I first read The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell in 1997. Then in 2005, I listened to it when it came out on audiobook. I remember it being an exceptional novel of first contact involving the Jesuits. Russell explored both religion and science fiction at the same time. Essentially, the story asks why bad things happen to good people, especially why would God be so cruel to one of his faithful. It asks this ancient philosophical question in a special context involving aliens, aliens who essentially make the query meaningless, or does it?
However, I don’t really remember the details of the book. This week I accidentally watched three reviewers review this book on Youtube and discovered most of them are part of a science fiction alliance of reviewers. That led to two more reviews. Watching all of them tells us a whole lot about how books are perceived by readers, and how reviewers take different approaches to evaluating books for our consideration. Here they are:
Bookpilled:
Kalandai:
Fit 2B Read:
Secret Sauce of Storycraft:
Media Death Cult:
The Library Ladder:
I’m afraid I’m going to have to study these reviews carefully and reread The Sparrow. Bookpilled is my favorite science fiction reviewer on YouTube and he did not like the book. He had very specific criticisms, some of which I’ve made against other books. I don’t remember thinking about those criticisms when I read The Sparrow.
The Sparrow is on the Classics of Science Fiction list with 23 citations. It is a novel that’s widely admired. But it’s over a quarter of a century old, and it’s been eighteen years since I last read it. I’ve changed, society has changed, and maybe it will be a different reading experience for me this time. Watching these reviewers has brought up a number of questions for me:
Are reviewers too easy or hard on books?
Are readers too easy or hard on books?
Will these reviewers change how I reread The Sparrow?
Are there positive qualities that all readers can recognize?
Are there flaws that all readers can perceive?
Are the value or faults of novels entirely subjective?
Have these reviewers found insights I missed?
Are novels merely Rorschach tests or do novelists have something specific to say?
Do we waste our time by reading books that aren’t worth discussing?
I like this group review by the Science Fiction Alliance. Kalandai doesn’t seem to be part of the group but her review fits in. I hope this group does other group reviews. Some novels are worth the extra focus.
The primary value of science fiction is introducing readers to new concepts. Take time travel – it’s a mind-blowing concept. But how many stories about time travel do we have to read before the concept loses its sense of wonder, or even becomes boring? When do we say: “Hey, I get the idea!”
My mother spent her whole life reading who-done-its, but I got burned out on the concept in my twenties. On the other hand, I’ve been reading about certain science fictional concepts my whole life. Why don’t I get burned out? I think I did, but I just keep reading science fiction hoping to find new concepts that will reignite those old thrills. Along the way, I’ve had to read mouldy concepts so many times that they’ve become boring.
However, let me clarify something. Fiction can approach a theme in two ways. First, the theme can be the focus of the story, or second, it can be the setting. When a theme is new, writers tend to explore it, but when it’s old, they use it for the background of their plot.
After finishing Beyond Armageddon edited by Walter M. Miller, Jr., and Martin H. Greenberg, an anthology of twenty-one post-apocalyptic stories about atomic warfare, I realized I’m burned out on that theme even though it’s always been one of my favorites? Why? That’s hard to say, but some stories overcame the problem of overexposure by focusing instead on the storytelling and characters and using the theme as a background. Others were original classics that I exempt from aging.
Walter M. Miller, Jr. is famous for writing A Canticle For Leibowitz, an uber-classic SF novel on the theme of a post-apocalypse caused by nuclear war. However, he had disappeared from the genre in the 1960s and 1970s. Evidently, he saw the 1984 British film, Threads, about surviving a nuclear war winter and it inspired him to edit this anthology. He mentions Threads several times in his main introduction and in the introductions to the stories. Miller said the main focus of the anthology was nuclear wars, especially a large-scale conflict which he called megawar.
It’s possible to read one post-apocalyptic novel or short story every so often and keep the theme interesting. You just don’t notice that writers seem to find a limited number of insights into that concept. Reading twenty-one stories in a row only emphasizes the finite number of subthemes. Miller chose to only focus on nuclear war apocalypses but I’m not sure how civilization is destroyed that matters for some of the subthemes.
I’m going to try and define those subthemes by citing the different stories. And I’m going to point out how some stories stand above the theme and why.
Because Beyond Armageddon is out of print I’ll link the first mention of the story titles to ISFDB.org to show where the story has been reprinted. You might already have another anthology or collection that has it. If there’s a significant article about the story in Wikipedia or elsewhere, I’ll link it in the second mention of the title. This anthology is being discussed on Facebook and if you’d like to read the threads about each story follow this link.
#1 – “Salvador” by Lucius Shepard (F&SF April 1984)
“Salvador” doesn’t involve nuclear war, but it’s about the dangers of escalating wars on civilian life and civilization. The protagonist, Dantzler, is a soldier in the near future fighting in Central America. Remember, this was written during Reagan’s administration and our secret war in Nicaragua. In the story, the Army uses powerful mind drugs to make soldiers super-aware, aggressive, and brave. The story feels like a cross between Carlos Casteneda’s books and the film Platoon.
I don’t think “Salvador” fits the theme of Beyond Armageddon, but it was an extremely popular story that came out during the time the book was being edited. I think it resonated with Miller’s anti-war feelings so he included it. It’s also the second newest story in the anthology. It doesn’t deal with the subject of this essay either. I would have left it out and picked another story that did. However, “Salvador” is an impressive story.
“The Store of the Worlds” is a story that at first doesn’t seem to fit the theme of the anthology either, however, Robert Sheckley is brilliant at tricking us into seeing a philosophical insight about nuclear war. When our reading group discussed “The Store of the Worlds” it was highly admired.
This story is one that focused on the theme of a nuclear war post-apocalypse and is squarely aimed at the theme, but I believe “The Store of the Worlds” should have been the last story in the anthology.
Rating: *****
#3 – “The Big Flash” by Norman Spinrad (Orbit 5, 1969)
“The Big Flash” is about a rock and roll band that has explosive success. Its satirical humor reminds me of the film Dr. Strangelove, and the storytelling outshines the theme. Like the movies Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe, the story is pre-apocalyptic. The first three stories in this anthology are really about our madness. Science fiction does two things. It promotes futures we’d like to see, and warns us about futures we should avoid. The first three stories in this anthology are all warnings about humanity being insane.
I’m not sure Spinrad wrote this story to protest nuclear bombs. It’s a gonzo story about rock and roll.
“Lot” is the story that should have been first in this anthology. It came out in 1953, probably during the peak era of atomic war paranoia. “Lot” is completely focused on the theme and defines many of the standard attributes of post-apocalyptic fiction. “Lot” is a wet dream for survivalists and preppers, defining their key philosophical creed. Once civilization falls, survival of the fittest is everything. Mr. Jimmon and his family flee Los Angeles just after it’s been nuked. Mr. Jimmon instantly embraces survivalist thinking while his family can’t stop thinking with a civilized mindset even as they race away from the mushroom clouds.
