Geek Pet Peeves # 50982272071463
Just finished reading Among Others by Jo Walton, a sweet little coming-out-as-a-geeky-intellectual story with a subtle fantasy edge. Loved the voice, loved the fact that I can now make myself an entirely new reading list from the books the protagonist, Mori, reads, loved the ambiguity of the fantasy--are the fairies Mori sees real or not? And I might have totally over-identified with Mori, except for this one passing paragraph:
I helped [the school librarian] stamping and shelving some new books. They all look awful, being of the category of books about teenagers with problems--drugs, or abusive parents, or living in Ireland. I hate books like that. For one thing they're all so relentlessly downbeat, and despite that you just know everyone will overcome all their problems in the end and start to Grow Up and Understand How the World Works. You can practically see the capitals. I've read half a ton of Victorian children's books, because we had them lying around at home...they're by different authors, but they all share the same kind of moralizing. In the exact same way these Teen Problem books share the same kind of moralizing, only it's neither so quaint nor so clearly stated as the Victorian ones. If I have to have a book on how to overcome adversity give me Pollyanna over Judy Blume any day, though why anyone would read any of them when the world contains all this SF is beyond me.
And here my head goes "Nooo Mori, don't write off realistic books about kids and teens with problems." Do that and you run the risk of writing off Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, which is in many ways this book's closest relative. (It's the only other book I've ever seen that describes intellectual growth and coming into one's nerdiness remotely as well as Among Others. It was also published in 1976, while Among Others takes place in 1979 and 1980. Mori's a huge Le Guin fan otherwise...I wonder if she wrote off Very Far Away... somewhere off-page because it's a realistic book about high schoolers.)
I know that YA problem novels were much more anvilicious in Mori's time. These days they're a lot better--some even have nuance and non-White people. But as a middle-schooler I ate up problem novels, good and bad, newer and older. In retrospect, they were kind of an early anthropology exercise; even with real-world settings, the problems were a window into things I would never experience, and the emotions resonated regardless. All the speculative fiction I read around this time didn't imprint and stick emotionally in the same way. I don't know when I acquired the ability to relate emotionally to things set in worlds beyond our own, to realize that my emotions and an alien's or future-human's could be one and the same, to really appreciate world-building, but I do believe it's a learned skill. I really do.
Mori is far from the first person, fictional or real, I've encountered to express the "why would you ever read other novels, especially ones about problems, when there's SF" attitude. Every time I see it my hackles go up, in the same way they go up when some SF fans call non-fans "mundanes." Maybe it's irrational and overly touchy, but whenever I hear this I get a sense that my childhood, especially my middle-schooldom, is being written off. Non-speculative books can profoundly shape a person too. Sometimes they can even shape a person along with SF. And Judy Blume's got a sense of humor that the author of Pollyanna could only dream of; as I write this I am remembering Fudge's disastrous birthday party in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and smiling broadly.
I helped [the school librarian] stamping and shelving some new books. They all look awful, being of the category of books about teenagers with problems--drugs, or abusive parents, or living in Ireland. I hate books like that. For one thing they're all so relentlessly downbeat, and despite that you just know everyone will overcome all their problems in the end and start to Grow Up and Understand How the World Works. You can practically see the capitals. I've read half a ton of Victorian children's books, because we had them lying around at home...they're by different authors, but they all share the same kind of moralizing. In the exact same way these Teen Problem books share the same kind of moralizing, only it's neither so quaint nor so clearly stated as the Victorian ones. If I have to have a book on how to overcome adversity give me Pollyanna over Judy Blume any day, though why anyone would read any of them when the world contains all this SF is beyond me.
And here my head goes "Nooo Mori, don't write off realistic books about kids and teens with problems." Do that and you run the risk of writing off Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, which is in many ways this book's closest relative. (It's the only other book I've ever seen that describes intellectual growth and coming into one's nerdiness remotely as well as Among Others. It was also published in 1976, while Among Others takes place in 1979 and 1980. Mori's a huge Le Guin fan otherwise...I wonder if she wrote off Very Far Away... somewhere off-page because it's a realistic book about high schoolers.)
I know that YA problem novels were much more anvilicious in Mori's time. These days they're a lot better--some even have nuance and non-White people. But as a middle-schooler I ate up problem novels, good and bad, newer and older. In retrospect, they were kind of an early anthropology exercise; even with real-world settings, the problems were a window into things I would never experience, and the emotions resonated regardless. All the speculative fiction I read around this time didn't imprint and stick emotionally in the same way. I don't know when I acquired the ability to relate emotionally to things set in worlds beyond our own, to realize that my emotions and an alien's or future-human's could be one and the same, to really appreciate world-building, but I do believe it's a learned skill. I really do.
Mori is far from the first person, fictional or real, I've encountered to express the "why would you ever read other novels, especially ones about problems, when there's SF" attitude. Every time I see it my hackles go up, in the same way they go up when some SF fans call non-fans "mundanes." Maybe it's irrational and overly touchy, but whenever I hear this I get a sense that my childhood, especially my middle-schooldom, is being written off. Non-speculative books can profoundly shape a person too. Sometimes they can even shape a person along with SF. And Judy Blume's got a sense of humor that the author of Pollyanna could only dream of; as I write this I am remembering Fudge's disastrous birthday party in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and smiling broadly.