At ReaderCon this past month, I discussed the idea of introductory (100-200-level), intermediate (300-400-level), and advanced (500-700 level) texts in the Fantasy and Science Fiction genres. I’ve thought about books as being 100-level for a while, but only in that conversation did I really flesh out the idea from 100-level to 700-level.
As background: At many colleges/universities in the USA, curricula are broken apart by school or department, and then by level.
- 100-level courses tend to be surveys, covering basic aspects of a discipline, and serves as an introduction.
- 100 through 400-level courses tend to be designed for undergraduate students
- 500-700 level classes are designed for graduate students.
As an ex-academic (BA and MA, no PhD, for which my bank account is thankful), I think this 100-700 scale gives us a useful framework for describing different texts within any given genre, and the fact that different texts will tend to best serve different roles for different readers.
Most newcomers to the genre would be well-served by reading 100 and 200-level texts to start, while readers who have engaged with a genre for decades may prefer to read 400-level texts and up.
To illustrate, I’m going to use SF/F examples, since this is Tor.com and I’m a SF/F guy.
100-200 level—Introductory Texts
These include survey works, which presume zero previous knowledge of a genre. These works serve to introduce common tropes (fantasy = feudal kingdoms, farmboy heroes, brave knights, wise old wizards, etc), story structures (the prophesied hero must take the McGuffin to the Place), and tones (epic fantasy’s elevated tone and archaic dialogue, urban fantasy’s wry wit and snarkiness).
This level would also include works that presume basic understanding of a genre’s major elements (tropes, story types, use of language, etc.), but are still fairly introductory in terms of how in-depth they get with the use of the genre’s distinctive qualities.
For years, I’ve talked about John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War as 101-level Science Fiction. It’s written in clean, straightforward prose, explains its speculative elements as it introduces them (the Brainpal™, the technology used with the volunteers to make them combat-ready, etc.). While it resonates with the work of Heinlein, I’d argue that more than being a child of Heinlein, it’s an updated successor, a Heinlein-esque text for the next generation, a new Science Fiction 101.
Other Examples:
- Boneshaker by Cherie Priest is Steampunk 101.
- The Martian by Andy Weir is Science Fiction 201—while largely very accessible and wide in its reach, The Martian includes a substantial amount of technical detail which is plot-essential.
- Dirty Magic by Jaye Wells would be a Fantasy 201 (Introduction to Paranormal Crime Fiction).
- Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed is Sword & Sorcery 101, with the subgenre updated for a more contemporary (and diverse) sensibility.
300-400 level—Core Genre Texts
Texts at this level delve deeply into one or more specific elements of the genre (a more sophisticated magic system, intricate sociological speculation based on a new technology, etc.), expecting the reader to have a solid grounding in order to get the most out of the text’s deep exploration of its topic. They’re the kind of everyday texts an experienced reader of the genre might get excited about, that investigate cool elements of a genre, bringing new ideas to them, without necessarily seeking to operate on a mind-blowing or genre-redefining level.
Some works at this level can be thought of as cross-listed as graduate texts, just as some colleges offer a 300/400 level version of a class and then a 500/600 graduate level version of the class. Most of the material is the same, but the depth of investigation and work expected of the student/reader is different.
N.K. Jemisin’s Inheritance trilogy (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, The Broken Kingdoms, The Kingdom of Gods) would be 300 or 400-level fantasy. They require some grounding in kingdom-level fantasy, with succession conflicts, large-scale conflicts being resolved through court intrigue, massively-powered demigods who seem human, but are clearly not, a less-spelled-out magic system than many fantasy series, etc. These books may work best as a contrast to what has come before in the genre, rather than as introductory texts.
Ancillary Justice is 400/600-level Science Fiction. It can be read as ambitious Space Opera with interesting twists on familiar plots, delving into colonialism, artificial life (Breq is a spaceship, and yet she is no longer a spaceship). But keeping the gender identity and perception in the forefront, it becomes more like a 500-level graduate work, where the use of she/her/hers as the default pronoun casts the entire work in a more nuanced light for an advanced reader.