“Lot” is one of my all-time favorite science fiction short stories. It’s brutal. It’s a story of cold equations before the classic Tom Godwin story. It’s one of my prime pieces of evidence that 1953 was the peak year for short science fiction.
“Day at the Beach” is another story that focuses beautifully on the theme. Carol Emshwiller describes life after the bomb, living with radiation. Like many science fiction stories in the 1950s, it speculates about mutations as a consequence of radioactive fallout. Myra and her husband Ben, who are bald, take their son, Littleboy, who has lots of hair, for a day out at the beach. Littleboy is a mutant. Life is grim, but people keep on living.
This story features two of the main subthemes of a nuclear post-apocalypse. The primary one is survival after the bomb and the second is mutants.
Rating: ****
#6 – “The Wheel” by John Wyndham (Startling Stories, January 1952)
“The Wheel” introduces us to another classic subtheme of post-apocalyptic fiction. It suggests that after civilization collapses society will revert to earlier social constructs. I’ll call that subtheme, a devolved society. In this case, a superstitious society like early America and the Puritans. This was common speculation about post-apocalyptic life in the 1950s. A classic example is The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett. “The Wheel” is tightly focused on painting the theme. The concepts are in the foreground, although there’s a good story.
Interestingly, “The Wheel,” “The Store of the Worlds,” and “Lot” have surprise endings. I wonder if that’s a factor in them being remembered and reprinted. All these stories are jammed with ideas about how post-apocalyptic life will be different. Yet, they all use good storytelling techniques to express these ideas. In other words, they have a message, but it doesn’t dominate the story.
As we progress through Beyond Armageddon these speculative ideas get repeated and newer writers elaborate on them. But eventually, I believe it gets harder to come up with fresh perspectives.
“Jody After the War” is where the theme shifts from the focus of the story to the background. The eastern U.S. has been destroyed in a nuclear war, and the capital is now in Denver. Paul and Jody are up in the hills and are having a day outside like Myra and Ben, but they have no child. Jody can’t have children because she’s a survivor of an atomic bomb explosion. This story is more about their relationship and less about the post-apocalypse. Civilization hasn’t been destroyed, but it’s been wounded and suffers from PTSD.
In “The Terminal Beach,” Traven, a deeply depressed man sneaks onto an island where they’ve been testing atomic bombs. This surreal tale is one of my favorites in the anthology. Because I’ve been reading and watching documentaries about South Pacific atom bomb tests, this story was exceedingly vivid to me. This is another story that’s not post-apocalyptic, at least for the whole world, but Traven inhabits a post-apocalyptic landscape. I feel “The Terminal Beach” captures the psychic horror we felt back in the 1960s.
“Tomorrow’s Children” is another story about mutants. There’s quite a bit of scientific talk in this story. Coming just two years after Hiroshima I’m sure the world was full of such speculation. Interestingly, the focus of this story is anti-prejudice. Anderson’s message tells people to ignore what people look like and accept everyone for being human.
Rating: ***+
#10 – “Heirs Apparent” Robert Abernathy (F&SF, June 1954)
In “Heirs Apparent,” Robert Abernathy puts his American protagonist, Leroy Smith, a visiting scientist, in Russia after a nuclear war has destroyed both countries. Russia has been bombed back to serfdom. Smith helps survivors trying to restart agriculture with his professional knowledge. Unfortunately, for a small village, a survivor, Bogomazov arrives there. He’s a member of the Communist party and demands to be the leader forcing everyone to work collectively. Smith goes along. He has no choice. Abernathy uses this story for a lot of infodumping and speculation, but the main gist of the story is capitalism and communism will be useless after the apocalypse.
This is another old favorite of mine, but an ideal form of post-apocalyptic fiction for me too. 76-year-old Brian Van Anda survives the apocalypse alone, living in a flooded New York City in the Hall of Music museum. I love post-apocalyptic stories about the last man on Earth, but as usual, they are never the very last person. Van Anda survives inside the decay of the city, scourging food the best he can. Weather permitting, he doesn’t even wear clothes. His only regard to civilization is playing the piano, working to learn a very complicated piece he wanted to perform before the bombs. Eventually, two young people find him. They live like primitive nomads. They had a leader, an old person who guided them, that’s died. They are out searching for a replacement old person because they need guidance. They also want to get married and that requires an old person.
The two major subthemes are living alone after the apocalypse and society reverting to tribal hunting and gatherers.
Rating: *****
#12 – “Game Preserve” by Rog Phillips (If, October 1957)
“Game Preserve” is another story of mutants, but a rather sad, painful one. It’s told by Elf, a child who lives in a strange tribe of human-like creatures. Their cognitive abilities are about equal to chimpanzees, but they all have a fetish. I don’t want to spoil the story, but it’s brutal. It’s another cold equations story.
“Game Preserve” takes the theme and uses it for a rather unusual setting. The focus is no longer the post-apocalypse, but something deep and psychological. I don’t know if Phillips was merely being sensational, or if he wanted to bring up a philosophical conundrum.
Rating: ****+
#13 – “By the Waters of Babylon” by Stephen Vincent Benét (Saturday Evening Post, July 31, 1937)
“By the Waters of Babylon” is a classic. If Stephen Vincent Benét had read and known about “The Scarlet Plague” by Jack London and After London by Richard Jefferies then his story is an update of those classic post-apocalyptic tales. If he hadn’t read those classics, then it’s a case of rediscovery of a classic concept. I don’t know how old the idea is that if civilization collapsed it would revert to a tribal society. I’d love to read a literary study of that idea.
I’ve seen this reversion theme over and over again. Sometimes it’s back to a hunting and gathering, sometimes the apocalypse knocks us back to a tribal society, and sometimes to a feudal society. And sometimes just to the 19th century. It’s very logical when you think about it.
I love “By the Waters of Babylon.” It has a tremendous sense of wonder. However, over the decades I feel subtheme has been overused. I sometimes wonder if writers merely want a setting that’s pre-modern and use an apocalypse to get them there.
This subtheme demands two other themes. First, why don’t we see new forms of society? And second, why don’t we see more stories about a healed, mutated, or changed modern civilization. “Jody After the War” was one possible example, but it didn’t work out the ideas of the subgenre in the way I’m suggesting. Think about it, what if a nuclear war killed 50% of current Americans but left the other 50% to rebuild. Wouldn’t we just patch up the broken parts and keep going the way we were? Japan and Germany rebuilt and became better than ever. Why don’t we see that in this post-apocalyptic tales?
“There Will Come Soft Rains” is another classic. Ray Bradbury imagines people completely gone, and our automated civilization working without us – for a while. We don’t know if this is world-wide or just in the city that got bombed. This rare subtheme, life after people, is one I love to contemplate. Bradbury anticipates the book The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, a nonfiction book about what would the world be like if people suddenly disappeared. It inspired two television shows. Follow the link to read more.
