Auxiliary Memory

When Does Science Fiction Go Stale?

Right off the bat, I should say dated science has no affect on the expiration date of science fiction. I’m still passionately in love with “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” by Roger Zelazny. Stories about Mars and Venus having inhabitants, or humans being able to breathe their atmospheres, do not detract from their freshness – if the writing was wonderful.

I do know that science fiction can go stale – just look at the books by E. E. “Doc” Smith, who was the brightest star among the science fiction writers of the 1930s. If Smith had been a better writer, more savvy about race and gender, he might be remembered along with H. G. Wells and Jules Verne. There were legions of science fiction writers between Wells and Heinlein, but how many of their books are fresh today? It seems like science fiction goes stale pretty fast. Why?

And the taste of staleness isn’t universal from reader to reader. Some people enjoy eating two-day-old pizza, and E. E. Smith is still read by a limited number of fans, especially those who acquired the pulp fiction habit. On the other hand, how many young science fiction readers today fall in reading love with Jack Williamson, Edmund Hamilton, Murray Leinster, John W. Campbell, Ray Cummings, E. E. Smith, Eric Temple Bell, George O. Smith or Eric Frank Russell?

When I was growing up in the 1960s, fans talked about The Big Three of Science Fiction – Heinlein/Clarke/Asimov. Fifty years on, I’m rereading their books and I realize they are starting to go stale like some SF books I read when I was a kid. Me and my buddies found E. E. Smith and Jack Williamson thrilling but also laughable. And like I said, it’s not the science, or the fact that we’re now living a future that’s overwritten those science fiction writer’s dreams of things to come.

I loved the Heinlein juveniles and assumed they were such obvious classics that kids would be reading them for centuries, like Treasure Island, Little Women and Alice in Wonderland. I still love them because of nostalgia, but I’m not sure they are as fresh today as they were to me in the 1960s.

What exactly goes stale? When you read an old science fiction story that’s as flat as a Coke without its fizz, what went wrong? I talked about this with members of the Classic Science Fiction Book Club and the Defining 1950s Science Fiction Reading Challenge. The consensus is writing style and political correctness. Readers don’t mind antiquated stories as long as they are well told, or even antiquated point of views, if they are part of the story. Good storytelling stays fresh. Good storytelling can override decaying style. But it’s very hard to maintain a story if the characters are very out of touch modern sensibilities of right and wrong.

Sadly, a lot of old science fiction wasn’t that well written. It impressed young people at the time with far out ideas, rather than with good writing and characterization. It’s funny how much a science fiction writer can get things wrong, and yet the story will stay fresh because of the storytelling, and not the idea.

I still love reading The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein, even though the story was written in 1957, about a robot inventor living in the year 1970, who buys suspended animation time so he can sleep till the year 2000 to get away from his cheating girlfriend. We didn’t have household robots in 1970, and Heinlein’s year 2000 was nothing like our year 2000. Yet, the story is still readable! Why? Heinlein had an engaging writing style, a sympathetic character, facing interesting problems, and who comes up with emotionally solid solutions, although the ending is becoming a little questionable.

The writing, characters and motivations are still functional. Yet, if we try to read something like E. E. “Doc” Smith Lensman books today, they feel archaic in their writing style, and the plot and character motivations seem simplistic – too much like an ancient comic book. Yet, a book like Out of a Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis written during the same decade as the Smith stories, still works. Lewis gets everything wrong about Mars, has a weird Christian take on space travel, and yet the story still works. And how did John Wyndham get away with writing a story about walking killer plants? Because the characters are very realistic and react in a realistic way, and we the readers care about them, plus we love to imagine what we would have done in their place.

Dime novels are seldom read today. Nor do people still read the popular girls and boys books of the early 20th century, like those by Roy Rockwood, who wrote the Great Marvel series (1906-1935). Many of these old books are so filled with racism and sexism that we cringe to read them today, but at one time they offered kids a thrilling sense of wonder. It’s a shame that those old authors weren’t better writers, because their stories captured their times in a unique way – their view of the future. Even the racism and sexism is historical. So I think that it’s the quality of writing that most makes a book go stale.

