Our mixed results experience with the Ye Olde Booke Clubbe was interesting and good for us, but more often than not we ran into issues of the prose being very dated, the attitudes of the writers being intolerably racist, the stories being gender-limited, or other dated-type issues.
But, these are older books, and we went into the project knowing and expecting this.
I’m running into what I think is a similar reaction to much more recent books.
I love my Sci-Fi Opera and often have to reach into the more dusty tomes to scratch that itch, books that were first published in the ’80s-early ’90s.
Some of them are super-duper and I love reading them, they’re a great zipper of a story.
Some of them, eh, are more of a struggle. There’s not so much the spark of wonder and amazement there. They’re not always SF–I’m limping through one now that’s an urban fantasy.
It may be that the social or science issues and technology are dated to things that I still remember and thus crash my suspension of disbelief.
The Bourne Identity/Trilogy is an example of this. The Hunt for Red October is another. I enjoy doing laundry or chopping onions to Star Trek: The Next Generation in the background, but some of the problems they face don’t exactly keep me on the edge of my seat (“makes my feet fall asleep”).
With the really old books (for the sake of discussion, say older than 75 yrs) I’m able to push that off and accept that people thought this way, the technology was extremely different, and so on. So it’s not a matter of my needing to take a history lesson.
For example, I grew up in the Cold War, so sci-fi stories that are based on nuclear threat being the driver of the plot… *shrug*. We’re not so worried about that anymore, whether or not we should be is not the issue, it’s not something that’s taking center stage in our anxieties.
Plots that center around NASA? NASA’s totally fab, but… another shrug. Our sense of wonder with what NASA is doing has kinda lost its sparkle. Yay for the Curiosity Rover, but if you’re at least as old as I am, there was once upon a yonder age when there was a lot more money in NASA and what they were doing was a lot more interesting, the information was more readily available, they were a political power in their own right, and now these dreams are the realm of the private industry. That’s the kind of thing that drops me out of a story: “NASA wouldn’t be doing this. This is a SPACE-X kinda thing, here.”
One of the great things about SF/F is that the stories do lock in stasis our social and political fears and agitations at the time of the publication of the story.
Some of them, though, are total Classics, like I can read Neuromancer (William Gibson) over and over again, and it’s still a thriller.
What say you?
I Love the Hunt for Red October. I’m completely guilty of seeing the movie a hundred times before i even knew it was a book, but I’ve read the book a handful of times now as well. (Super happy childhood memory: watching Sean Connery movies on TV with my Dad)
it is funny reading older stuff, be it stuff from the 70s, stuff from the 40s, or stuff that was written a hundred years ago. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and so many of those books are a look into how things were then. Granted, that’s my over romanticized view that lets me excuse books that treat minorities and women like shit. . . but hey, that makes it romanticized and oversimplified!
The movie is rad. It’s one of the few movies I can watch repeatedly (and 2001, 2010, and Alien, Alien 3…) I tried reading it a couple of times.
I wonder if it makes a difference when in our lives we read these books? I’m sure there are loads of high school kids nowadays who can’t stand Neuromancer.
For me, if it’s a totally old book, I’m way more forgiving of what would be considered inappropriate now. But more recent oldy-ish books? “back in the olden days when they didn’t have cell phones” is not really olden days, it’s when I was in college and so I have a hard time disconnecting from that.
I really enjoyed Dracula even tho it was dated and there were gender issues. But it had a sense of mystery and of something darker than most of us that required an united force of good to battle successfully.
That was a fun read. It was fun to explore what would have been radical with the tech to a reader of that time, too.
Some of the books I’ve had the ho-hums about are from the late 1980s, I guess I should specify century.