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SF and its "sell-by" date
This expands on what I brought up at the canon panel at Loscon.
I learned my bearings in the SF field mostly from the fellows in my high-school SF club, many of whom were better-read in the field and more "genre aware" than I was at that time. My tastes and prejudices in the field still mark me as a child of that time, the mid-1970s.
I also learned a lot from writings about the field by established authors and critics. Whether they discussed the canon explicitly or by implication, it was clear that they considered the foundation stone of genre SF - that is, that which came out of the pulp magazine tradition - to be the epics of E.E. Smith.
But curiously, I and my young contemporaries didn't rate Smith very highly, or any of the Thirties authors, except maybe Stanley G. Weinbaum and Don A. Stuart, whom we (very whiggishly) considered harbingers of greater, later ages. We thought Thirties SF was pulpish, badly written, embarrassing, outdated, not worth our attention. Around that time, Isaac Asimov published Before the Golden Age, an anthology of stories he remembered fondly from his teen years in the Thirties. I'll never forget the dismissive review of it that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sturgeonslawyer, our best-read member, wrote for our clubzine. "The best of trash," he wrote, "is still trash."
I don't know if he'd still stand by that opinion; we haven't discussed the point. But that was how we felt then. Maybe in the 1960s, and/or for older readers, Thirties SF was still canon, but for us youngsters, it'd passed its sell-by date.
But we read Forties, Fifties, Sixties, and current (Seventies) SF with indiscriminate eagerness. We certainly recognized stylistic differences between these decades, and acknowledged increased sophistication over time, but for us, it was all good, still current, still valid. John Campbell's making his mark as editor of ASF in 1938-9 marked a threshold: after was the good stuff; before, the dark ages. And gradually that seemed to become an established opinion.
So I was interested to start reading in the 1990s opinions of Forties SF, especially Asimov (always my favorite of the "Golden Age" authors), that echoed what I'd thought of Thirties SF in the '70s: that it was pulpish and badly written. I went back and re-read the Foundation trilogy, which I'd always considered a cornerstone of modern SF, and sure enough, the critics were right. It was a bit startling, like a bottle of milk going bad in the fridge. "Funny," you say, "it tasted all right yesterday."
Somehow, if Thirties SF passed its sell-by date in the '70s, Forties SF had passed its by the '90s.
Why should this be? Kathryn Daugherty on the panel suggested that feminism played a large part in it. But I don't think so, at least not for me. The '70s were the heyday of feminist awareness in SF, and we were young men sympathetic to feminism even then. We deplored stereotypes like the Scientist's Beautiful Daughter, but we thought of those as Thirties stuff. Forties SF's view of women may not have been ideal, but we felt it had been an acceptable advance: Asimov's Bayta and Arkady Darrell, not to mention Susan Calvin, were women of action and strong opinions; they didn't sit around being decorative.
Besides, the problem with SF that has passed its sell-by date was a broad charge against its pulpishness in general, in writing as well as plotting. Problems with female characters were just a small part, symptomatic of the whole.
One thing does occur to me. What was true of Thirties SF in 1975 that wasn't true in 1965? Answer: Smith and Campbell, its most prominent authors, were dead. And what was true of Forties SF in 1995 that wasn't true in 1985? Asimov and Heinlein were dead. Maybe there's something about a living author, who's active and a vital part of the field, that keeps the work alive in people's minds.
Obviously that isn't the whole story, and an author's death isn't even necessarily a sign of a downward revaluation. Consider Philip K. Dick, whose stock went way up the minute (it seemed) that he died in 1982, and has never come down since.
Also, of course, "Thirties" does not mean 1930-39 or 1931-40 exactly, nor "Forties" equivalently. There was Thirties SF still being published in the 1940s, in Planet Stories and places like that; us teens of the 1970s didn't think highly of that either.
And some work does not age. I see much less discussion of Weinbaum and Stuart now than I used to; the Twenties-Thirties generation author who seems to have aged best today is Murray Leinster. But I can't recall him being singled out in our opinion back in the '70s, except insofar as he was one of the older authors who successfully made the transition to the Campbellian era.
As far as the Forties go, Campbell's perceived importance to the field as editor seems to have muted with time. If Asimov's work is fading and aging, other authors of that generation are less so. Sturgeon faded from view a bit for a while; now he seems to be returning, aided perhaps by that definitive edition of his short stories. And canonization seems to be increasing and cementing Heinlein's already distinctive rank in the field to one of unique importance as the characteristic author of 20th-century American SF.
Much of the canon panel discussed which work by a given author should best represent them. I often argued for a good short story collection over a novel: many of our best authors are best represented by their shorts. The first book named for Sturgeon was More Than Human, but surely that's because if you're going to pick a novel for him, that's the obvious choice. I think he's better represented by a Best Of story collection. Same with Clarke. (Kathryn offered Tales from the White Hart for him.) Not Dick or Heinlein, though: they're most outstanding as novelists. For Heinlein, the unsurprising panel consensus was that his juveniles are his consistently best work. But which one is the finest?
And that is how we came to the conclusion that the single most representative novel by the single greatest and most characteristic genre SF author - and thus, if you could put just one novel in the time capsule to represent 20th-century American SF, this would be it - is:
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.
And what do you think of that? I can't imagine us coming to any such conclusion 20 or 30 years ago. The Heinlein juveniles were highly valued, but the process of picking a single representative work would have led to something more epic. If Heinlein, perhaps Stranger in a Strange Land, which now (the panel mostly agreed) seems merely quaint. If not, then probably Dune. But not today. Our view of the field and its values has changed.
