Towards an SF Canon: Curiosities
Due to circumstances beyond my control which involve several people raising interesting ideas in reply to my tweets about my essay “Why the SF Canon Doesn’t Exist,” I’m now neck deep in a massive research project on the formation of literary canons and their placement in SF scholarship (and wider discourse). In reality, I’ve been curious about this for a while, but I’ve never taken the time to do the deep dive because my research has demanded my attention elsewhere (ugh, tenure needs) and there hasn’t been an urgent need to do the work. After all, most people are either pretty satisfied about there being no official SF canon OR perfectly fine with the de facto canon, which we can piece together through a combination of “important anthologies” and aggregating the works people decide are Important™.1 One might, for example, start with NPR’s reader-selected list of the Top 100 SF/F books and its related list of the 50 best SF/F books of the 2010s.2 I, however, want to look more deeply at why these types of lists and the “de facto” argument are so prevalent in SF discourse AND what efforts have occurred to put together a legitimate canon of SF works. With that in mind, I’d like to turn to two curiosities on the path towards canonization in SF: Robert Silverberg’s The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929-1964 (1970) and Mark R. Hillegas’ “A Draft of the Science-Fiction Canon” (1961; in Vol. 3, Issue 1 of Extrapolation). Two other groups also exist. The first argues that there is a canon — or, at least, that there are classics — and then yells at other people about it. The second hates that the canon — or, at least, the classics — doesn’t much care for that version of the canon and hates being told they have to read that stuff (though some of them may read those things anyway). ↩ For the record, I don’t think general popularity is a good way to form a literary canon. It should be considered, of course, but we must also consider factors such as influence, presentation, representation, etc. More on that another day. ↩
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: You DON’T need to read “the classics” for reasons (there are many) You DO need to read “the classics” for reasons (there are many) 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.
The Unbearable Weight of Fantasy, Tolkien, and Race (or, Eh, Black Elves Are Fine)
The Internet is abuzz about the one fantasy author to rule them all, J.R.R. Tolkien. Over Superbowl weekend, Amazon released the first trailer for their new Tolkien adaptation, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. As with any highly-anticipated media property, the trailer (and the still shots released earlier this year) have sparked considerable debate about the nature of Tolkien’s work, the process of adaptation, and, in particular, Amazon’s decision to feature more diversity than we have seen in previous adaptations of Tolkien’s work (or, indeed, in much of the public conversation of his work). The last of these debate topics would be disheartening if it weren’t so utterly predictable — both because it’s a talking point we’ve seen before in this same community and because it’s a talking point that has been used as a response to diversity in basically all media going back long enough that it’s essentially tradition. While there may be value in discussing these attitudes of (sometimes racist) rejection in particular terms, I think it’s more fruitful to consider the root assumptions which make these debates even possible.
On Legitimacy, Academia, and the Hugos (or, Someone Needs to Take a Class)
If you’ve been following the Hugo Awards fiasco, you might have come across Philip Sandifer’s fascinating analysis of Theodore Beale / Vox Day, his followers, and the Hugos. Sandifer has since become a minor target within the Sad / Rabid Puppies discussion, but not so much for what he actually said as for who he declares himself to be: an educated man. Why would this matter in a conversation about the Hugo Awards? What is so offensive about being a PhD in English (or any other individual with a PhD in the humanities)? As someone who is roughly a year away from acquiring a PhD in English, I find this blatant anti-academic stance rather perplexing if isolated to the science fiction and fantasy world. After all, so many of our greatest writers were academics — mostly in the sciences, but occasionally in the humanities. But once I think about the wider culture — in this case, U.S. culture — it becomes abundantly clear: it’s anti-intellectual posturing. The U.S. has always had a strong anti-intellectual perspective, but in recent years that has reached alarming levels, with mountains of outright derision lobbed at those who are identified as intellectuals — especially academics in the humanities. And as an academic, I still struggle with how to respond to this derisive viewpoint. How do you convince people who already view intellectuals (and academia) with contempt that there is value to be had among the intellectuals (and academics)? That’s a question to answer another time. All of this leads me to R. Scott Bakker’s recent post on the Hugos. In particular, I’m interested in Bakker’s conclusion, since the majority of his post has