The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley is a 400/600-level Fantasy text. On the one hand, it’s a sophisticated epic fantasy with complex interpersonal dynamics, interesting worldbuilding, and incredibly high stakes. It’s also even more than that—it’s a referendum on the tropes, biases, and blind spots of the genre, which makes it both an advanced 400-level text and a genre-challenging 600 level text, depending on how you’re reading it.
500-700-level—Graduate-level Texts
These are the kinds of books that get genre academics climbing the walls with excitement. They’re thoughtful, challenging, sometimes inaccessible texts by masters of the field working at a very high level. These are works that assume a deep and broad knowledge of the genre so that the reader can follow the work’s commentary on what has come before, be it allusion, parody, and/or moral refutation.
These books are capstone works that seek to challenge the fundamental assumptions of their genre. They’re master classes of technique and conceptual ambition, or calls to arms for a revolution in the genre. They tend to be very rare, and have a smaller readership when compared to the introductory texts.
Samuel R. Delany’s Neveryona series is graduate-level fantasy, as is Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. Both rely on substantive pre-existing knowledge of their respective genres, and work at a very high level, both language and concept-wise.
Many of China Mieville’s books are 500-level, if not 600-700 (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council, Embassytown). They combine Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Pulp. Their structures directly refute the tradition set down by The Lord of the Rings, instead looking to the New Wave and all the way back to the Weird of Gormenghast and similar works. Mieville’s works are filled with elevated, muscular prose and incredible conceptual richness, sometimes to the point of opacity. They’re very much books for people who have read a lot of SF/F and are looking for something new.
So, what does this all mean? And how can this be useful for us as readers, as members of the SF/F community?
As someone who’s been in the SF/F community as a reader for almost my whole life, and as a scholar and/or professional for going on ten years, I think it’s important to remember that different texts can be more or less useful and powerful for readers at different points in their reading history. We will always need new 100-level texts to help bring readers into the genre.
The SF/F 101 books of the 1940s and 1950s are not likely to be as accessible to 21st century readers. Especially readers from diverse backgrounds looking for themselves in the genre. We cannot keep pointing people at Heinlein, Asimov, Brooks, and Tolkien forever and expect those works to resonate as strongly with people born fifty years after the books were written.
It’s frequently said that Science Fiction is more about the time in which it was written than about the future. And so, just like we update textbooks, we need to update our genre curriculum, as readers and as writers. Authors like Ann Leckie, Kameron Hurley, Max Gladstone, China Mieville, and others are pushing the genre forward, from representation to concept-work to worldbuilding and beyond.
In terms of the field as a whole, we’re likely to see more 100 and 200 level texts than 300-400, and more of those than 500-700-level. Some readers, the most voracious and/or academically-inclined, are going to scale the curriculum pyramid and spend a lot of time talking about what’s at the very top, the narrow point of the genre that scrapes the sky. But it’s critical for the genre’s future that we keep that the base of the pyramid, those first few steps up into the genre community, well-maintained, and replace them with new stepping stones as time goes on.
For every generation of readers, we need new 100-level texts, presumably written by the generation of writers that grew up with the last set of 100-level texts, and are updating, re-imagining the genre with their own perspective. 100-level texts never stop being important, as they serve as the entry points to new readers, and so it’s good for veteran readers to keep updated with the new introductory texts.
Each step up the pyramid, from the wide base to the narrow point, each level of intertextuality and orientation of focus, each part of the genre conversation is important, but let’s never forget what it was like to read those first few science fiction and fantasy books, to have our minds opened to worlds of wonder, with dragons and magic and lasers and spaceships. That sense of wonder, that desire to imagine a world other than the one around us, is what makes the SF/F field so powerful, and we have to make sure that we continue to be inviting, not insular, not elitist, and to make everyone feel welcome, so that the conversation can be enriched and made new over and over again.
Michael R. Underwood is the author of the Geekomancy series. He also has two new novels, Shield and Crocus and The Younger Gods, publishing in 2014. If he survives to the end of this year, he will have earned a party. He lives in Baltimore with his fiancé, an ever-growing library, and a super-team of dinosaur figurines and stuffed animals. You can find him on Twitter @MikeRUnderwood.