“To the Chicago Abyss” reminds me of the Sheckley story. In it an old man annoys people in a post-apocalyptic world by constantly reminding them of things that no longer exist. Since we have two stories in this anthology on this topic I guess that makes a subtheme – what we’ll miss.
Rating: ***+
#16 – “Lucifer” by Roger Zelazny (Worlds of Tomorrow, June 1964)
“Lucifer” is another story about what we’ll miss. It feels like a last man on Earth story. Carlson, the protagonist returns to a dead city to repair generators and get the lights going. The light flare up for a few seconds, and then go out again. But it’s enough to remind Carlson of what life was once like. This story reminds me of the 1959 Harry Belafonte film, The World, The Flesh, and the Devil.
Rating: ***+
#17 – “Eastward Ho!” by William Tenn (F&SF, October 1958)
William Tenn cleverly unwinds the clock on Europeans settling North America. He imagines Native Americans reestablishing control of the continent after a nuclear war. The title, “Eastward Ho!” is a play on the famous saying “Go west, young man.” The story really isn’t focused on the post-apocalypse theme, but instead it’s a satire on American hubris. It’s a fun story. It really belongs to the subtheme of what will we build next. That subtheme gave authors a chance to imagine all kinds of societies.
The thing is, no civilization lasts for long, The history of our species is trying out all the possible combinations of societies. So apocalypses just the way we start over and try something new.
“The Feast of Saint Janis” is the second story in this anthology that uses the apocalypse to create an exciting rock and roll story. I guess the subtheme could be called rebuilding America, but like Spinrad and Ellison, Swanwick is using the postapocalyptic setting to stage a gonzo story. And I consider this one superior to the other two. Swanwick imagines a situation where a woman volunteers to become the reembodiment of Janis Joplin. It’s a striking story.
“If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth…” is a different take on the nuclear post-apocalypse, although to tell you why would spoil the story. This is both early and minor Clarke, but it’s still readable.
Rating: ***
#20 – “A Boy and His Dog” by Harlan Ellison (New Worlds, April 1969)
“A Boy and His Dog” is a famous novella by Harlan Ellison that earned a Nebula award and was made into a movie in 1975. The setting is a post-apocalyptic America where on the surface men live like a Mad Max movie, but in silos beneath the surface, the good and righteous exist in clean and orderly cities. This is a perfect example where Ellison uses the post-apocalypse as a setting for his story about sex and violence. It has nothing to say about the theme, and its real goal is to be sensational. And boy is it sensational. It’s an exciting and classic science fiction story but I don’t think it fits in this anthology.
Miller maintains an outrage about politics throughout all his introductions, and he’s seriously protesting against nuclear war. I don’t see this story as a protest, nor is it a serious take on his theme. And it will be problematic for modern readers because Vic, the protagonist is a serial rapist who uses a mutant dog to find women to attack. The story is misogynistic through and through.
Rating: **** (but it’s definitely politically incorrect, even I might want to cancel culture it)
“My Life in the Jungle” by Jim Aiken is another story that doesn’t fit the theme of our anthology. It’s about a man, a mathematics professor, who suddenly finds himself in the body of a chimpanzee. The story is a surreal fantasy that symbolizes the tragic stupidity of our species. The ending can be seen as a post-apocalypse, but it’s more of an analogy for ecological self-destruction than nuclear self-destruction.
However, “My Life in the Jungle” is a powerful story and the newest of the anthology. My guess is Miller read it while editing Beyond Armageddon and just wanted to promote a new writer. This anthology is its only reprint.
Rating: ****+
I may have had my fill of post-apocalyptic fiction, at least for stories about nuclear war. However, I’m tempted to read other anthologies on the subject to see if anyone found something uniquely different to say. I do have several of them. See my post on “End of the World Anthologies.”
What I really need to decide is if I just like vicariously living in post-apocalyptic worlds. That’s kind of sick when you think about it, and if true, maybe I need psychoanalysis. I’ll have to contemplate that. I’ve always loved tales like Robinson Crusoe. On the other hand, I need to consider that there’s nothing new to be learned from reading speculations about nuclear war. That I should go on to other topics. Time is limited in this life, especially now that I’m 71, so why waste so much reading time on such a narrow subject when there’s zillions of interesting other subjects to explore?
I’m struggling to find a science fiction novel that grabs me. Months have passed since the last one I loved. That was The Hopkins Manuscript by R. C. Sherriff. It’s not that I don’t have hundreds of science fiction books waiting to be read, but finding one that profoundly resonates with my current mindset is difficult. I subsist on science-fiction short stories until a sci-fi Moby Dick breaks the waves of my attention.
I’ve mostly been diverting myself by reading nonfiction and novels from other genres. I just finished The High Window by Raymond Chandler and for whatever reason it did resonate perfectly with my current mood. I remember reading Farewell, My Lovely years ago and loving it. And I vaguely believe I read The Big Sleep, but that was long ago. Usually, I dislike mysteries, thrillers, and other crime novels. I just don’t care who did it.
What thrills me about Chandler’s books is his prose, and in particular, his descriptions. Chandler is famous for creating the detective, Philip Marlowe. Whenever pop culture satirizes the hardboiled detective, they are usually making fun of Marlowe’s way of talking. Chandler’s dialogue is painfully cliche. His convoluted plots often mystify and confuse. I would completely ignore Chandler if those two aspects were all he offered. What redeems Chandler in my eyes, even elevates him to a model writer, is his descriptions.
Wherever Philip Marlowe goes he describes what he sees in vivid detail. To illustrate my point, here are the first few pages of The Big Sleep. Last night I started watching the Humphrey Bogart version. I’ve seen it several times before. And after reading The High Window I decided to start over with Philip Marlowe and read his first appearance in a novel. When I went to buy it on Amazon I discovered The Annotated Big Sleep and it seemed perfect for jumping into the world of Raymond Chandler.
In the film it’s a bit different, the girl says, “You aren’t very tall” to Humphrey Bogart and he replies, “I try to be.” I’ve seen many different actors play Philip Marlowe and none of them matches my mind’s eye, but Bogie does okay. I watched a couple low budget versions of The High Window yesterday and was extremely disappointed. They go for Chandler’s cliche dialogue but they never capture the feel of the books. Even though Time to Kill (1942), The Brasher Doubloon (1947), and The Big Sleep (1946) were made in the 1940s, they don’t look like the 1940s Chandler describes. They only seem to be visual sketches or quick impressions.
Movies drive quickly through 1940s Los Angeles. Chandler strolls. He stops and smells the roses as well as the dog shit.
This got me thinking about science fiction. Are there any science fiction novels that paint the future in the same way that Chandler has portrayed the past? My first thought was of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion. I just went and checked, and it is indeed full of vivid details, but not at Chandler’s level of density. I’ve always liked Heinlein for his details, but checking shows he is a far cry from Chandler’s descriptions too.