little to do with academia, except insofar as he demonstrates a significant dislike for us (we’re fools and clowns, apparently, for believing we can teach critical thinking). That dislike also seems to extend to Sandifer, though I’ll admit that it’s difficult to parse posturing or rejection of ideas from actual dislike (and, hell, they may not be that different anyway). Sandifer is a necessary starting point here, because what Sandifer argues about the effects of the Sad / Rabid Puppies (and Beale in particular) on the Hugo Awards can be boiled down to “damaging the Hugo Awards” and “damaging the value of fandom by infected it with bile.” To this argument, Bakker eventually concludes the following: And let’s suppose that the real problem facing the arts community lies in the impact of technology on cultural and political groupishness, on the way the internet and preference-parsing algorithms continue to ratchet buyers and sellers into ever more intricately tuned relationships. Let’s suppose, just for instance, that so-called literary works no longer reach dissenting audiences, and so only serve to reinforce the values of readers… That precious few of us are being challenged anymore—at least not by writing. The communicative habitat of the human being is changing more radically than at any time in history, period. The old modes of literary dissemination are dead or dying, and with them all the simplistic assumptions of our literary past. If writing that matters is writing that challenges, the writing that matters most has to be writing that avoids the ‘preference funnel,’ writing that falls into the hands of those who can be outraged. The only writing that matters, in other words, is writing that manages to span significant ingroup boundaries. If this is the case, then Beale has merely shown us that science fiction and fantasy actually matter, that as a writer, your voice can still reach people who can (and likely will) be offended… as well as swayed, unsettled, or any of the things Humanities clowns claim writing should do. There are a number of problems here. First, Bakker assumes (or wants us to assume) that the so called “literary works” aren’t reaching audiences. This is easy to refute by looking at the mountains of so called “literary writers” whose works appear on bestseller lists or are invited to give talks in performance halls fit for a thousand or more people. The challenging works of the “literary” form are already reaching audiences. Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan, Karen Russell, and on and on and on and on. This is, after all, what we are concerned with, no? Challenges to our literary and personal sensibilities. Within science fiction and fantasy, that becomes much more difficult to measure. What constitutes “reaching an audience”? Bestseller lists? OK. If so, then we might as well assume that sf/f is utterly stagnant, since its most compelling and memorable work isn’t hitting those lists, which is a problem too complicated to explore here. I am, of course, setting aside the reality that “literary” doesn’t exist in any realistic grouping. As a genre, it is even less well-defined than science fiction, which at least has identifiable traditions. What I will say is this: while Bakker seems to view people like me as clowns, we do have a significant hand in what continues to be discussed as “significant” in the sf/f field. What I teach when I teach a science fiction class influences what thousands of everyday people think of when they think “science fiction and fantasy.” There are thousands and thousands of teachers just like me, and thanks to a massive shift in public and academic interests, we’re now teaching sf/f more than we used to. And what I teach isn’t going to be the repetitive, stagnant sf/f of today. Why would I teach an sf/f adventure novel from 2005 which offers nothing new when I can teach its more compelling predecessor from 1895? When I teach my space opera course in the fall, I’m not going to teach contemporary works which read like E. E. “Doc” Smith. I’m going to teach Smith. I’m not going to teach Heinlein pastiches. I’m going to teach Heinlein. And when it comes to the contemporary writers I want to explore, it will be Ann Leckie, Yoon Ha Lee, Tobias Buckell, and so
On the Raging Child of Science Fiction Neo-Snobbery
On a foundational level, the most visible element of SF awards discussions concern subjective assertions about literary quality. I have participated in some of these discussions over the years, podcasting about nominees I disliked for whatever reason and otherwise raging against what I perceived as the absence of taste within certain award-giving communities (mostly the Hugos). The further away from those first instances I become, however, the more I realize how foolish these discussions really are. Why rage against a difference in literary tastes? I can no more tell someone what they should like than they can me. At best, I can make a case for what I consider to be “good,” but even then, the most effective arguments are those that explain why a text is interesting, not why it is qualitatively better, since the latter is, for the most part, impossible. What we consider “of quality” could make for a very confusing, intersecting Venn diagram.