We still read H. G. Wells stories written in the 1890s. Why does Wells survive while so many other SF&F books from the same time faded from our reading awareness? Is it merely bad writing? I tend to think so. Books that become classics, like Pride and Prejudice or Great Expectations, have something more that good storytelling though. They tap into the core of human nature, and most science fiction never aims for such psychological depths. Wells was no Dickens, but he did have great intellectual ambitions. I think that’s why he’s stayed fresh while Jules Verne trails Wells in popularity. Verne still can engage people with his storytelling, but Wells was a scientific prophet of his age.

Bad science won’t ruin a story, if the story is wonderful, but does cause a kind of staleness. 1930s and 1940s space operas just seem silly today, often hokey, or even campy and kitschy. One reason Nineteen Eighty-Four is still so damn fresh, it’s it’s about politics and human nature, and not galactic empires and robots. If you’re a science fiction writer who hopes to enchant readers next century then it’s wise to write about common denominators that people now and in the future will have. But if you really want to dazzle the people of today, you want to write about things they never imagined. Which is what E. E. “Doc” Smith and Jack Williamson did in the 1930s. What will awe people in the 2010s will probably feel silly and stale by the 2040s, but maybe that’s just part of the science fiction game.

JWH

The State of Freedom 100 Years Ago

By James Wallace Harris, Wednesday, January 14, 2015

If you think terrorism and war is bad now, just study how things were one hundred years ago. We think of America as the land of the free, but during the 1910s people were being jailed for printing words and jokes about things we commonly see in sitcoms. Language we’d consider G-rated would get you jailed back then if you used it in a literary work that was sent through the U.S. mails. Writing about contraception, condoms or abortion could also get you thrown in the slammer. Using phrases like “snot-green” or “old fart” would get you labeled as a horrible lower-class person. And it sickened and horrified cultured people when James Joyce wrote about Leopold Bloom eating organ meats, even though everyone ate organ meats. One hundred years ago people just didn’t like facing up to the gritty details of life, details we embrace today.

Because of laws regulating decency, sedition, sexual practices and other moral issues, most of 21st century writers, movie makers, publishers would be jailed if their work appeared a hundred years ago. This doesn’t mean the common people didn’t say anything they wanted, but state and federal governments tried very hard to control what people printed and shipped through the mails. If liberals think conservatives are controlling now, just read about the history of censorship in America. We’ve come a long way baby.

The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham thoroughly entertained me with his history of censorship and legal battles to publish what is now considered the best novel in English literature. Even if you have no interest in James Joyce, this book is fascinating history. It does deal with Joyce’s immense struggle to be an artist, and to push the limits of literary expression, but it’s also about why and how our society wanted to rein in artists. It’s about the editors and publishers that risked jail to publish writers like Joyce. In 1920, the year my father was born, Jon Stewart would probably have been sentenced to ten years in jail for each episode of his show, if they could have seen The Daily Show back then.

I listened to The Most Dangerous Book to prepare me to listened to Ulysses. I keep trying to get into Ulysses but I always fail. Ulysses is an almost impossible book to get into, very tough going, but not because Joyce was so intellectual and learned. Joyce wrote about ordinary events and people, but used new writing techniques to show how people actually thought and felt. Since we often think about sex and bodily functions, or feel thoughts about people we’d never express, our minds are chaotic tangles of incoherent phrases and perceptions, and Ulysses tries to capture this stream of consciousness. In the 1910s and 1920s, readers found his experiments startling, offensive, unnerving and threatening. Some European and American government officials thought Joyce’s apparent nonsense could be coded messages of espionage. Even his most ardent admirers struggled to decode his prose.

Joyce set the stage for comic observations about humanity that armies of standup comics still mine today. Yet, a hundred years ago, this so horrified government officials they did their damnedest to erase, and keep from the public. Their paranoia over strange ideas was fueled by radicals and anarchists who promoted conflict, disorder and social unrest. There were hundreds of terrorists bombings back then each year. The government associated anything Avant-garde with radicalism.

We have practically no censorship now, and a lot less social unrest and terrorist bombs. Strangely, the lingering forms of censorship we see today often come from terrorist bombers who want to revert our freedoms. The Comstock Law of 1873 was a kind of American Sharia Law, and the people who terrorized the literary world back then was the U.S. Post Office.