Great idea. I hope this catches on, especially for book reviews.
So what level are you going to do THE NEVERENDING STORY? 600-700, I’d propose. I’ll give the course myself. Recommend it for therapists and Special Educators out there as well. You put the pic on, but never mention it in the article!
Nice article but a small personal critique: I don’t think I’ve read a single one of the books you list, so to me this article didn’t really help me much since I have no point of reference. I was kind of surprised that more common works like Harry Potter or the Shannara series, LOTR or Wheel of Time didn’t get on the list anywhere. This would have at least allowed me to look at a category and say “Ok, I’ve read that one, so I know what this one is probably like”.
Admittedly this is a personal thing. I’m sure there are lots of people who have read some/many of these. You did at least give me an idea of some books I should add to my reading list :)
Now I wonder about author progression through genres. Which authors progress to higher level writing as their careers continue. Do readers *expect* an author to do so? Can an author “go back” to a 101 novel in their genre once they are writing deep stuff? Should they? Is genre-hopping a way to return to the shallow end again and again?
Here’s another thought–is an indication of the effectiveness and worthiness of a Graduate level text is that it CAN resonate and remain relevant decades later?
@3: If I’ve understood, Rowling was writing for a YA audience who wouldn’t necessarily be familiar with the genre, so something like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone would be a 100-200. I would say that Tolkien’s LOTR by itself can be understood on a 300 level (with The Hobbit around 200) but more in-depth material (The Silmarillion et al) would doubtless push that higher.
@@.-@: The best example I can think of at the moment (I’m probably missing a substantial amount) is Ursula Le Guin, with the comparatively recent and straightforward Annals of the Western Shore books following on from The Birthday of the World and Changing Planes.
Hopefully books exploring genre academically would be included in the Graduate Level Texts. I’ve found a niche for this, especially as the ideas from them are popularized at the 300-400 Level. In addition, such academic considerations could gain greater readership by way of application outside genre to contemporary issues, say DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and how it relates to human violence and tribal conflict in application to Israel and Hamas in Gaza.
Thanks for the essay.
I definitely agree with Scalzi’s Old Man’s War being a great Intro to Scifi 101. And for a stand-alone, I think Fuzzy Nation was good too.
Other 101 hopefuls:
Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One
Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, or Timeline, or Sphere
(Honestly having some trouble coming up with good 101 types, but Crichton was my intro to scifi, so, y’know… goose/gander.)
Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.
200-400 range?
Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl
Connie Willis’ The Doomsday Book
William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition
Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash
And I’m wondering were the major epic fantasies of the last two generations would fall?
Wheel of Time around 200, because it builds yet changes the main tropes.
Then A Song of Fire and I in the 400?
Bujold’s work in the 300?
But I’m more in @3’s boat. I have read 3 of the authors you talk about, but not enough to judge all the rest. Yet I was happy to see a mix of female and male writers.
I’m surprised there’s no mention of The Belgariad. After LoTR, that was the series that sucked me firmly into epic fantasy before branching off into the various sub-genres.
And Thank You for mentioning diversity. I’ve been reading fantasy exclusively for about 20 years, and while it didn’t bother me as much in the past, the lack of diversity in most Fantasy (not S/F) is pretty jarring to me.
My husband questions it well. “If you’re in a world where creatures have green skin, do magic or can transform, how come all the people are white?” or “So….nobody of color ran fast enough to survive the zombie apocalypse?”
Had to laugh at that. Even if it is a sad/true/ bad thing we see in books.
And I really like Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, because it really is a worldwide view of one. I think someone from every continent is represented. But my memories a little hazy, can’t remember if there was a voice from South America.
