888740715581443
Before I head off to bed, I just want to say: I'm planning this Damia read/skim, not from a place of malice - I genuinely loved McCaffrey growing up and still feel a lot of affection for aspects of her work - but to demonstrate something that's (hopefully) important about SFF.
Something that's very common in all readers is that, even though we retain our love of a book or author over many years, we don't always have the time or inclination to reread those books - and because we don't have photographic memories, we forget the details.
Crucially, we're always changing and growing. Our awareness of the world changes, just as our surrounding culture changes, and that can have a seismic impact when it comes to our memory of old books vs the reality of them.
Especially when we first read something as teens, we don't always parse the wider context of its politics, stereotypes or cultural depictions, not because teens are lazy readers, but because we've got less to compare those things to then & a newer analytic framework.
Bias and privilege also play a huge role. With McCaffrey's Pegasus in Flight, for instance - which started this whole thread and idea - as a white kid reading that book growing up, I was oblivious to the casual racism directed at other cultures and races, bc it didn't impact me.
The book wasn't "about" how other races and cultures were ignorant or bad, and so I missed it completely, even though, as an adult, I can see now that it's a constant narrative undertone. But if the book had made similar declarative asides about Australians? I'd have seen it.
What I remembered about Pegasus, though, was the age-gap proto- "romance" - something I'd been fine with as a kid, but which rang alarm bells in my adult memory. So when I went back to check the details, I was genuinely floored by just how much racism was in the book.
The point being: it's no shame to have read something uncritically at an earlier time in your life, or to have had those details fail from memory. But this becomes problematic when, so often, SFF lists recommended for newcomers include old books on the BASIS of those memories -
- instead of any recent re-reading to see if they hold up. People ask for recommendations on what to give teen readers now to usher them into adult SFF, and people list out books written 20+ years ago which, in all probability, they themselves haven't read in over a decade.
And it's not that these books are necessarily bad, or even all bad! Even skimming through Pegasus, I could tell the pacing was good, the main plot compelling, the characterisation mostly great: there was a reason my uncritical younger self enjoyed it! BUT:
If we, as a community, don't ever take the time to look over old books with fresh eyes - or if we dismiss those efforts and their critical lens as cancel culture, or hating, or some other nonsense - we're ignoring not just our own progress as people, but as a genre.
So when my copy of Damia arrives and I write a thread detailing its issues, it's not because I want to tarnish McCaffrey's memory specifically. It's because I want to illustrate the necessity of thinking critically about even our favourite old books before recommending them NOW.
There's a lot to love in the worlds McCaffrey, and others like her, created. But if we can't admit to the biases and bigotries that were allowed to proliferate in those works, we won't understand the significance of so much that has come afterwards - that is being written *now*.
Especially for white and otherwise privileged SFF fans, I do think it's important to reckon with how much racism (and homophobia, and sexism, and other bigotries) was casually and not-so-casually simmering in many of our foundational stories, and how that might've shaped us.