The founding fathers made free speech legal, but they didn’t understand what that meant. We’re still exploring the social implications of real free speech. Kevin Birmingham’s book is a stunning history of the fight for free speech in the early part of the 20th century. He focuses on an array of literary freedom fighters who were directly or indirectly connected to helping James Joyce get his book published. Whether or not you’re interested in literary history hardly matters if you love history itself when considering reading this book.

History is like a jigsaw puzzle with an infinite number of pieces. A great history book is one that helps you put hundreds of pieces together to reveal the big image of the past. A great history book also helps connect its images with pieces of images you’ve assembled from other great history books. The Most Dangerous Book helped me see a lot more of 20th century American and European history.

I still find listening to Ulysses hard going, but I’m making a greater effort because of The Most Dangerous Book. Birmingham explained the tremendous struggle by Joyce to write his book, and why. Birmingham gives a great deal of background facts that interpret each chapter in Ulysses. But most important, he testifies to the valiant effort so many people made that allows us to read Ulysses and books like it. I’m very grateful to those people. I think we all should be.

JWH

Picking 52 Books to Read in 2015

By James Wallace Harris, Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Last year I read 67 books. At first thought, I wondered if I could read 100 books in 2015. But I neither want to spend all my time reading, nor do I want to be in a race to finish 100 books. Reading one book a week is a nice pace for me, however for many years now, I’ve been buying about five books a week. This certainly presents a problem if I don’t want to speed up my reading pace.

To complicate the situation, I’ve been buying some rather outstanding books that I’m lusting to read soon. I’ve gathered books for decades in anticipation of retiring. I thought for sure retiring would let me read 100-200 books a year, but after my first year of not working I’ve discovered I’m not inclined to be a superbookworm. I now have more books than I could read in five retired lives. Once on my bookshelf, books are out-of-sight out-of-mind, leaving me literary hungry to prowl the bookstores. I need to fix that.

Since I’m always compelled to start projects I never finished, I thought this week’s ambitious endeavor would be to go through my physical bookshelves, my library at Audible.com and my Kindle library at Amazon.com and pick the 52 books I’d most loved to read most. To nag myself daily of this project, I thought I’d pile them up somewhere very visible so they will sneer at me to be read. But since so many are digital, invisible from view, I figured I needed to slightly amend that inspiration. Thus the muse for this blog post. I’ll make a list that I will meditate on daily, and keep it near the pile of physical books that are begging me to be read.

Here are the 52 books I’d love to read in 2015. I’d be immensely satisfied with myself if I did, and very proud if I read half their number. They will be in no order – just listed as I pull them from the shelves and stack them in their special pile. This is a nice snapshot of my interests at the beginning of 2015. It will be revealing to see how I do at the beginning of 2016. I’m pretty sure I’ll have read 52 books, but will it be these books?

I know myself well enough to know I won’t stick to the plan exactly, but I’m curious how close I can get at predicting my reading future. I know I will read a bunch of science fiction books I haven’t listed, and books for my book clubs that haven’t been selected yet. I will promote these books when we nominate books though, so I can get some extra incentive to read them. In fact, some of the books listed here are books I was supposed to read in 2014 for book clubs, but didn’t. And some of these books are ones I’ve started and never completed.

What’s interesting, is 52 books is probably more books than I read to get my Bachelor’s degree. And this list covers a lot of subjects. If I do read and comprehend them, it will be like getting another degree.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein
~~The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham~~
The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God by Peter Watson
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt
Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age by Kurt W. Beyer
ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of The World’s First Computer by Scott McCartney
Old Friends by Tracy Kidder
What Makes This Book so Great by Jo Walton
Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson
Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other by Sherry Turkle
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The History of Mr. Wells by Michael Foot
About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made by Ben Yagoda
~~Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos~~
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom
It’s Complicated by Danah Boyd
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama
This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life by Daniel C. Dennett
The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnerman
Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson
The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson
Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade
The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance by Anthony Gottlieb
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Math Book by Clifford Pickover
Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline
A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence by George B. Dyson
The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments by Gertrude Himmelfarb
~~The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson~~
A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850-1900 by Stephen Puleo
The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman
The Violinist’s Thumb by Sam Kean
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
How To Live or A Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
Children of God by Mary Doria Russell

JWH

The Definitive 1950s Science Fiction Reading Challenge

By James Wallace Harris, Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Over at Worlds Without End, they routinely offer reading challenges for people who use their science fiction book database. My post “The Defining Science Fiction Books of the 1950s” inspired their page, “The Defining Science Fiction Books of the 1950s” which displays the books from the list in their database format, nicely illustrated by book covers. You can join and tag books you own, want to read, have read, or want to buy and read. You’ll need to sign up and set a password, but that’s no big deal.