I actually took a Lit 200 on SciFi/Fantasy 30 years ago at Community College of Rhode Island. We dealt with the heroic cycle and applied the concept to both movie and books to analyse the cycle and find the hero/ wise guide/dark point of enlightment/ and eventually overcoming of the obstacle. Great course..used Tolkien and Star Wars along with current books at the time and some of Joseph Campbell’s work on this
I was kinda hoping this would be about actual classes on different genre works :) I got to take a Tolkien class in college – I was in college as the movies were coming out so of course it was the big thing and you could tell the professors were totally excited to have an excuse to teach a class on it (I think it was a 300 level classical studies class, but pretty much open to everybody. It was tons of fun. It was actually taught by 3 professors who each had their own specialty. My favorite was the professor who specialized in languages/ancient works and was known to just break out in Ancient Greek, etc at times. Haha.) I also sat in on a panel once where we discussed the legitimacy of sci-fi/fantasy in academia (or lack thereof in many cases).
But as for this…I get it, and agree we need to keep fresh stuff coming, but I worry that if taken too far it can add an element of snobbery to the whole thing. Oh, you’re only reading the 200 level texts? You’re not a Real Fan…etc. Or, would just create a sense that the texts classified as ‘100 level’ are somehow worse than the others. I used to be an academic too, though so…I get it :)
I think that bringing in contemporary stuff is really helpful, as too often it is easy to look back at the classics and think of them as largely unassailable. Whenever I’ve considered this in the past, I always wonder about not including certain classics–is that necessary or wise? In particular, I think about how a text is talking with the prior texts in the genre, and whether it is necessary to offer some kind of grounding.
This is kind of true in all forms of genre fiction studies–do you need to start mystery with Poe, or is it okay to just jump right into Hammett? Part of the work here is probably in-class commentary and description, but it’s equally valuable to consider offering readers a sense of what the field is like. Perhaps we might want to teach Diaspora, but thinking about robot minds might begin with some Asimov.
Thoughts?
@3
Well, based on popular fantasy series, very few would count as postgraduate work. Most of those are much less popular. A lot of single volumes I could name, but very few series, although that is changing as readers get more sophisticated.
The Belgariad is clearly a 101
The Mallorean is the 201 – it takes the same work and expands on it in more detail.
The Elenium and tamuli would be 202/212 – both slightly deeper but relatively straightforward, and clearly related themes.
Anything fantasy by Piers Anthony, Margaret Weis or Richard Knaak is aimed at high school level, so 051?
The Myth books and the Lankhmar books would be 200-300 – fairly simple, but due to the references, reward genre knowledge.
Shannara starts off as a 101, then turns into a 201 series with the sequel. The Heritage series would be 301/302/303/304, but then the rest are lower.
Tad William’s Memory Sorrow & Thorn would be 301-401 as they are surprisingly complicated.
The WoT is 300 – graded higher for length, but overall the plot is relatively straightforward throughout.
aSoIaF is more of a 400 level text. It isn’t postgraduate as such as it doesn’t have a lot of deep references. Just very solid core text.
Thomas Covenant would be a 500 level text, as is anything by Erikson.
Both require a lot of attention to get the most out of.
I’d probably put both Hugh and Glen Cook in the same 400-500 bracket. Wide genre knowledge is both expected and rewarded. Compare and contrast Thraxas with Cold Copper Tears.
Robin Hobb would be 300-400 level, as would Modesitt’s Recluce. Both have a lot going on behind the scenes to make you think.
Surprisingly the Redwall books can have a lot of depth as well, so 220.
The Valdemar books would be 101-301 then back to solid 200s.
Michael Moorcock would be anything from 101 to 700, and they might even be in the same series. Pratchett is similar – if you look for depth you will find it, and genre familiarity greatly helps.
Harry Potter is gateway fantasy, but I think it works as a basic degree – 101/102/201/202/301/302/303. The books definitely become more sophisticated as the series progresses, unlike most older series.
I’ve been using these sorts of divisions in my own thinking (and occasionally in my book reviews) for a while, and I have found it very useful. For myself, I can only get excited about 300+ level works anymore; every time I’ve tried to read something 100/200 level I’ve been underwhelmed. (Looking specifically at Old Man’s War here.)
(Though the 100-level texts I read as a kid still work for me, I’m sure that’s more about my nostalgia than their greater quality.)
The examples you chose seem spot on to me, too, and I am familiar with most of the authors’ work. And I very much appreciate the racial and gender diversity!
