Tuck Boxes, Literary High Ground, and the SF Community
Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.
Mmmm coffee cake. I have just returned from Raeli’s Book Week parade. She dressed up as Rhapsody from the Fairies which isn’t overly literary (though she has several of their books!) but she came up with the idea herself, based on a trouble-free costume she already had, so who was I to argue? I was also delighted that her obsession with Cats the Musical has gone viral, as her friend Inigo insisted on going as Macavity. Not sure if he had a copy of TS Eliot with him.
The coffee cake came from the cake stall. Mmmm. Also from the Book Fair, I picked up a classic Alice in Wonderland colouring book and Egyptian sticker book for Raeli for our upcoming plane trip, and got myself a biography of Beatrix Potter purely because I adored the cover, plus she was heralded on it as a ‘Victorian genius’ which blew my mind. A female children’s author who drew slightly morbid pretty pictures (seriously, have you ever read Jemima Puddleduck, that book is MESSED UP) heralded as a genius! And a Victorian rebel, too. Had to buy it.
Anyway, getting distracted. On the way back I was listening to the latest Coode Street podcast in the car, and very pleased to get a shout out from some conversations I’ve had lately with Jonathan Strahan. Am totally working for my Feminist Advisory Committee t-shirt.
Once you get past the 10 or so minutes of discussion about what might or might not be happening with Gary’s microphone (SERIOUSLY, guys, learn to use the pause button!) I was interested to hear further discussion of the ongoing conversation they’ve been having about the core or centre of science fiction, and how that may or may not be the same thing.
Personally I really dislike the idea of science fiction having to have a core, mostly because I’m pretty sure the stuff I think should be in it is different to other people’s - I’ll have my own, core, thanks! And Jonathan acknowledged this, referring to a conversation we had when I pointed out that the younger you are, the more off-putting it is to be told (or have it implied) that you basically have to catch up on 60 or 70 (the younger you are the bigger the number gets) years worth of core material, before your opinion is worth something.
What I did like was the way that Jonathan distinguished between the core or centre and the “deep memory” of the field (a concept I find far more charming than that of a “core”), and Gary’s suggestion that we need to draw a line between the history we learn, as opposed to the history we experience. As they rightly point out, too often people get confused between their own personal history of the field and The History Of The Field, and this is where new and younger readers start feeling seriously excluded.
There is I feel (and it’s worth mentioning now, a week before Aussiecon, because conventions are a serious breeding ground for this kind of opinion) a form of discrimination in the SF community, based on reading history. This comes in many forms - from an intellectual superiority or even a sense of having a Literary High Ground, whereby you can win any argument if you can prove you have read more obscure SF classics than the person you are chatting to; and, less negatively, from a genuine enthusiasm for the field, and a desire to share your past reading experience with someone else.
Even where the Better Read Fan’s intentions are pure, and they are not point-scoring but genuinely wanting to share an experience, it can be alienating to the person whose Literary High Ground isn’t high enough.
A similar sense of Literary High Ground can come into play with books people have not read - sometimes, a reader will claim the high ground and superiority from NOT having read a book, which I think is actually worse. I’m not a Twilight fan by any means, but at least my criticism comes from having read the first book, and looked closely at the plot elements of the latter ones, and I still try hard not to judge people who do like those books - yes okay, I’m a bit incredulous about it, no one’s perfect. BUT how many people do you hear mocking the books and mocking the fans of those books, while proudly declaring they have never (or WOULD never) read them? Lots, sadly. And while I disapprove of telling someone how they should spend their precious reading time, I do think that it’s worse to suggest that they have wasted their reading time. Refusing to read books you consider bad is fine, but continually complaining about them or criticising them is kind of like bitching about the government when you voted informal.
Friends don’t judge friends based on what they have or haven’t read. It’s a good message to take into a convention with you. Or even real life!
Something I really liked from the Coode St podcast was Jonathan’s confession that it hurts his feelings a bit when someone (*waves at Jonathan*) says they don’t like the books he does, or they don’t want to read them. I think this is really getting at the nitty gritty of it, and explains why so many people end up retreating behind the facade of Literary High Ground, or the Read That, Wouldn’t Read That debates. It is personal. The books we love are intensely personal, and when you hear someone dissing a book you loved, or refusing even to try it, it’s like finding out that two people you like are not interested in joining you for a cup of coffee because they can’t be bothered to meet each other. Or worse, your two best friends met each other once and HATE each other and keep making bitchy remarks about each other whenever one of them goes to the bathroom.