I learned my bearings in the SF field mostly from the fellows in my high-school SF club, many of whom were better-read in the field and more "genre aware" than I was at that time. My tastes and prejudices in the field still mark me as a child of that time, the mid-1970s.
I also learned a lot from writings about the field by established authors and critics. Whether they discussed the canon explicitly or by implication, it was clear that they considered the foundation stone of genre SF - that is, that which came out of the pulp magazine tradition - to be the epics of E.E. Smith.
But curiously, I and my young contemporaries didn't rate Smith very highly, or any of the Thirties authors, except maybe Stanley G. Weinbaum and Don A. Stuart, whom we (very whiggishly) considered harbingers of greater, later ages. We thought Thirties SF was pulpish, badly written, embarrassing, outdated, not worth our attention. Around that time, Isaac Asimov published Before the Golden Age, an anthology of stories he remembered fondly from his teen years in the Thirties. I'll never forget the dismissive review of it that
sturgeonslawyer, our best-read member, wrote for our clubzine. "The best of trash," he wrote, "is still trash."I don't know if he'd still stand by that opinion; we haven't discussed the point. But that was how we felt then. Maybe in the 1960s, and/or for older readers, Thirties SF was still canon, but for us youngsters, it'd passed its sell-by date.
But we read Forties, Fifties, Sixties, and current (Seventies) SF with indiscriminate eagerness. We certainly recognized stylistic differences between these decades, and acknowledged increased sophistication over time, but for us, it was all good, still current, still valid. John Campbell's making his mark as editor of ASF in 1938-9 marked a threshold: after was the good stuff; before, the dark ages. And gradually that seemed to become an established opinion.
So I was interested to start reading in the 1990s opinions of Forties SF, especially Asimov (always my favorite of the "Golden Age" authors), that echoed what I'd thought of Thirties SF in the '70s: that it was pulpish and badly written. I went back and re-read the Foundation trilogy, which I'd always considered a cornerstone of modern SF, and sure enough, the critics were right. It was a bit startling, like a bottle of milk going bad in the fridge. "Funny," you say, "it tasted all right yesterday."
Somehow, if Thirties SF passed its sell-by date in the '70s, Forties SF had passed its by the '90s.
Why should this be? Kathryn Daugherty on the panel suggested that feminism played a large part in it. But I don't think so, at least not for me. The '70s were the heyday of feminist awareness in SF, and we were young men sympathetic to feminism even then. We deplored stereotypes like the Scientist's Beautiful Daughter, but we thought of those as Thirties stuff. Forties SF's view of women may not have been ideal, but we felt it had been an acceptable advance: Asimov's Bayta and Arkady Darrell, not to mention Susan Calvin, were women of action and strong opinions; they didn't sit around being decorative.
Besides, the problem with SF that has passed its sell-by date was a broad charge against its pulpishness in general, in writing as well as plotting. Problems with female characters were just a small part, symptomatic of the whole.
One thing does occur to me. What was true of Thirties SF in 1975 that wasn't true in 1965? Answer: Smith and Campbell, its most prominent authors, were dead. And what was true of Forties SF in 1995 that wasn't true in 1985? Asimov and Heinlein were dead. Maybe there's something about a living author, who's active and a vital part of the field, that keeps the work alive in people's minds.
Obviously that isn't the whole story, and an author's death isn't even necessarily a sign of a downward revaluation. Consider Philip K. Dick, whose stock went way up the minute (it seemed) that he died in 1982, and has never come down since.
Also, of course, "Thirties" does not mean 1930-39 or 1931-40 exactly, nor "Forties" equivalently. There was Thirties SF still being published in the 1940s, in Planet Stories and places like that; us teens of the 1970s didn't think highly of that either.
And some work does not age. I see much less discussion of Weinbaum and Stuart now than I used to; the Twenties-Thirties generation author who seems to have aged best today is Murray Leinster. But I can't recall him being singled out in our opinion back in the '70s, except insofar as he was one of the older authors who successfully made the transition to the Campbellian era.
As far as the Forties go, Campbell's perceived importance to the field as editor seems to have muted with time. If Asimov's work is fading and aging, other authors of that generation are less so. Sturgeon faded from view a bit for a while; now he seems to be returning, aided perhaps by that definitive edition of his short stories. And canonization seems to be increasing and cementing Heinlein's already distinctive rank in the field to one of unique importance as the characteristic author of 20th-century American SF.
Much of the canon panel discussed which work by a given author should best represent them. I often argued for a good short story collection over a novel: many of our best authors are best represented by their shorts. The first book named for Sturgeon was More Than Human, but surely that's because if you're going to pick a novel for him, that's the obvious choice. I think he's better represented by a Best Of story collection. Same with Clarke. (Kathryn offered Tales from the White Hart for him.) Not Dick or Heinlein, though: they're most outstanding as novelists. For Heinlein, the unsurprising panel consensus was that his juveniles are his consistently best work. But which one is the finest?
And that is how we came to the conclusion that the single most representative novel by the single greatest and most characteristic genre SF author - and thus, if you could put just one novel in the time capsule to represent 20th-century American SF, this would be it - is:
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.
And what do you think of that? I can't imagine us coming to any such conclusion 20 or 30 years ago. The Heinlein juveniles were highly valued, but the process of picking a single representative work would have led to something more epic. If Heinlein, perhaps Stranger in a Strange Land, which now (the panel mostly agreed) seems merely quaint. If not, then probably Dune. But not today. Our view of the field and its values has changed.