What I really love about this analogy is that it now makes a lot of sense as to why I can’t go back and enjoy Fantasy 101 anymore. I really love hanging out around the 300-400 level, with the occasional foray into graduate level work that I find too hard, sometimes. I just finished the Codex Alera series by Jim Butcher, and hated every minute of it. I think that absolutely qualifies as Fantasy 101. I couldn’t make it through the Belgariad, either. And it’s no wonder – you can’t take French 301 and expect to still be able to learn anything from French 101.
Um… the numbering system as presented isn’t meant to be an indication of “quality”, people, as much as it is “how much in the way of prerequisit genre knowledge is required to truly understand this text and what the author is doing…”
At least that’s the way I took it. There are plenty of 400-700 level books that are going to be crap to most people, and there are plenty of 100 level books that will be entertaining and amazingly well written. We’re just talking about how deep into SciFi/Fantasy you have to be to understand its lineage and internal genre tropes and references.
And then there are books like The Name of the Wind that would work for several levels of courses. Its fantasy 101 for sure… except its not, at the same time.
Ender’s Game by OSC?
@19, anthonypero:
I was not saying 100-level stuff was crap; I was saying that it’s now too basic for me. I get bored when authors hold my hand through the introductions to their world-building; I’d rather be thrown into the deep end and have to figure out half a dozen neologisms in the first page. (See: China Mieville.) Similarly, I get bored when classic tropes are played straight, and would much rather see them interrogated and subverted.
So while I do not think 100-level stuff is “objectively” bad, it does absolutely nothing for me as a reader and I try to avoid it.
I’m not sure I’m happy with this. It seems insular: the depth and seriousness of a work measured by how it relates to other works rather than, say, the light it casts on reality, or anything more intrinsic to it. New Crobuzon considered in terms of Gondor and Gormenghast but not in terms of London or of Mieveille’s strong left-wing politics… At worst it could become all shadows and mirrors: stories about stories riffing off stories about other stories, everything a reflection of another reflection and nothing solid anymore.
What are these numbers supposed to enumerate, and how are they calculated?
For years I’ve wanted to teach a course on the roots of Tolkien’s fantasy, or just pre-Tolkien fantasy in general: Lord Dunsany, ER Eddison, James Branch Cabell, Hope Myrlees, etc.
I wouldn’t do these as an introductory course, though, partly because of the cultural context needed to understand them and partly because, read through the lens of modern fantasy, they sort of seem to anachronistically subvert tropes of later fantasy. (I’ve heard this called an “unbuilt trope” but I don’t know how common-knowledge that phrase is…)
mmmm. Okay, but it sounds like you’re teaching genre history without most of its past and not the literary interpretation of a particular genre. How’s that fit into the rest of the English dept.? If it doesn’t have staying power, I don’t see how it has any importance beyond a hist. of the genre’s trends…..
And frankly, you could omit a few current folks of no importance outside the genre to include Ray Bradbury. For teaching interpretation of SF, that would be a better beginning than Scalzi.
And short stories need to be there, not just novels.
On the grad level, I’d like to see Clute’s “Appleseed,” which I just read recently & think will far outlast Mieville.
Also, much as I like _Perdido Street Station_, it is not on a level with _Book of the New Sun_. Both are portmanteaus of classic SF tropes reined to a higher purpose – but only one will stand re-reading. Mieville is a good writer, and _The City And The City_ would have been a classic if he had found a decent ending for it – but PSS [and, I would assume, the entire Bas-Lag sequence] is fundamentally adolescent in nature.
I like what @19 wrote about the Name of the Wind putting that example aside (though I agree with it) it is a real phenomenon. You can have Hamlet or other plays by Shakespeare on high school level reading list, and it can also be considered on any other level mentioned in this article.
@PhoenixFalls
If you haven’t checked out Stephen Erikson’s Malazan books, you should give the first a shot – Gardens of the Moon. It’s real sink or swim on the world building, and his background as an anthropologist really shows in the depth of the world-building. Especially in later books. The first is a cake-walk, compared to the rest.
