An SF Canon?

[jsburbidge]

*Sigh*. So people are arguing about "the" SF canon again.

I posted about this in a less fraught context a few years ago, but I was less tired of this then.

So let me be blunt: there is no SFF canon. There is no authoritative body capable of defining one, there is no function to be served by one, there is no arena in which one would be, as it were, exercised.

SF is barely old enough to have "classics", and damn few of them. Defining what a "classic" is is fraught, but aspects of it are straightforward, and one of the minimum thresholds of defining a classic is the reasonable belief that a work will have permanent appeal. And for permanent a reasonable approximation is "will still be read a hundred years from its date of publication by anyone except scholars". (Scholars will read minor works smelling of deep levels of dust because they are influences on major works; this does not count.) I don't think that's the only criterion, and there are some surprises (Freckles, Greenmantle and Seventeen have all made it past the hundred-year mark), but it's a reasonable minimum.

I'm not suggesting that Wells and Bellamy, who have already passed that mark, (some of Cabell is there as well, and Eddison is coming up in 2022) are the only candidates for SF "classics", but you have to have a real confidence that works will be read for themselves a generation or more from now for most SF works. Occasionally something comes out with a stature which suggests staying power, an "instant classic", and just maybe Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is up there.

My primary influences when I grew up (roughly 10-16) were weighted in the Fantasy direction (Tolkien, Dunsany, Cabell, Eddison, Morris, Kurtz, Chant, Zelazny...) though I certainly also read the SF standards at the same time - Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Niven, Le Guin, Dickson, Laumer, Van Vogt. But I moved on to five years of studying English (and some classical) literature, and by the time I hit my third degree I had a pretty good idea of the lastingness of most of the works I read for relaxation.

I have no real expectation that Foundation (which won the "Best All-Time Series" Hugo in 1966, over LOTR, the Lensman series, and Heinlein's Future History) will actually be read much if at all in 2042. I can imagine some Asimov and Heinlein in anthologies. For guessing about Stranger in a Strange Land I'd have to guess at 2061, and I'm not about to guess 40 years out on that. (Barring civilization-scarring calamities - not out of the question right now, but not my immediate problem, because I'm trying to assess quality, not make predictions, I think I feel comfortable saying LOTR will be read in 2055.)

Guessing about The Dispossessed in 2074 or Little, Big in 2081? I'm not even going to try, and those are among the stronger candidates in my view.

I agree in general with Jo Walton that a work has to be in conversation with SF/F to be a part of the field (which is why mainstream authors so often stumble). But there's no set of determinative works which provide that immersion. If you want to write about grand, galaxy-spanning space empires Asimov won't hurt but Banks, Scalzi, Asher and Martine will almost certainly serve you better. Gibson's cyberpunk is well-written, foundational, and still good, but you can react to thirty years worth of works responding to Gibson since Neuromancer. The same applies to reading - the only novel for which the Foundation series should be required reading is Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis.

There's some far more interesting discussions possible about groupings of works in conversation with each other which create effective subgenres, rather that going down the rabbit-hole of arguing about canonicity.

Comments

[ndrosen]

Well said and learned, as usual. Say, when I was 10-16, and afterward, I read a lot of Poul Anderson, whose work I continue to hold in high regard, while recognizing that is not flawless. Have you read much of Anderson, and if so, what do you think?

[jsburbidge]

I read a good deal of Anderson in my early teens, and not a lot since, so I'm not going to try any sort of detailed evaluation.

Part of the problem with trying to make guesses is that every generation has a lot of bread-and-butter authors some of whom happen to survive, and many of whom don't, and coming up with explanations is largely just so stories. So people still read Collins but very few read Surtees.

Anderson is at that sort of level. Some of that set of mid-range authors will be remembered - usually, the ones with good prose, as ideas are easy to repurpose but the actual texture of writing is another matter. (Someday, someone will write the equivalent of the Lensman novels with three-dimensional characters and subtlety in its superhuman agencies, and people will forget about Smith. Two centuries of novels about romances with mistaken first impressions have not taken away from rereading Jane Austen.) Which of the many second-level authors will last through various contingencies is a question I don't think can be answered.

[graydon]

I agree in the particulars, though I think we're going to go through a very large lacuna, culturally. I'm not sure anything pre-2000 is going to be as easy as Chaucer is now to someone in 2100.

[jsburbidge]

That's why I had the guard in about civilization-scarring calamities.

Actually trying to predict what will be read in 2100 is a mug's game. Using the exercise as a way of putting in perspective claims which exalt the status of works published in the claimant's lifetime is more easy to ground.

We're already in the middle of larger changes in general taste between, say, when I was born and now compared to the same length of time leading up to 1920. In 1920 novels from the 1820s (notably Scott) were genuinely popular. I'm not sure Babbitt and Mrs. Dalloway are anywhere near as popular now.

A few days ago in some thread or another somebody referred casually to Pilgrim's Progress as being essentially unread and unreadable - but it was the most popular book other than the Bible in English-speaking countries for over 200 years and I happily read it in my parents' inherited copy at about 10 years old.

Major civilizational change could speed that up - or maybe it will lead to three generations of readers for whom novels about daily life in the late 20th Century is sought-after nostalgia.

[graydon]

It's an alien world in some axiomatic ways. Women's suffrage has truly caught somewhere as a real thing; statistical reasoning and the habits of cooperation may be.

Should those hold, even if the climate does nothing, we're looking at a comparable cultural change to the rise of patriarchal norms. Nothing from before makes any sense.

[dewline]

Quite probably more than one such lacuna.