No, Repetition Does Not Mean Science Fiction is Stagnating…Per Se
(This is going to be a bit ranty. Be prepared.) There’s been a bit of talk lately about Project Hieroglyph, an Arizona State University anthology (and website) which attempts to address the argument in Neal Stephenson’s “Innovation Starvation.” I recommend reading that essay yourself; it makes some compelling points about science fiction and the failure of contemporary culture to meet the demands of the 1960s imagination. Here, I’d like to talk about Ed Finn’s (editor of Project Hieroglyph) article at Slate.com: “The Inspiration Drought: Why Our Science Fiction Needs New Dreams.” In fairness, I came to this article via a wildly misleading headline on io9. Finn’s actual argument concerns the recycling of ideas within and outside of science fiction proper and its impact on science. Finn argues that Hollywood special effects have depended for years on the same kinds of high-end computer modeling that physicists, mathematicians, and other researchers use to solve technical problems. Film design gets cited in patent disputes over product design. And then there’s James Cameron, explorer of real and invented abysses. But the issue is not sharing tools—it’s the limited pool of metaphors behind those tools. Right now, almost everyone is working from the same conceptual playbook. All of these engineers watched Star Trek…[It’s] why the X Prize Foundation wants someone to build a Tricorder. [The] fact that we are all so steeped in the same shorthand of the future (intelligent robots; warp drive; retinal displays) is a hint that we’ve become complacent about our dreams. Part of the problem I have with Finn’s argument is that it relies too heavily on an assumption that the repetition of ideas is necessarily tied to intellectual or imaginative stagnation. I’ve left in the line about the tricorder to illustrate a point. As far as I can see, the reason we continue to talk about warp drives and tricorders has less to do with the inability to imagine new technologies, but rather than fact that these tools are utterly absent from our everyday lives. And we notice that absence because we feel a need for these tools. The tricorder serves a function. Our desire for it is largely utilitarian — we have nothing that can replicate its functions, and yet having one would fill a need gap in the same way the now-old-hat calculators we used in school also filled a need gap. Many of the science fictional things we keep turning to in our everyday lives arrive from a center of need, not an inability to imagine beyond the confines of reality. Whether the functions of a real world tricorder will be the same as described in the Star Trek universe is secondary to the symbolic function of the device itself: it’s a catchall term for a tool which serves a variety of scientific and biological functions (and its name will likely change when we actually build one). The exoskeleton is another example. Is it original to the now? Nope. Does it serve a need in the now? Yup. Is creating a real exoskeleton an act of innovation? Well, Finn’s argument requires him to say no, but I’m inclined to say “hell yes.” There are a sea of common, repeated terms in everyday life that come from science fiction. Repeating them in our narratives doesn’t suggest stagnation to me. In a way, the repetitions are necessary to convince our culture that we do, in fact, need some of these imaginary tools from our literary past. Would we be talking about exoskeletons without the repetition of the term (and related terms) in our narratives? Probably not (or maybe). Would we continue to strive for faster-than-light travel in the form of a warp drive without Star Trek and the constant reference to the past? Maybe, but it wouldn’t have the same cultural resonance. The same language. That’s the thing: these repetitions are for Finn a mark of stagnation, but I see them as a mark of a cultural language of need and fulfillment. That we share this language — the warp drive, the tricorder, the ansible, the exoskeleton, etc. — is significant. Without that shared language, without shared reference points, we would have no way to talk about innovation and desire. There would be no way to talk about a possible future or a future that we desire. Rather, we’d be trapped with no way to conceptualize the future as it might one day be. This is not to suggest that science fiction cannot continue to add to that language; indeed, it must by continuously imagining new technologies and ideas in response to the present. Who would have imagined we’d live in a world where a huge number of people have access to immense amounts of data from the comfort of a pocket? Star Trek. Science Fiction. The common language. Additionally, I’d argue that the common language is a necessity. It is inevitable that whatever device we create that falls under the title of “tricorder” will serve an entirely different function from the tricorders of Star Trek fame. Function will outweigh the fiction. But by referring to it by the same term, we create a narrative of that device’s creation that is recognizable by a larger population. Everyone knows what a tricorder is (well, most people), and so using that concept to describe a device with similar properties as the fiction gives us all a frame of reference. “This is a tricorder.” That means something. That meaning is transferable. It has no immediate affect on innovation, since what we might create to fall under the name will be different by default. Even so, Finn can’t honestly think that we’re not creating innovative technologies all over the world despite science fiction’s input, right? Look at the cell phone. Look at medical technology. Look around you. Finn, of course, is right to point out that there is a certain degree of stagnation in filmed science fiction, which more often than not offers nothing new to the table, even if the technologies