(no subject)

[seekingferret]

I was going to rant for a while about the newest episode of Charlie Jane Anders and Annalee Newitz's podcast "Our Opinions are Correct", which does a really crappy job of trying to grapple with the problem of Lovecraft and Campbell, and I wrote a few angry paragraphs but then I saw Cora Buhlert's post which does a better job of saying most of what I was trying to say, so read her post.

Why the Retro Hugos Have Value

I do not, personally, find much value in the Retro Hugos, but I am glad some people do, and I appreciate the thoughtful things Buhlert has to say about Golden Age SF and how we can with a modern eye find what's worthwhile in it.

To reduce the golden age to just Campbellian science fiction and Lovecraftian horror is to deny the existence of all of those other stories.

I think the only thing I want to add is that the overall problem with Anders and Newitz's take is that it's built on a progressive approach to the genre that weirdly wants to say that modern fiction is better because we have advanced from the more primitive building blocks of the 1940s. You don't have to read Heinlein's boring, turgid prose anymore, says Anders, since John Scalzi is writing explicitly Heinleinian science fiction in a modern style and more progressively! So Scalzi is better than Heinlein! This is preposterous and I don't think even Scalzi would say that he's a better stylist than Heinlein. This is one step from saying that Kendrick Lamar is a better poet than Shakespeare. Kendrick's an amazing poet, and of course he's been influenced by Shakespeare, but art is not progressive in the way engineering is. We haven't advanced beyond Bach, you know, we're just doing other different cool things with music now.

Also, in addition to a weird take on genre as a whole, the podcast is frustratingly sloppy on basic facts (Lovecraft never edited Weird Tales, the Howard trophy was the World Fantasy Award and has nothing to do with Worldcon...), and midway through Anders admits that even though she's been talking for twenty minutes about how unsalvageable Lovecraft is, she's never read a word he's written. Like, fine, you don't have to read Lovecraft, there's too many books and not enough time, but if you're going to talk about him on a podcast for an hour, wrestle with his legacy, maybe you ought to at least read At the Mountains of Madness or The Call of Cthulhu first? It'd take half an hour, an hour at most.

Comments

[oracne]

See, I hate Lovecraft because I read like two of his short stories, lol. (One of them clued me in on some of the racism.)

[seekingferret]

I have no problem with hating Lovecraft, go for it. I've only read one anthology of his fiction, and I was also repulsed by the racism, though I did admire the way he conjures existential horror.

[oracne]

I didn't HATE hate it, just wasn't into it...aggressively. If that makes sense.

[calledtovienna]

>> This is one step from saying that Kendrick Lamar is a better poet than Shakespeare. Kendrick's an amazing poet, and of course he's been influenced by Shakespeare, but art is not progressive in the way engineering is.

Even if art was progressive, in the way that engineering is, that would still be a weird argument, since:

- The history of the discipline is still worth studying and acknowledging, even if we have grown past it.
- Science Fiction builds on foundations, and if Scalzi was writing in the world where we were not familiar with the concept of "space marines", Old Man's War would be a much harder sell. Lovecraft Country is amazing, but it is partly amazing because it is building on a tradition of horror.
- Subtly different, but art is a product of its literal circumstances. Pulp SF was published in magazine serials to a different denominator of fan, Scalzi is writing novel-length works, etc. In a sense, Greg Egan is a much better comparison. (The first few chapters of David Byrne's "How Music Works" come to mind here: we do different things musically because we have different technology, a different society and a different way of consuming that music)

Anyway, I guess, I tend to approach a lot of art as an engineer/historian, and that makes my view of it very different.

[seekingferret]

I think you need to be careful with the historian argument. It's certainly how I read a lot of the time. I love reading a book and then digging down into its influences, and understanding its context. But it's very easy to get from there to telling people that if they didn't do all that background reading, they're not appreciating the fiction Correctly. And that's especially a problem when the background reading is racist/sexist/etc, because then you're telling people that if they don't go back and read racist/sexist/etc books they didn't do the reading correctly. Cora Buhlert in the post I linked makes another important critique of this historian pose, which is that very often when we talk like this we only talk about the history we're aware of, which doesn't include all the influential writers who were written out of the history, and that tends to be writers of marginalized identities.