P.S. I thought I recognized that handle! I did a few of your reading challenges on Shelfari.
blutnocheinmal wrote at #9: “And for a stand-alone, I think Fuzzy Nation was good too.”
Umm, Fuzzy Nation was a rewrite/reworking/homage of H. Beam Piper’s Little Fuzzy. I did a double-review of both books a while back, and gave Piper’s original the win. Scalzi’s reworking was enjoyable, but my end take on it was that it seemed like the novelization of the screenplay that might be written for a movie version of Piper’s book. (Made the protagonist younger, less dialogue, more action, etc.)
I can’t decide if I agree on Ancillary Justice being 400/600 level or not. At it’s heart, it’s space opera 101 but the character of Breq is at least a 400. Can one character push it that high? I don’t know. Great read either way.
@29 Yes, I was aware it’s not an original story. But I think the fact that it does read much like a movie novelization/book-I-wrote-hoping-it-will-get-optioned works in it’s favor as a ‘101’ type book.
I was trying to go for picks to ease newcomers into Scifi. And also trying to stay away from anything before the 80s. I’d rather peak someone’s interest with Fuzzy Nation, than turn them off Scifi for years with say, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. (Nothing against it, but it was a hard read – the prose and the first half for me just slogged.)
Iain M. Banks. Iain M. Banks. Oh, and Iain M. Banks. All grad level, I think. And Daniel Abraham, at least 200.
Re the older books: what kind of literary class teaches modern books without any reference at all to the classics? Would you expect somebody who’d never read Austen or Dickens to get anything at all out of (let’s say) Jane Smiley or Thomas Pynchon? Sure, bring in some of the newer stuff, I’m all for it … but not without historical perspective.
Yeah, the classics never resonate with people with modern sensibilities. Oh wait, that’s the definition of a classic…
I’m all for bringing in the new, but leaving out the old for the reasoning above is just ridiculous. Because, you know, no one reads Tolkien nowadays.
You could do an entire 500-700 course of Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series.
Very good; a fun academic exercise, also a framework in which you can target your own work as an aspiring author and bear it in mind as you write. Endless debate over what belongs at what level – but if there weren’t, this topic wouldn’t merit study.
If you’re interviewing an author who says they are intentionally *writing* in this manner, then ok, I could stomach it. To say that you’re somehow able to *grade* novels into these categories is utterly ridiculous.
Literature is many different things to many different people, like all art, and all life. There may be a progression that some people find helpful, but that does not in any way illegitemize the ways that others experience it.
Tor is better than this
>>that does not in any way illegitemize the ways that others experience it.
Which invalidates the entire point of your overly-aggressive argument. If this is not the way you like to consider works of literature, then just…don’t.
@37 Moderator here: I’ve edited out the first line of your comment, because the tone and language is not in line with our moderation policy. If you’d like to rephrase your argument in more respectful terms, please feel free to do so. Thanks.
This article has finally given me the words for why I didn’t like Throne of the Crescent Moon. I went into it expecting a 300-400 fantasy, and I just wasn’t in the mood for a story that trotted out so many common tropes. Thanks also for so clearly explaining why each level has value–I have frequently been guilty of elitism towards the 101-level books. I’m pretty solidly in the 300-400 range for fantasy, based on this scheme, though I often enjoy 100-200 level. Haven’t read any of the suggestions people have given so far for 500-700 works, so I would hazard a guess that I don’t read at that level that often…although would Guy Gavriel Kay count? I’m sure he could be read at a graduate level by looking at the way he fictionalizes history, but I don’t know if he could be read at a graduate level in relation to other fantasy books.
Oh, this is fun!
I’d agree that at least some of the books/stories in the 100 level courses would be classics. That’s how literature works. There should be a place for some contemporary classics (Harry Potter, Scalzi, etc.) and some classics (The Hobbit, A Wrinkle in Time, Ray Bradbury, etc.).
So, yeah. When is Tor.com offering up these courses? I’m ready to sign up!
Niven’s RINGWORLD needs to be in a 100-level class. It satisfies the “Introduction to World-Building” requirement (on many levels), as well “Applications of Real World Physics and Math to Fiction.”
