In which I am getting pissed off.
Over at the SFWA blog, in the comments of this post someone says: The reason many are neglected is because they are not very good. As soon as someone parades Anne MacCaffrey as a good writer I just think of the huge gulf in standards in science fiction in general.
-->I've heard a lot of people bash Anne McCaffrey, but what I've never heard is why. Why is she considered a bad writer?
What is the definition of a good writer?
Who decided on this definition? Is it codified somewhere?
It's like the whole, "That book may be popular, but the writing is crap" argument. While I may agree that there are weaknesses of type A, B, and C in a particular author's writing, I also hold a standard that a book that speaks to many people is intrinsically "good."
(And don't give me any of that "bad writer but good storyteller" crap. It's words on paper, and either they work or they don't. Saying writing and storytelling are different is just bullshit. If "good writing" doesn't tell a story well then it's bad writing, and the inverse is just as true.)
This pisses me off because it leads directly to the problem that is discussed in that article, namely that women (and POCs) are underrepresented in SF. If someone's definition of "good" includes "talks about things that interest me," and they happen to be a hetero, white male who is incurious about the lives of non-hetero, non-white, non-male persons, then you're going to get an awful lot of books about and by hetero, white males in the "good" category of this person, and this person is going to continue promulgating this definition.
It doesn't have to be on purpose. (Indeed, it is rarely on purpose anymore.) All we need is a lot of "Well, we would love to sell this book with a woman/POC/gay couple on the cover, but that will prevent it from selling" [1], to make sure that such people aren't put on the covers of books except when those books are specifically for the audience of folks who are represented by the people on the cover. And therefore readers come to associate those images with being for that limited audience. The prophecy fulfills itself.
White, hetero men do read romance novels (Robert James Waller, Nicholas Sparks). They read books by black authors with black protagonists (Walter Mosley). I can't think offhand of any widely-read books with openly gay male protagonists, so if you've got one, please mention it in the comments. [2]
I want to know the definition of "good," with respect to books, paintings, or indeed any sort of art. I want to know how the fuck any of that is defined or quantified, because I gotta say, If you can't measure it and demonstrate it, then it's just your fucking opinion. [3]
This is one of the great things about sports. We can say that a sidearm pitcher is doing it "wrong," but if a sidearm pitcher is continually racking up 20 wins a season, then he's obviously not doing it wrong.
You get the same thing when new techniques are developed. The high jump used to be done forward-facing, until the invention of the Fosbury flop. Was Dick Fosbury wrong? Obviously not. Were the high jump record holders prior to Fosbury bad high jumpers? Again I say, obviously not. They were the best high jumpers of their time.
So yeah, I want a definition--I demand a definition--of "good writing" that does not ultimately boil down to "the stuff I like" and/or "the stuff my professors or other authorities told me I should like."
Because Anne McCaffery? A fucking good writer. Her books may have many flaws, and like most books they may not be timeless, but they spoke to a lot of people, and provided a lot more than "mere entertainment" to a lot of readers. I count that as "good."
[1] Here, "good" = "will sell a lot"
[2] Considering that gayness is not obvious unless characters have romantic or sexual interactions, it's entirely possible that any of those two-fisted, testerone-laden military fiction books that don't include sex might indeed be starring a gay man.
[3] Now, there are "informed" opinions, and there are "uninformed" opinions, I will grant. The problem comes in demonstrating who has what. The mere presence of the letters "PhD" and lengthy time in an institute of higher learning do not, in fact, make a person informed. It is entirely possible to get a PhD in just about any liberal art from a well-regarded school without actually reading a broad spectrum of people. (And in some cases, limiting one's reading is essential. Who has time to go outside the area of one's thesis?)