So I'm cool with telling people they don't need to go back and do the historical reading. If they want to just pick up Old Man's War or The Light Brigade without reading Starship Troopers, they're fine, they're still Doing SF Fandom Correctly (tm). I just think we can do it without imposing a progressive narrative on the history of literature where Old Man's War is somehow replacing Starship Troopers.

[calledtovienna]

Absolutely -- I was trying to be careful with my phrasing there, and I definitely want to keep the distinction between the double-negative of "you should not tell people that they should not study X" versus telling people that they are obligated to do so. Nobody is obligated to read Lovecraft (except people who are getting phDs in Lovecraft or whatever).

[edited for clarity]

[cahn]

You don't have to read Heinlein's boring, turgid prose anymore, says Anders

I'm sorry, I... just stopped there. What? :P
...Heinlein has a lot of problems, I am super on board with that, but being boring is not one of them!

I liked the Buhlert post! Though I also do not interact with the Retro Hugos in any way.

[seekingferret]

Maybe I was unfair to them in my paraphrase. Here, I transcribed the relevant section, to be fairer. I still think this is a baffling aesthetic judgement, as someone who is under 40 and has read a lot of Asimov and finds him the opposite of impenetrable.

Anders: "I've read some Heinlein, I'm not a huge Heinlein fan. I mean, I just admit it, I hope I don't get in trouble."

Newitz: "I am also not a Heinlein fan. I'm an anti-fan.

Anders: Right. But nobody ever needs to read Heinlein and I don't think anybody ever will read Heinlein. Like, again, I don't think young people are going to be reading Heinlein now. People can read John Scalzi, who basically has admitted on like many many occasions in my hearing that he writes what he calls Heinleinian fiction, and he is writing in Heinlein's ethos, but you know, he's more progressive, he's more aware of other perspectives and he's a little bit more savvy about some of the tropes that he's handling. And so you don't need to read Heinlein because you can just read Scalzi, or you can read Becky Chambers, for that matter, you can read a bunch of other people who are playing with things Heinlein came up with but just doing it in, I would say a better way, in a more interesting way. I'm not going to cast aspersions on Heinlein's prose, but I think his work is of the time it was written, his prose style is of the time it was written, it's much harder for someone who's used to reading books written in the 21st century to go back and read kind of 1960s, 1940s even prose,

Newitz: "That kind of turgid great man style..."

Anders:"Yeah, it's a very different style of writing, and Asimov I think is completely impenetrable to anybody who was not born in the mid 20th century, and I think, nobody under the age of 40, let's say, has ever really read Asimov at this point, people read people who were influenced by Asimov..."

[ambyr]

...speaking up here as an under-40 who has read Asimov. I made it through the Foundation trilogy at approximately age 10, and while I didn’t fall in love with it, I found it perfectly lucid and comprehensible.

[primeideal]

Me reading Asimov some time ago (and I'm well under 40): "Man I hate what this guy has to say about us not having free will, but the story is great! I mean, this is unputdownable! ...I'm not sure what that says about free will."

Also, I haven't read anything novel-length by Heinlein (some short stories), but from what I've osmosed Chambers is...not a very direct replacement??

[cahn]

Chambers is not even kind of a replacement for Heinlein! Or Heinlein a replacement for Chambers, for that matter -- they seem completely different to me. *is confused*

"Man I hate what this guy has to say about us not having free will, but the story is great! I mean, this is unputdownable! ...I'm not sure what that says about free will."

HA!

[cahn]

...I'm over 40, so maybe I shouldn't chime in. :P

But I am even more boggled by calling Asimov impenetrable than I was by your paraphrase of calling Heinlein boring! There are a lot of things you could call Asimov, but impenetrable is... not the word I would choose.

[lokifan]

We haven't advanced beyond Bach, you know, we're just doing other different cool things with music now.

QUITE. We don't need to Myth of Progress art quite this much, you guys.