Why the SF Canon Doesn’t Exist

As is periodically the case in the SFF community, we’re once more in the midst of a conversation about “the classics.” If you’re reading this now, it doesn’t actually matter that I wrote this in 2022; this conversation happens so often that the context above could apply in any given year going back decades, albeit more frequently today than before social media. The conversation typically features the following claims:

1. You DON’T need to read “the classics” for reasons (there are many)
2. You DO need to read “the classics” for reasons (there are many)
3. There are no “classics” for reasons (there are many)

I’m not going to list the various reasons offered for all of these. Instead, I’ll note that we usually see two common claims for the first two: 1) that you don’t need to read them because they do not represent where genre is now; and 2) that you do need to read them because they’re necessary to understand how we got where we are now. These are incredibly reductive versions of those common arguments, and both are technically correct but typically uttered in the wrong context.

In my view, the questions of “the classics” is really only relevant in an strictly educational framework. This framework may include formal education such as that found at a university or include informal education such as that of a long-tail critic (i.e., someone who is invested in literary criticism of genre). It is not universal (there being value in teaching a variety of works when trying to support a reading culture). Outside of that educational framework, I think these questions collapse. A writer, for example, really has no need to read “the classics” to write work appropriate for now, except if such work is meant to respond to, borrow from, or be interpreted through/with those older works. Knowing works from the last twenty years within a specific genre is likely sufficient in almost all situations. A casual reader doesn’t need to know those works either, as their interactions with contemporary works may be valid within a contemporary context alone. And so on and so forth…

Within that educational framework, however, “the classics” hold a particular allure, in large part because our efforts to teach and understand the history of genre requires us to know where the genre *was* so we can understand where it is *now* (or, at least, in a given post-time). Whether we need to read all of those works may depend on what we are trying to understand and the particular needs of a given project. A project on American space opera from the 1950s, for example, would be bound to a strong, particular knowledge of the works of that period. However, even this project wouldn’t require intimate knowledge of all of the works in that category; rather, you’d need to have a good grasp of several texts largely deemed “important.” If we extend this project out to something much larger in scope, such as a history of genre or teaching a course on genre as a whole, then we can see where the knowledge of works across a wide range of times becomes essential (even if we acknowledge that one does not need to read all of those “classic” works).

But that word “important” is also one worth exploring. When we sit down to construct something within that educational framework, we’re often attempting to identify those works deemed “important” (or, at least, “important in a certain context”). If we include works that aren’t generally recognized as “important,” those works are still understood dialogically (i.e., that these works are in a conversation, albeit one we’re often superimposing onto those works). In general literary studies, this is usually an easy task; there are numerous texts defining the “canon” of literature, and the history of literary study is so substantial that identifying canonical texts usually doesn’t take much effort because those texts are rooted in our educational structures from the ground up; any work we include which is not part of “the canon,” thus, enters a conversation with the works most people accept (or recognize) as “the canon.” SF, however, does not have a canon of texts. It never has. It probably never will.

As academic tools, canons have arrived through a process of formal and discursive (arriving through conversation and dialogue and writing) practice in which works are argued for, debated, presented through formal research, used as comparative models, and used as representative examples in formal education. This process need not be objective nor the result of objective measurements, though such measurements have been used; rather, they exist as a conversation, sometimes with “the nation,” about which works matter and why they matter. In traditional literary circles (i.e., non-genre), these have arrived in two primary forces: the cultural forces of education (what works young people and educated people must know for a variety of reasons) and academic production (books about the great books). There’s a reason we can say things like “the Western Canon” (thanks, Harold Bloom…) or the “Great Books” (there are entire series dedicated to this concept, as in the case of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World series from 1952): we have a language for talking about these things as a result of over a century of discussion about what constitutes the canon (or, at least, what constitutes the Books That Matter).

The curious case of Herman Melville is worth noting here as a prime example of this canon culture. Melville made waves with his first major works, Typee and Omoo, both notable for content that was, for the time, rather titillating. However, the work for which he is most famous today, Moby Dick, effectively marked the decline of his career. He was brutally rejected by the same (mostly New York) critics who had hailed his earlier work,¹ and by his death in 1891, Melville had largely faded from literary memory. He might have stayed that way except for the efforts of Raymond Weaver, who wrote the first biography of Melville in 1921 (1919 being Melville’s 100th birthday) and partly sparked the famous “Melville Revival” of the 20s and 30s.² Before roughly 1950, Melville wasn’t taught anywhere outside of the halls of academia (with rare exception); by the time I hit high school in the late 90s, Moby Dick was one of the most ubiquitous canonical texts taught to teenagers and The Melville Society had been in operation for about 50 years.³ Melville, in other words, became a part of the (American) literary canon through continued and sustained argument by (mostly) academics (and literary critics) who wrote books, started foundations, hosted events, and placed Melville in conversation with other works already considered canonical. While not all traditionally canonized works went through this exact process (though Shakespeare’s canonicity followed a semi-similar path), the people associated with academia (professors, literary critics, and certain publishers) had an outsized impact on defining what we now consider the Western Canon, both through the arguments they made, the works they published, and the influence they had in the classroom.