Maybe it’s not possible to imagine the future in such detail. Hemingway steered writers away from such writing. But then, few writers like to go overboard on the details like Henry James or Edith Wharton. I guess what I like about Chandler is he paints realistic pictures with words while most modern writers have left realism for impressionism and minimalism or even the abstract.
I need to think about this. I need to pay closer attention to how science fiction writers describe the future. It occurs to me that Walter M. Miller, Jr. was quite vivid in the opening of “A Canticle for Leibowitz” in the April 1955 issue of F&SF.
If you know of science fiction novels that are rich in descriptive details, let me know in the comments.
For most of my life I’ve had a prejudice against the fantasy genre. When I was ten I was crazy about the Oz books, but not long after that I discovered science fiction. I know it’s possible to enjoy both science fiction and fantasy, but I associate fantasy with the unscientific, with religions and myths, and with the belief in magic. On rare occasions I’ve fallen for fantasy tales, like the Harry Potter books and The Golden Compass trilogy. I believe they were acceptable to me because they were for kids and I assume fantasy stories are fine for children. Although, that might suggest that part of my prejudice against fantasy is because I believe fantasy is for children — and that at a certain age we should give it up.
However, I mainly dislike fantasy stories because fantasy embraces magic. I hate the concept of magic for scientific and philosophical reasons. I have always hoped that scientific thinking would supplant religious thinking. Christianity has a problem with magic too. Christianity has always hoped to supplant belief in magic, and I can understand why. Because for a new paradigm to take old the old one has to be erased. But for me, Christianity is just another form of magical thinking, and I expected science to replace it.
You might be thinking this is a weird way to review a book, but reading The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany deals with these philosophical issues — and I wonder if it’s message isn’t anti-magic. I’m not sure what it’s exact stance on the subject is, which is why I want to talk about it. And you might think I’m even more confused because I’m reading a classic adult fantasy novel when I just declared I’m too old for fantasy novels.
I decided to read The King of Elfland’s Daughter when the unnamed reviewer on Bookpilled, my favorite science fiction reviewer channel on YouTube, reviewed it. The Bookpilled guy praised The King Of Elfland’s Daughter so highly I felt I should try and overcome my fantasy prejudice and give it a read.
The King Of Elfland’s Daughter came out in 1924, and according to Wikipedia it made quite an impact. Over the years, some of my favorite science fiction writers from the mid-20th century mentioned an admiration for Lord Dunsany. In 1969 Ballantine reprinted the novel as the second book in its second series of Adult Fantasy novels. That series if often cited as reviving fantasy as a popular genre for adult readers. I remember that Ballantine Adult Fantasy books coming out back then, and I liked them for their covers, but never wanted to read them. Over the years, I have ended up reading a few of them. I wish I had bought and saved those Ballantine editions because many of them sell for hundreds nowadays.
The King of Elfland’s Daughter might not appeal to modern fans of fantasy though. It’s prose sounds like something out of Chaucer, and there is very little character development, dramatic action, or even dialogue. Lurulu, the troll, who is mostly a comic character seems to have had the most lines. I say that because in the audiobook edition I listened to the narrator did voices for the characters and about the only one that stood out was the troll’s. I also read along with a 99 cent Kindle edition from Amazon.
The story is set in the village/valley of Erl and the neighboring fantasyland of Elfland. The setting is sometime before 1530 — Dunsany makes a specific point of bringing that up. Erl is ruled by a hereditary lord who lives in a castle, but a Parliament of elders comes to visit the lord of Erl telling him they want more magic in their land. The lord tells his son, Alveric, to go into Elfland, find and bring back the King of Elfland’s daughter, Lirazel, and marry her. This happens early in the book and they have a son named Orion. Unfortunately, Lirazel can’t adapt to human ways and returns to Elfland. Most of the rest of the story is about Alveric trying to find his way back to Elfland to recapture Lirazel, and Orion growing up to be a hunter, first of stags, but then of unicorns.
This novel was pleasant enough to read, but it’s structure was primitive, much like a long fairytale. Alveric and Lirazel have practically no personal traits at all, and there’s barely any for Orion. Lirazel is beautiful, and that’s about it. Orion is good at hunting and loves his hunting dogs.
On the other land, the prose is rather nice.
The real meat of this story is the contrast between Earth and Elfland. Elfland is another dimension that borders Erl on the east. Elfland is timeless. Immortal beings that leave Elfland to visit Earth age. When Alveric is in Elfland capturing Lirazel, ten years pass by in Erl. Lord Dunsany sets up his story so that Erl is Christian and its citizens believe they will go to heaven. But we’re also told there is no path to heaven from Elfland. The choice for some of the characters is between living, growing old, dying and going to heaven, or choosing to live in Elfland where nothing happens and everything is eternal. Dunsany constantly reminds us of the timelessness of Elfland.
Sometimes I picture everything in Elfland frozen in one beautiful tableau. When Lirazel returns she sits on her father’s knee the entire time Orion grows up. I tried to get Midjourney to create an image of that scene but it kept making Lirazel a little girl in her father’s lap. I settled for what I have above.
During that same time, Alveric is on a never ending quest to reenter Elfland. His quest is longer than Odysseus’ journey home after the Trojan War.
Eventually, Orion discovers the edge of Elfland and sees a unicorn. Now, in this story, unicorns are magical, but not special like in modern fantasy stories. In fact, Orion hunts them, and mounts their heads. I bet modern readers will be horrified at that. Orion also discovers trolls and the trolls start visiting Erl.
I’m not sure if I should tell the whole story, but I’m going to say that the Parliament of Erl come to regret their desire for more magic in their land. They thought it would make their valley famous, but instead magic scares them. And it’s here where I wonder if Dunsany isn’t making a case against magic. At one point the Freer (friar?) speaks to the village:
I won’t tell what the ending is but it involves a transformation that I can’t decide if it’s wonderful or horrifying.
My theory is belief in magic existed before Christianity all across Europe, and for two thousand years the Church has been trying to stamp it out. Lovers of fantasy hate to let magic go. And I wonder if Lord Dunsany’s book, The King of Elfland’s Daughter isn’t about that. On one hand, I tend to think Dunsany is siding with Christianity and is against magic, but on the other hand, I think he’s just as enchanted by the magical.
The reason why I believed fantasy is for children is because I felt pretending is something kids like to do. But I also assume when we grow up we need to get real. Now, I’m no longer sure if it is okay to allow fantasy in books for children. Too many kids never grow up. I thought reading science fiction was taking the road to realism, but I realized late in life that much of science fiction is just as magical as fantasy. The reality is we don’t like reality and wish it was something its not. On the other hand, fiction allows us to cope with a reality that is difficult to comprehend.
Back in the 1800s there was a lot of opposition to reading fiction. Serious people thought it rotted the mind. People thought fiction mainly appealed to children, women, and men who couldn’t cope with the real world. I’m not sure they were wrong. And I wonder if Lord Dunsany wasn’t touching on this issue in The King of Elfland’s Daughter.