Thinking of SF/F this way, and remembering the half-hazard way I found books as a kid, in the mid-’70s, yeah, going from LotR to Thomas Covanant (9 years old: same summer that Star Wars was out) it was a mess. I slogged through the first book and eventually read the next two but swore off Donaldson after that. Am thinking I need to revisit his stuff.
I’m not as familiar with newer SF but was thinking some of C. J. Cherryh’s ’80s stuff would fit the 300-500 range. Some of her novellas (Port Eternity) are definately in the graduate level. Same goes for John Brunner. I re-read Shockwave Rider and Stand on Z every 5 years or so and still find new stuff.
Cool thing is, am in process of building new paper-back shelf, so daughter (13) has access to our collection. Am thinking I’m going to arrange books in this format.
>The SF/F 101 books of the 1940s and 1950s are not likely to be as
accessible to 21st century readers. Especially readers from diverse
backgrounds looking for themselves in the genre.
I think this kind of statement is problematic because it implies readers from diverse backgrounds have trouble identifying with people of different backgrounds. It also implies that people from this century have trouble identifying with people from previous ones, which is also problematic.
Thinking that the characters in a story need to be demographically similar to the audience in order for the audience to like them is how movie studio executives think. It’s what resulted in tons of awesome heroes getting annoying kid and teen sidekicks because it was assumed that kids and teens couldn’t identify with the hero. It’s why movie writers are constantly told that they can’t have women or minority leads because the white male audience can’t identify them. Experience with this sort of thinking was what led Alison Bechdel to make the Bechdel test.
This sort of thinking is just as wrong when it’s done on behalf of minorities as it is when it’s done on the behalf of white cismales. It has the potential to be insulting and patronizing to the audience.
I personally came across an anthology of Golden Age SF when I was in
High School and was like “Where have you been all my life?” I don’t
know why, but for some reason I often find it more enjoyable than most modern SF. There’s just something about the style that appeals to me. Of course, my indifference to the era and place when something is written is a pretty deep-seated part of me. I can enjoy movies or books from any decade or country.
Perhaps artistically rich would be a viable descriptive phrase? Works that you can get more out of? As per film, In the Name of the Father is a good example.
@44 and earlier . . . Yes, let’s remember we can enjoy writers’ works without finding someone excactly like us . . . Seems to me universality means we can actually find points of contact no matter what . . . I can relate to Eowyn in The Lord of the Rings because I’ve been in what Marion Zimmer Bradley describes as the “heroic age,” have had a tendency to flit from interest to interest like Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun yet also have a passion for one profession (with me it’s copyediting, not medicine), don’t like being treated like I can’t do anything right as Gerry doesn’t like being treated like that in In the Name of the Father, but then again if I don’t find a point of contact at all, I am still interested in the characters and what happens to them, what they’re like, etc. no matter what. I read all sorts of books set various cultures and eras, plus biographies, when I was a kid, so perhaps that accounts for it. As per genre, I’m mainly a reader of fantasy and more of a scifi viewer (Doctor Who, Star Cops, Red Dwarf) but I reckon I’d enjoy reading different types of scifi–I just need to get myself to the library and find some!!! :)
I stuck to fantasy earlier, but certain authors definitely need a lot more thinking than others.
IMO the difference between an undergraduate work and a postgraduate work is in the analysis that can be performed on the text, and how much work the text is being made to do – fore and back shadowing, themes, allusions and direct references for example.
You might have a very complicated work, but at the heart the analysis could be quite shallow. On the other hand if we look at the acclaimed classics, you have the ouevre of Gene Wolfe, which is very much complicated text and complicated worldbuilding. I first read the Book of the New Sun when I was a teenager and loved it, but understood barely a fraction of what is actually happening beneath the surface.
GGK is a good example of more complex works – he never talks down to the reader, rather he lets the tale unfold as it will, and it has that air of inevitability of a true historical – “this has happened already so you can’t change it”
Older works can be extremely inaccessible to people – I certainly wouldn’t recommend The Worm Ouroboros to a newcomer, not because of the story – which is relatively clear – but because of the language choice – it tends to be sixteenth century english rather than modern, so like Shakespeare, the modern reader has to mentally translate as they go into more familiar terms.
