UPROOTED and the Generation Gap in Fantasy

[rj_anderson]

So this week Naomi Novik's Uprooted won the Nebula Award, and as a result a lot of people are reading it. And the reactions, as they have been pretty much ever since the book came out, are... mixed

Comments

[lorata]

(here from the homepage, I hope this is okay!)

I find this a really interesting discussion as someone who read the book and disliked it for exactly the reasons the people you talked to disliked it, but who also grew up reading the same type of books as you. (I'm 31, but my small-town library didn't have access to newly-published books, so the sci-fi & fantasy section was several decades behind and almost exclusively male-authored, sigh. When I found the stuff people my age grew up with I was too old to appreciate it for what it was.)

For me, I found the sexual assault & gender relations stuff in Uprooted such a harsh throwback to the books I'd choked down as a teenager (while at the time feeling uncomfortable but not having the vocabulary to explain why for a while) that that's why I couldn't deal with it in Uprooted. I thought we'd moved past this, to stories where I didn't have to feel that awful lump in my throat while reading; it knocked me right back to those years when I scarfed down awful, awful media because it was the only thing I had and I'd become inured to it out of sheer necessity. To feel that again while reading a book by an author I love in 2015 was not a pleasant experience.

(At the same time, everyone I know loves it -- even the friend I gave it to saying READ THIS SO WE CAN BE MAD TOGETHER -- and the prose is beautiful. When I heard it won a Nebula I thought 'oh well' because it's not what I would have chosen, but that's okay. However, it's also been an oddly alienating experience, especially when I hear people describe it as a love letter to fans and fandom, tailor-made to stir fans up and give them everything they want in a story -- it's weird to realize a book has been written for a specific audience and that audience is Not You.)

[rj_anderson]

I made the LJ homepage? My goodness, how small has this site become? But you are most welcome to jump in!

I can totally see what you're saying, and that's why I would never want to push the book on anyone. My review on GoodReads described it as "like a beloved classic read for the very first time", but that was far more my reaction to the prose and the general feel of the story than a blanket endorsement of the plot.

I also very much get the "written for a specific audience and that audience is Not You" thing, as I've come across popular and widely beloved books that made me feel that way as well.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this!

[green_knight]

it's weird to realize a book has been written for a specific audience and that audience is Not You.

I felt like that about Jo Walton's 'Among Others', a book so many of my friends love. I didn't grow of with the same books. I grew up with an almost completely different subset of SFF: my access to golden-age Science-Fiction did not go beyond Asimov. So all those warm vibes of 'the books we used to read' are more of a slap in the face for me: 'you're not one of the tribe, you don't share this heritage'.

[rj_anderson]

I haven't read Among Others for that very reason, as well.