If I had the time I would like to make a case comparing the L. Frank Baum Oz books to The King of Elfland’s Daughter. There were 14 Oz books published from 1900 to 1920. The King of Elfland’s Daughter came out in 1924. I’d like to study what people thought of fantasy in the years 1900 to 1940 before science fiction started getting popular.
As a ten-year-old I wanted Oz to exist like Elfland. As a teenager, and even into my twenties, I used to tell people I never wanted to adultify.
Does anyone know of a good study on the evolution of fantasy fiction? I might not want to read it but I might want to read about it.
I am reading The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany, first published in 1924. Normally, I do not like reading fantasy, but Bookpilled praised this novel so extensively and claimed it was so influential that I had to try it. I’ll review the book itself in the future. What I’m writing about now is how I tried to visualize the story using AI software.
I have a condition called aphantasia, which means I can’t visualize images well in my head. Most people can close their eyes and see things. I can’t. I didn’t discover this until I was in my sixties. I’ve often read that ordinary people when they read a story visualize it in their mind’s eye. When I discovered Midjourney I got the idea that maybe I could use that program to help me see what fiction was describing. I’m just beginning to learn Midjourney. It’s easy to make striking pictures, but very hard to make specific striking pictures.
In The King of Elfland’s Daughter, the Elfland’s daughter is Lirazel, a princess who leaves her magical world to live in our ordinary world to marry Alveric and become his queen in the nonmagical land of Erl. Lirazel has a hard time coping without magic. Alveric wants her to become Christian and worship his way. Lirazel can’t understand why. She wants to worship the stars, but Alveric considers that evil. She tries to skirt his commands by worshipping the reflections of stars in a lake. That’s what the picture at the top of the page is trying to show.
Midjourney will draw almost anything, in any style you request. However, you have to describe what you want in words and codes, and Midjourney does its best to guess what they mean. It’s very hit-and-miss, and quite often Midjourney will ruin a beautiful image with weird deformities of the human form. If you look closely at the image at the top of the page, the women’s hands are ugly. Or look at this image. At first, it’s beautiful, until you see her arms. So many attempts have to be thrown out because of these deformities.
Here is another go at the same scene but asking for a more artistic view. However, I definitely didn’t imagine The King of Elfland’s Daughter looking like this art style. Mentally, I pictured the setting of the story to be a darkly medieval world lit by natural light. That’s why the picture at the top fits better in my mind. But the picture below does have an enchanting fantasy flavor. I can imagine that some readers see the story like this picture.
I went looking for previous artwork used for The King of Elfland’s Daughter but didn’t find much. Here is some artwork from an early edition, maybe even the first. I’m not sure. It’s very stylized. And it’s from the 1920s, so maybe this is how they pictured fantasy worlds.
This is how they pictured it in the 1960s when Ballantine reprinted this novel for its Adult Fantasy series. Notice how stylized the art is compared to how I’m trying to picture it.
These illustrations aren’t from The King of Elfland’s Daughter but show art styles that I think people associate with fantasy. However, probably they are more suited for children’s books. Using Midjourney you can apply any artistic style you want. The trick is convincing the program to use it and that can be hard.
People are using Midjourney to create art that can be used as digital art, book covers, illustrations, or in a series for comic books, graphic novels, and even animation. There are many hurdles. The first is to develop a consistent character out of a program that generates art from randomness. This can be done by using the same random seed number. You can also guide the program by uploading illustrations or photos, or even crude hand-drawn sketches. And there are endless keywords, styles, switches, datasets, etc. that can be applied. It really is something to be learned. And using Midjourney is a skill requiring artistic understanding. You either need to know about art or you need to learn about it quickly.
This is why it will be a while before I could ever read a book and routinely picture scenes in Midjourney. But while I’m reading The King of Elfland’s Daughter I’m often finding scenes I would like to see. There is one with a troll talking to a fox. Another with Lirazel, her small son, his nurse who is a witch, and the troll. And I just read one where Alveric is walking across a vast deserted landscape. He starts out with a bag of food thrown over his shoulders, enough to last him two weeks, a blanket around him as a coat for warmth, carrying a bundle of firewood, and a sword at his side. I’d like to visualize those scenes.
You can try Midjourney for free, but when I did, it warned me there were too many free users at the moment. I joined for $10 a month, but I soon realized that learning the program requires cranking out more images than the $10 account limit, and upped my account to the $30 version. And it’s not easy to use. You have to be a member of the Discord community because you send commands to Midjourey through that social site and view the results there too. There are tons of videos on YouTube that show how to do all of this if you’re interested.
You can view a gallery of Midjourney art here. It’s dazzling. If you crave beautiful pictures, this program might become addictive.
As I’ve mentioned, our short story club is reading Beyond Armageddon edited by Walter M. Miller, Jr. and Martin H. Greenberg. Its specific theme is megawars, which is what Miller calls all-out nuclear conflicts that destroy civilization. Tuesday’s story discussion was on “Tomorrow’s Children” by Poul Anderson which first appeared in the March 1947 issue of Astounding Science Fiction but was probably written in 1946. Coincidentally, today I finished the short novel The Murder of the U.S.A. by Will F. Jenkins (Murray Leinster) which was published in 1946. Both of these stories were written in the year after we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and imagine the United States nearly destroyed by a sneak attack using hundreds of atomic bombs.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been consuming science fiction stories, nonfiction, and documentary films about the development of atomic weapons in the 1940s and 1950s. I want to discover where the common ideas we hold today about surviving an atomic wars come from. Are they from science fiction stories or from general public knowledge? As Civil Defense programs emerged after WWII, Americans were told about what an atomic bomb attack would be like and how to prepare and survive it. It was assumed we’d survive such a war. But as the years went by many people started believing we wouldn’t.
Darker assumptions became the norm. Books, and especially movies and television shows, based on a growing list of memes about atomic wars have shaped what we expected. Over the decades, those fears have taken a back seat to other fears, especially about climate change, and occasionally about plagues, cosmic disasters, and the return of gods. For some reason, we all entertain various scenarios about the end of the world.
For some reason, reading all this old science fiction about nuclear war has shown me we were too worried, and mostly scaring ourselves. Sure, such wars were possible, but not as likely as everyone feared. That makes me wonder if we’re too worried about climatic change, or economic collapse, or pandemics? Of course, all these things can actually kill us, but what are the odds that they will kill as many people as fiction imagines?
In “Tomorrow’s Children” Anderson imagines Americans in small towns rebuilding after the war but still suffering from widespread fallout of radioactive dust and germs from biological weapons. Anderson pictures both human and animal births being overwhelmed with horrible mutations. It’s a grim story, but ultimately positive. His solution is we must give up all prejudices about what people should look like. “Tomorrow’s Children” was well anthologized.
Anderson also pictures many of the tropes we’ll see used in most post-apocalyptic novels that have been published since then. I often wonder if the success of AR-15 sales isn’t due to apocalyptic fears? Are survivalists and preppers living with assumptions that are probably more science fiction than fact?