I know this feeling particularly well because I have a five year old daughter who loves books and is developing her own literary taste. The feeling I get when she adores a book I loved when I was young is extraordinary, it’s the best high in the world, and it feels like we are sharing something hugely important. Likewise, when she dislikes one of my childhood favourites, or refuses to try it, it’s completely STABBITY and I have serious hurt feelings to nurse.
So yes, much though I do think it’s important to stop telling each other they SHOULD read something, and even more important to stop judging each other for not reading the MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS IN THE UNIVERSE, it’s also super important to be kind to those whose favourite books we are choosing to ignore. Let them down gently. It’s not you, it’s me.
Something we all need to learn, in the interests of literary tolerance, is that you can’t force someone else to replicate your own reading experience. Even if they read the same books you do, they will read them in different ways. Sharing a book love with someone is awesome, but it wouldn’t be such a special experience if it happened that way all the time.
I’ve read two novels by Robert Heinlein. One was awful and confusing (The Cat Who Walked Through Walls) and one was tight, clever and very thought provoking (Starship Troopers). I see no need to read any others, and have said so before - I’m not saying never, just that reading more Heinlein is not my priority. It’s not anywhere near my priority list. I have a BIG priority list, and unless I get a really strong reason to add Heinlein to it, he’s not even getting on the bottom rung.
The only reason Starship Troopers got added to the list was because the movie came out. And I liked the movie. I loved the reading experience of the book, because it was a fascinating example of how a book changes to make a film, and the two make for a really cool comparison exercise. I would venture to say, there are probably a lot of people out there who read Starship Troopers at the time the movie came out, and this forms something of a generation of reading, which is completely different to those people who read Starship Troopers when it first came out as an abridged serial in 1959, or those who read it when it was first released as a book in 1960, surrounded by the politics of the time and the context of the Vietnam War, or those who read it in 1980 when Heinlein was still a living author, and you could maybe meet him at a SF convention.
The book is 50 years old, and Heinlein had been writing for decades before it came out. It’s a historical artefact.
A second example of the incomparable reading experience: I have read The Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair books to Raeli. She loves them. I thought I’d try my other favourites next, and started on The Naughtiest Girl in School. Right from the start, I could tell I’d misjudged it. The main character, Elizabeth Alleyn, is very badly behaved, and selfish. She learns to be otherwise, but I could see that Raeli was failing to identify with her, and her attention was slipping. The crunch came when I had to explain to her what boarding school meant. Remember boarding school, that literary paradise of tuck boxes and midnight feasts and French mistresses? I was crazy about Malory Towers and St Clares, and reading those books on my own by the time I was her age. Raeli was so traumatised by the VERY CONCEPT of boarding school, that we couldn’t get past chapter two.
“Why would her parents not pick her up at night, Mummy?”
I’m still not convinced there is a universal core of science fiction. I think if it was ever true (and there are certainly convincing arguments that it was) then it is far less true now. The older science fiction gets, the wider a variety of readers it gets, and there are new ones coming in all the time. 20-somethings, for whom the Starship Troopers movie is hopelessly old fashioned, 13 year olds who were BORN the year that movie came out, who may find Heinlein utterly unreadable. Likewise there are going to be 13 year olds or 20 year olds or 30 year olds who are new to the field, and have never heard of Paul Verhoeven OR the Vietnam War, who pick up that book and actually find something really cool in it.
Just like one 5 year old might find the idea of boarding school exciting and nostalgiariffic, and another might think it sounds like a waking nightmare.
At the Book Fair today, I saw at least 3 kids ages 10-11 who were dressed as Bella from Twilight. If nothing else, that reminded me that as Raeli grows up, her literary tastes will be her own, and far from expecting her to love the books I did at her age, I have to be grateful for every moment where her book loves and mine intersect. That is, presuming that she wants to read books at all. If she’s voluntarily turning pages at the age of 15, I will count it as a win.
Every time we make someone feel like they HAVE to read something, we increase the likelihood that they might go do something other than reading. The one thing we can all agree on is that books are awesome, right?