World Without End has collected many award list and best-of book lists, so it’s a great way to find outstanding science fiction books to read.

If you click on “Roll-Your-Own” image, you’ll be taken to a list of Reading Challenges.

Then look for this icon.

After you sign up, you can always go directly here, where you can see a list of members in the challenge, and which books they are reading or have read. The challenge is to read one book from each year 1950-1959 from the Defining List of 1950s SF. Look through the years to select each book you want. Clicking on the cover will allow you to mark the book read, reading or unread, and you can check to use it for the challenge.

The books go in the list 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. So if you want the books to read 1950-1959, left to right, you’ll need to enter all 10 starting with the 1959 first, and go reverse order years. Otherwise, if you add them one year at a time, the final list will read 1959-1950. Since I don’t want to commit what book I’ll read for each year until I read them, I’m entering in reverse order.

This is a fun reading challenge for those people who love classic science fiction. The 1950s were when science fiction book publication ramped up, and many of the classic stories from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s were reprinted in hardcover and paperback. I started 1950 by rereading The Martian Chronicles, which were short stories Bradbury wrote in the late 1940s, but collected together to create a fix-up novel of related tales. I listened to an audiobook edition read by Stephen Hoye, and it was excellent. The characters sound like I’m listening to a 1940s movie.

There is also a forum at the WWE site for discussing the books in the challenge.

If you love old SF, and want to see what other people are reading and saying about these old books, give it a try. After the 1950s are finished, DrNefario, the creator of the challenge, plans to create one for the 1960s.

JWH

Why Does the World Suck?

By James Wallace Harris, Tuesday, January 13, 2015

We’d all be happier people if we didn’t watch the news on TV. Most people I know are depressed by events around them, some happening close by, some far away. But if you think about it, the world sucks for very few essential reasons, most of which deal the threat of harm to our bodies. We fear war, terrorism, crime, violence, natural disasters and disease. And those break down into two causes, threats from people and threats from nature. And if we solved the problem of violent people, I think most of our reasons for being depressed about our life on Earth would disappear. We can see the world as sane even if it has cancer and tornadoes, but all the human generated violence makes us think we live in an insane reality. In other words, injustice comes from other people, and not nature.

Avoiding depression when watching the local news is very hard. The stories of murder, rape, home invasions, shootings, gang crime, brawls, berserk shooters, road rage, muggings, robberies, holdups, makes us anxious to exist. Listening to international news about all the variations in wars and terrorism makes us think humans are incapable of reason and sanity.

If all violence stopped, can you imagine what a psychological uplift it would give humanity. We’d be free to work on all the other problems we face. Yet, our solution to violence is more violence. That’s why seeing a film like Selma is so inspirational. That’s why having a holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr. is so important.

As Eldridge Cleaver said, “If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” I think that’s very insightful, but all too often many people become part of the problem by pushing their solution, which all too often if fight violence with violence. Cleaver fell into that trap. This is different from self-defense, but most people can’t see the dividing line. We need some way to neutralize violent people without going to war or arming ourselves like a special forces soldier. For the last couple centuries this has been the police. If you look around the world and study places without police, you’ll find no civilization. If you find places where the police are corrupt, you see civilization crumbling.

Yet, the police can’t prevent all problems of violence. A strong police force can deter, but we need more teachers, psychologists and social workers to identify and help troubled people. We need more parents and mentors to observe and guide young people. We need more leaders, artists and visionaries to inspire nonviolence.

The trouble is too many young men see violence as the solution, whether they are ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, urban gangs, organized criminals, drug cartels, Hamas, FARC, Taliban, or lone wolf madmen, and we need to study why they join these groups, to solve the problem. Just killing them only seems to inspire more of them to come into existence.

In some ways, we can say the world sucks because there’s too much testosterone. And if you combine testosterone with guns, you get all the groups I mention above. Just killing crazed gunmen isn’t enough. We need to understand why people become crazed gunmen.

JWH