No such mechanism exists for SF.⁴ Prior to the 1940s, there was very little to almost nothing published outside of fan circles or popular venues such as Cosmopolitan and Harper’s on SF or its precursor genres and iterations (such as the boy’s adventure fiction of the late 1800s or the scientific romance Jules Verne). Some of this can be explained by time, of course. Shakespeare had centuries to be appraised as canonical; much of proto-SF had, in some cases, less than a century before some of the first works of academic writing began to appraise the history of the genre. Still, the first substantial works on SF and SF topics didn’t arrive until the 1940s, and SF studies as a legitimate field of study wasn’t cemented with academia until, arguably, 1970 with the creation of the Science Fiction Research Association and, later in the 70s, the emergence of research references for SF scholarship. Even then, SF struggled to gain widespread legitimacy, this despite the fact that the 60s and 70s saw a remarkable number of foundational works of SF Studies scholarship.⁵

It’s hard to pin down exactly when SF Studies gained widespread acceptance. It might be the emergence of the first academic programs on SF in the 1990s, though I’d argue that it still took another 20 years to get to “legitimacy.” By the time I entered grad school in 2009, it had become a thing you could seek out among the professors in a given department: some departments wore the genre label proudly while others stuck to traditional roots (with its genre professors cleverly framed as something else). By the time I left grad school in 2018, however, you’d have a hard time finding a R1 or R2 university anywhere in the U.S. that didn’t have at least an SF or SFF class or at least one or two or more faculty working in or around the field.⁶

Yet, by the time SF Studies gained widespread legitimacy within academia (and its allies), almost all of the critical work on SF had occurred outside of the academy or the traditional New York critics circle. Those conversations were happening in fanzines and at conventions, in letters and magazines, and even in the occasional non-academic book. They were still happening there when the boom of SF scholarship hit in the 70s, and it only increased as we entered the age of the Internet. While SF scholarship grew exponentially leading into and following the 90s, fandom grew at an even higher rate as we gained access to email, Usenet, blogs, social media, and more. Within all of that, SF had to fight to be taken seriously on its own terms: as a genre, as literature, as a legitimate form of reading. During all of this, the traditional literary canon had secured itself as an institution of its own.⁷ In other words, SF fought to be taken seriously while the halls of “real literature” continued to cement itself as The Canon.

Within SF scholarship, too, the issue of canonicity hasn’t had nearly the same impact as it has elsewhere. One reason for this: the SF canon likely cannot be attached to the same aesthetic and literary merits argued for so aggressively in traditional canon conversations. Instead, academic histories of SF have contended with the variable qualities of SF literature, from pulps to influential first works of dubious merit (Skylark!!!). Works might be considered significant not because they’re widely considered “good” but because they had substantial influence on the development of a genre. Histories, of course, are not canons, but they are a measuring stick for canonicity because they tell us which works most likely align with what could be seen as a canon.

Outside of scholarship, fans have also attempted to identify the significant works of SF. This post is a response to one such effort (albeit, an indirect effort). Any conversation about “the classics” is a conversation about canon, though a loose one that is more malleable and less strict than a canon must necessarily be (more on that another time). We could glean from this an SF canon, of course, but it would be an effort of aggregation rather than a concerted effort on the part of a community. Besides, what one group might consider a classic may not be so for another.⁸

Whether we should have a canon is an important question to ask, and one that the SFF community hasn’t seriously engaged with in decades (in my view), but the fact remains: SF does not have a literary canon. It has many varying lists of important works with an expected high degree of similarity among certain cliques, but it has no actual, defined, argued-for canon. It probably never will because the institutions that would create that canon have not taken up the project and the people who might actually take it up don’t appear to have much interest in picking up the slack. Without that activity, an SF canon is probably a doomed prospect.

Whether you consider that a bad thing will depend a great deal on your perspective on this subject. For me, it’s a complicated affair. As an academic, I find canons useful as tools for placing works in conversation with one another (among other uses). As a fan, I think canons are too often used as a bludgeoning tool by people with personal or professional agendas (the Harold Blooms of the world, if you will). Will that change? Certainly not by me. I tried that project once, and I think it was doomed to failure before it even began (maybe more on that another day).

For now, I leave you with this: argue for the works you think matter, but leave behind the exclusionary rhetoric endemic to many canon conversations. SF is a vibrant, wide-reaching field that continues to grow and adjust and change and become something new every decade. Our conversations about what makes up the Great Books of SF should reflect that as much as the history. Otherwise, we’re not really in conversation with the genre we claim to love. We’re just tourists.