Anderson wrote three other stories that were “sequels” to this one that was collected in a fix-up novel called Twilight World. Radioactivity that caused mutations was a big theme in science fiction in the late 1940s and 1950s. Remember all the movies about giant invading insects or post-apocalyptic novels where normal people battled tribes of human mutants?
Murray Leinster’s novel, The Murder of the U.S.A. has a rather unique plot. America is destroyed by a sneak attack that leaves all the major cities in ruins. However, we don’t know who attacked us because the rockets came in over the poles. This was well before ICBMs were invented, so impressive speculation by Jenkins. However, in this story, Americans built over a hundred deeply buried silos where the military could survive and launch retaliative attacks. The novel is about the men of Burrow 89 who do detective work to find out who murdered the U.S.A. It’s not a very good novel and has been out of print until recently when Wildside Press reprinted it.
After reading all these stories and watching all those documentaries, I’m not sure an atomic war will be like what science fiction imagined. I believe fiction has assumed we’d go to extremes. As far as I know, radioactive fallout has not caused weird human mutations or giant insects. And we haven’t had any all-out wars that destroyed most of humanity. What I’m afraid of is a limited nuclear war. I’m afraid politicians will discover they can get away with using nukes. I believe all this post-apocalyptic fiction has scared us so much that we fear any use of them will destroy everything. I keep reading about the times our presidents considered using nuclear weapons. And we have to assume leaders and other countries have had similar thoughts. What if we start having limited wars with atomic weapons and they don’t destroy the world? Isn’t that something to fear even more?
Science fiction often imagines the worse possible ways for us to destroy ourselves. What I’m beginning to fear are all the ways we can merely make everyday life worse because of these fears. I have to admit, that science fiction has given me a lot to worry about over my lifetime. Science fiction has always been about our hopes and fears for the future. Reading all these stories about nuclear doom shows how we incorporated that one fear into our consciousness.
Here is Hiroshima in 1945 and 2020. Did we imagine such a recovery in 1945? It’s pretty weird that it’s taken me over fifty years to begin to distrust science fiction.
But there is something else we should consider. Why have these stories been so popular for so long? Sure, the causes of apocalypses keep changing, but we still delight in fiction about surviving something big and awful. Maybe they imply another kind of psychological issue. Instead of worrying about the worse than can happen, maybe we subconsciously want cataclysmic change? That deep down we don’t like how civilization has evolved and want a do-over. That’s not healthy either.
Now I’m starting to wonder if my life-long addiction to science fiction isn’t a psychological symptom suggesting I have a problem with reality. Think about it. Why would anyone really want to live on Mars? Why would anyone picture themselves living in a post-apocalyptic world? Why would anyone imagine time-traveling to the past or future? And really, why are dystopian novels so popular as escapist fiction?
We’re living through times changing so fast that it seems ridiculous to imagine the future. Over the past year, I’ve developed an addiction to watching YouTube. It’s an easy way to take the pulse on a lot of topics and subcultures. I watch between one and two dozen short videos a day, as well as read several kinds of news feeds on my computer. During the past two weeks, since the announcements of GPT4 and MidJourney 5, my YouTube feed has been overwhelmed with AI stories. Possibilities are exploding like a-bombs.
I believe we’re in the middle of a societal paradigm shift. It’s already possible to write science fiction with the aid of an AI, but creators can also create SF graphic novels and comics, SF videos, and movies with AI creating all the visuals including the actors, SF audiobooks using AI-created voices, and even newer SF art forms. Already, it was possible with technology for a writer to create and book via their own artistic skills and self-publish it, now they can use an AI cowriter, or even an AI ghostwriter.
There’s one barrier that AI can’t cross, as of now. And that’s creating new science fictional concepts. The writer who can take in everything that’s going on now and speculate about the near future in any coherent way has the edge – for the moment. AIs based on current training models are essentially limited to rearranging the deck chairs on the Carnival Cruise’s Mardi Gras. What’s disappointing, is that’s exactly what most current human science fiction writers are doing too.
Everyone is freaking out over AI being more creative than humans, but right now AIs are becoming more and more creative like humans. They take old art and rearrange it to suit themselves. Both humans and AI are recyclers.
Even when a human does do something startlingly different, like Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, it’s still possible to deconstruct most of it to stock off-the-shelf parts. William Shakespeare is rated number one as a creative writer, but look how brilliant he was at recycling.
We don’t actually want 100% original creativity. How many people read Finnegans Wake, a work where Joyce tried to be uniquely original?
Although it has fallen out of favor, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land was vastly different from anything science fiction had produced before it. So was Frank Herbet’s Dune. More recent examples would be Hyperion by Dan Simmons and The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. But all those novels were black swans, weren’t they? So how could we predict them?
Right now we have more science fiction of all kinds being produced than ever before. That production is going into overdrive with AI. And the percentage of it that’s readable and entertaining is increasing. That’s also part of the problem – there’s too much science fiction – at least for any one work to become widely known. Good science fiction novels have almost become a generic product line, in white boxes with black letter labeling.
What we need is a writer who has a holistic perspective of our time that can write a Nineteen Eighty-Four or The Handmaid’s Tale about what we’re experiencing in the 2020s. Kim Stanley Robinson keeps trying but doesn’t quite hit the mark. His novel The Ministry for the Future was impactful like Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar was back in the 1960s, but both books were too experimental, too intellectual, and not emotionally moving. I’m not sure AIs will ever be genuinely emotionally moving, but they will be able to fake it.
Is anyone ever original on their own? Don’t we all stand on the shoulders of others? As Newton pointed out, the goal is to stand on the shoulders of giants.
[The above is a screenshot from the video by KhromAI.]
I’ve always loved looking at the covers of science fiction books and magazines where artists have visualized the stories. Recently, AI programs like Midjourney allow anyone with a knack for words and a visual imagination to illustrate a science fiction story. They are starting to show up on YouTube as videos. Here’s one that envisions the novel Dune but with the artistic style of H. R. Giger.
I highly recommend you also look at this on a large-screen television to see these images in their full glory. They are quite impressive.
I know there is a controversy about AI programs “stealing” artistic styles from human artists, but let’s not get into that now. I’m fascinated by the idea that an individual just using their imagination and language skills can create an illustrated science fiction novel or movie. What are the possibilities?
Already, YouTube is being flooded with videos like this one and it gives me ideas of what might happen. Again, let’s not get into copyrights and legal issues at the moment. But imagine taking your favorite science fiction story and illustrating it with AI software. Will this become a new art form? A new kind of fan fiction? Or will it be considered a new kind of communication? What will it mean when you can express your thoughts in words and pictures?
What are the limits on visualizing something in your mind and getting a computer program to paint it for you in pixels?
What if two people visualize the same story? Or ten? What if people start developing their own artistic style with words that convey how they imagine things? Here’s another example, also of Dune and also using Giger as inspiration. You can see it’s much like the other. AI/human artists need to branch out.
Sure, they should experiment will all the great artists, but also figure out how to create their own artistic styles. I’m sure that will emerge as a feature in AI programs.
And besides creating paintings and videos of existing stories why now use AI to visualize your own stories? This is where I see things getting exciting. With AI a person can be their own art book or video publisher. Or, writers who want to create old-fashion novels and short stories can use this technology to create visual mockups of what they want to paint in words.
Here is an original story created using Midjourney. Is this the future of science fiction writing?
Here’s an example of Midjourney using famous science fiction art from the past. This barely hints at the possibilities.
Here’s another example. But why are people focused on obvious inspirations? I’d love to see someone illustrate “The Moon Moth” by Jack Vance or “Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester. Still, some of these images are quite striking. There’s no denying that AI art programs can create stunning pictures.
Of course, human artists will have to compete against machine minds. I’m hoping existing human artists, especially those already working with digital canvases, can use AI art programs to empower their artistic skills to compete with nonartists using AI programs.
Isaac Asimov would open his introductions to each of the 25-volume series, The Great SF Stories (1939-1963) with “in the world outside reality” and then describe actual world events of that year. Several paragraphs later, Asimov would start over with “in the real world” and relate what happened in the subculture of science fiction. Because I grew up addicted to reading science fiction, I actually thought like that. I was born in 1951, and I became aware of atomic bombs and ideas about WWII and WWIII from reading and watching science fiction. I eventually learned differently as I got older in the second half of the 1960s, but still, most of my conceptualizations about nuclear wars came from science fiction. In other words, I learned about reality from science fiction and fiction before studying history.
But even as an adult, I assumed that most people got most of their ideas about what it might be like to survive nuclear war from science fiction. That’s why I wrote “Science Fiction About Surviving a Nuclear Holocaust Pre-1960.” And that might be true for people born after 1950, but in researching my essay I realized that it wasn’t true for people born before 1950. Between 1945 and 1950, and probably for several years into the 1950s, atomic warfare was widely discussed and speculated about in public — in newspapers and magazines, and on radio and newsreels. After that, I theorize people’s conception of what nuclear war would be like was shaped more by fiction and science fiction.
While researching these blog posts about nuclear war and science fiction I discovered I already owned The Beginning Or The End by Greg Mitchell, a 2020 nonfiction book about the making of a 1947 film, The Beginning Or The End. That MGM film is one of the first fictional accounts of the making and use of atomic bombs. What Mitchell’s book shows is how Hollywood and the Army worked together to tell their version of the story while the scientists who built the bomb wanted to tell a very different version — one closer to actual history and fact.
The book’s subtitle is “How Hollywood and America Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” and that’s accurate and inaccurate at the same time. For a short while (maybe 1945-1947), the government and the military tried to convince the American public that the bomb wasn’t as scary as the scientists claimed. The public might have accepted that official view during those years, but soon most people were scared shitless about the bomb. And fiction and science fiction made their fears even worse.
Mitchell’s book is a cold case study proving fiction distorts our understanding of history, and I highly recommend it. The Kindle edition is currently just $4.29 at Amazon. There’s also a hardcover and audiobook edition. The DVD of the 1947 movie is currently $18 but I don’t recommend it. It’s actually a crummy flick even though at the time MGM aimed to make one of the greatest films ever. You’ll be able to discern their lousy artistic effort by watching the equally lousy print of the film on YouTube.
Once I started looking for old documentaries about atomic bombs YouTube started offering what I think must be public service films created to inform the public about atomic warfare. It seems that each test explosion had its own documentation. And watching those films has been immensely revealing in understanding history from that period. I thought I knew more than I did, especially since I grew up in that period. But I realize, what we know about the world before puberty, and in the decade just before we were born, has been highly distorted by pop culture. The older I get the more I realize that my awareness of 1945-1960 is mostly based on science fiction, fiction, television, movies, and rock music. Talk about a reality distortion field!
I thought atomic warfare would be a great test case for studying the influence of science fiction because it’s so recent in history with 1945 being the starting point. I’m discovering science fiction gave me a very low-level kind of awareness of reality while I was growing up. If I’m brutally honest, I’d say SF was just two steps up from comic books, and one step up from television and movies. But as a kid, I didn’t want to believe that. As a twelve-year-old, addicted to sense-of-wonder, I wanted to believe science fiction offered a sophisticated education about reality and future possibilities.
Mitchell’s book let me jump back to 1945 and follow along one path about how the public learned about atomic bombs. The book goes into great detail starting just after the bombing of Hiroshima about how movie studios wanted to make a fictional film about the development and first use of the atomic bomb. The book chronicles how fiction, especially movies created that reality-distortion field I was talking about above.
Mitch does mention science fiction early on, but the book mostly focuses on the making of the MGM film, and for a while, a competing film from Paramount. By the way, the screenwriter hired for the Paramount film was Ayn Rand, and she could be considered a science fiction writer. Here’s Mitchell’s early tip of the hat o science fiction:
However, this was small potatoes compared to what film moguls and screenwriters were already working on. On October 28, 1945, Donna Reed got a letter from her old chemistry teacher, Ed Tompkins. Tompkins was part of a group of scientists working at Oak Ridge that were freaked out about the possibilities of atomic bombs and wanted to warn the public. He asked Donna Reed in a series of letters to give them to someone in power at MGM who could make a movie about their fears. Reed gave the letters to her husband Tony Owen, an agent, who contacted Samuel Marx, a producer, who got them an interview with Louis B. Mayer. Mayer flew Owen and Marx out to Oak Ridge on MGM’s private DC3. Eventually, the movie people got an interview with President Harry S. Truman, who supported the idea but for different reasons.
The Beginning Or The End got quickly made in 1946 and came out in 1947. But it wasn’t the only picture being made on the subject. It did have a rather striking opening. The film begins with a fake documentary of a bunch of actors portraying famous scientists and military men involved with the bomb installing a time capsule that’s supposed to be open in 500 years. What they put in the time capsule is the film The Beginning Or the End.
However, right from the start of making the movie, the scientists involved thought the film distorted their message. The rest of the book is about the problems of making the film. Those details illustrate what I’m talking about how fiction gives us a false conception of history. It’s quite fascinating. As I said, I recommend this book. Vanity Fair picked it as one of the top books of 2020. Read clips of various reviews here.
The book also deals with the argument on whether or not we should have used the A-bomb on Japan. That history has been presented in other books, but it’s an important factor in this one because it was a major motivation for lying to the public. In this case, fiction, the film The Beginning Or The End, intentionally lies. That’s one kind of distortion of history. But I’m also interested in how fiction speculates and become memes that fixate in the public’s minds.
For example, science fiction quickly moved to imagine atomic wars that would wipe out civilization and kill most people. In the early 1950s, it used radiation as a magical reason to create movies about giant insects or horrible mutant humans. A good comparison is science fiction about pandemics. Those stories often imagine a plague that kills 90% or 99% percent of everyone, even though in history, the worse plague events might have killed 25-35% of the population of specific cities. Fiction imagines the worse, for obvious dramatic reasons. But how often does fiction imagine a realistic limited nuclear war? We generally assume that any use of nuclear weapons will lead to all-out global warfare, and that’s because of fiction. Maybe that fiction has kept us from using nuclear weapons again, but isn’t it also another kind of distortion?
What I want to explore in my essays about science fiction and nuclear war is how fiction distorts reality.
Ever since I had an operation last August I’ve noticed that my enthusiasm for science fiction is waning. Partly, that’s due to a loss of vitality after the operation and partly, I’m getting older and just more tired. I know this because I can measure my activity level by how well I keep up with my reading group. It reads and discusses one science fiction short story every day. I was reading and commenting on every story before my operation. Now, I can’t keep up.
Reason 2
I read about 1,500 science fiction short stories between 2019 and 2022. Most of those came from retrospective anthologies and best-of-the-year anthologies that featured outstanding examples of the genre. The memory of so many great stories brings high expectations to anything new I read now. I can no longer tell if a story is ho-hum because it’s not very good or because I’m jaded by the ideas that the story uses. I suspect younger readers find many of these stories very exciting.
Reason 3
Our group also reads the finalists for various awards that cover the previous year, which means I’m also reading a lot of current science fiction. Unfortunately, new science fiction seldom feels as good as science fiction from the past. I don’t know if this is because I’m old and out of sync with modern science fiction. Or, because I’ve read so much science fiction for over sixty years makes it extremely hard for new science fiction to feel original. Or, older science fiction had a storytelling style I prefer. Do I just give up on current science fiction and retreat into the past? Or do I work harder to find new SF I like?
Reason 4
Last year I read several mainstream/literary novels which I thoroughly enjoyed. I felt like I was covering a new and exciting territory. I love it when I read science fiction that covers new territories, but that rarely happens anymore.
Reason 5
I have become more excited about reading and thinking about the genre than reading science fiction. While reading each new short story or novel I get most of my reading pleasure from considering how the story fits in the evolution of all the stories covering the same theme. I seldom read a new story and get excited by just that story. One example where I did was “Two Truths and a Lie” by Sarah Pinsker. Another example is “You Have The Prettiest Mask” by Sarah Langan (excerpt). Neither of these stories is really science fiction.
Reason 6
Amazon has decided not to carry five science fiction magazines I’ve been subscribing to for years: Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, Lightspeed, and Clarkeswork. I seldom read these magazines, but I wanted to support them. I keep thinking that one day I’ll write a story and want someplace to send it. I figured my $20 a month was a tiny way of being a patron of the arts. And I liked having copies of these magazines on my iPhone so I could quickly find a story to read when the group picks it, or when it was mentioned online. These magazines might show up in Kindle Unlimited but since I don’t read them regularly, subscribing to KU won’t get them as much money. I could use another ebook source but I detest keeping up with ebook files, and they would never be as convenient to read and manage as they were in my Kindle app. I’m considering subscribing to print magazines, or buying them on the newsstand. I could kill two birds with one stone by buying them at my favorite bookstore. That way I’m supporting my bookstore and the magazine.
However, I’m not keen on piling up a bunch of magazines I’ll seldom read unless our group reads the story. We’re currently going through the finalists for Asimov’s Readers’ Choice Award, and will do the same for Analog. However, all those stories are put online. I also read newer stories when we read best-of-the-year anthologies.
I’d hate not to support the magazines. This is a quandary for me. I’m not sure I even like modern science fiction anymore, but I’ve always loved science fiction magazines since the mid-1960s. I don’t know if I can give up on them now. On the other hand, I have more back issues on my shelves to read than I could read in several lifetimes, and I have digital scans of nearly all the science fiction magazines from the 20th century. I’ve got more than enough to read.
Reason 7
I think I need to spend less time reading. At 71, I need to be more active. I need to get into hobbies where I’m not just staring at words all the time. However, giving up a lifelong addiction is hard. I might have to accept that basically, I’m just a science fiction fan. That, being a science fiction reader was my purpose in this life.
Reason 8
On the other hand, I want to read a greater variety of fiction and nonfiction. I’m sure I’m missing out on other great genres and subjects. However, I have been reading more that’s not science fiction and I feel like I’m moving in too many directions at once. It’s much easier to read more about science fiction than read more about the world and the history of the world. Again, this is another mental conflict I need to resolve. But I have hundreds of nonfiction books on many subjects waiting on my shelves to be read. I collected them for years planning to read them in my retirement. However, I’ve spent a lifetime specializing in science fiction and to learn a new specialty would be impossible.
Reason 9
I’ll start with an analogy. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, I spent a lot of time flipping through record bins at record stories. When I was young I could barely afford one album a week. And even after I got a regular job I seldom bought more than four albums at a time. But I flipped by thousands of albums I wanted to buy. Now with Spotify, I can go back and listen to all those albums that looked interesting but that I couldn’t afford.
The same is true for science fiction. I have a choice between reading a book I didn’t pick back then or reading a new science fiction novel that just came out. Both in terms of music and science fiction I’m strongly drawn to the years 1950 to 1980.
Think of it this way. The past and present are two extremely large picture puzzles. I have more pieces in place seeing a more complete view of the picture for the past puzzle. Filling in the holes in that puzzle is more rewarding. Or think of it this way. The SF genre is one giant puzzle. I’ve got more pieces in one area put together, and fewer in another area. Theoretically, if I read all science fiction it would fill in the entire puzzle. I would see connections between all time periods. I’d love to fill in the picture between 1950 and 2023 but I have more pieces I see fitting together in the 1950-1980 area that I want to be matched up first.
Reason 10
I don’t like where current science fiction is going. The science fiction I grew up with was mostly set in the solar system and nearby stars. Humans were humans. Too much of modern science fiction is about faraway places and post-humans. I really dislike the idea of brain downloading and uploading. Sure, it’s a fun idea, but too unbelievable. A lot of modern science fiction feels like it’s inspired by comic books or movies which push ideas, characters, and plots into ridiculous places.
I’m realizing something about science fiction with my study of fiction about surviving nuclear war. I used to think science fiction promoted certain new concepts into the public consciousness. I thought science fiction lead when it actually was following. So far, I’ve found nearly all the concepts about nuclear war were public knowledge before science fiction stories and novels used them. Actually, by reading much older science fiction, stories, and novels from 1850-1950, many of the science fiction concepts I thought were original with science fiction after 1950 weren’t. And I suspect the science fiction writers back then got their ideas from concepts already spreading around in the public mind.
This makes me want to go back and reread science fiction and see if it was ever creatively original. One reason I don’t take to modern science fiction is that it feels like recycled old science fiction. How many concepts do science fiction writers keep repackaging over and over again? When were they first discovered? Where can science fiction still innovate?
Classics of Science Fiction 