I actually like golden age scifi, and almost nothing else scifi in my reading. Ray Bradbury, Issac Asimov, Heinlein. They are great. I’m 35, and I read most of them as a young teen, so maybe the disconnect isn’t as great as it would be today, since I remember a time (most of my life) before the internet was everywhere.
I can see how visions of the future that don’t include that kind of communication and network would be difficult for a younger audience and throw the reader out of the story. Its one of the things that makes Ender’s Game so viable still… OSCs vision of the future is actually still viable, for the most part, today. The same cannot be said for Asimov and some others.
This isn’t as much of a problem in fantasy. There are cultural issues, perhaps, but the fantasy setting can help people get past those.
@44 I had pretty much the opposite reaction to the accesibility idea; I have read a lot of the classics, but bounced on quite a few not because of the quality of the book itself, but the assumptions that seep in from the time it was written both made me feel ill and threw me out of the story. (Some of the classics hold up better than others, obviously.)
I’m a 40 year old queer woman, and have plenty of practice putting myself in the place of a protagonist not like me, but why put in the effort to not only do that but ALSO deal with, say, sexist attitudes of the 50s when there are modern books that don’t have nearly that level of problem and are just as good? Especially since as I am reading the intent of the article, the 101 texts are most useful for inviting people into the genre to read more, rather than scaring them off.
And for current readers who live in a world where a lot of what was science fiction in the classic era is now just normal tech, as well, the stories we loved so much will seem quaint and dated, rather than horizon expanding.
@44
It’s false equivalency, though, to compare calls for more diverse representation with the status quo that presents white, male, cis, hetero as the default standard.
It’s not that people who aren’t cishet white dudes CAN’T identify with people who are, it’s that we’re tired of being told that we SHOULD identify with them, and that expecting to find ourselves as the hero of the story (rather than the sidekick, love interest, comic relief) is an outrageous ask.
I read a lot of Bradbury as a teen and thought his stories were wonderful.
Rereading his stories now is actively painful to me. I’m a lot more able to pick up on those subtle cues, and less able to make excuses for them, that the author doesn’t really see his female characters as important, or real, or three dimensional, or people. It was clear by their rarity as POV characters, their complete absence from certain types of stories except perhaps as an object that the men talked about wanting to see or own, their continued limitation to the roles of housewife/secretary/mistress in every setting of story no matter how far future, the way they clung to men’s elbows and nagged men into doing the thing that caused disaster and constantly needed to be told “Pull yourself together” and and and…
Reading through a thick anthology overview of his work, I couldn’t help but see a consistent and clear pattern, and it hurt.
Making “classics” like that required reading for entry-level SF courses raises an artificial barrier on entry for anyone who’s not a straight white cisman. The sign on that barrier reads, “Yes, a lot of these authors sure don’t seem to think of you as equally human to them–but you’re just going to have to put up with that if you want to be a Real True and Well-Educated SF fan.”
I’m not saying they should be jettisoned and forgotten about, these classics. But they are not entry level by any means. The stories that made a teenage white boy in the 70’s fall in love with SF may well put a lasting bad taste in the mouth of women, people of color, and people of QUILTBAG identities today. Why make it harder for them? Why make it harder for me? Why not save that stuff for a later course, one which looks at the history and origins of SF, one which will discuss the progress the genre has made towards inclusiveness?
Entry level SF shouldn’t hurt.
Also, kit_r_writing @49 speaks truth. It’s so infuriating when we’re told it’s somehow selfish to want to see people like us getting a chance to protag, especially when the people telling us that have never NOT gotten to see themselves protag.
I would give my body for a Malazan class.
@50: Extremely well put. Just because older readers put up with (or were unaware of) that kind of thing does not mean that newer readers should have to do the same. I certainly have books that I loved (and still love, in some cases) that I would never hand to a new reader for fear of turning them off of the genre entirely.
I think, too, that classics aren’t necessary because this particular framework isn’t about getting every single reader to the graduate level. There are plenty of fans who find their idea reading conditions at different levels (trying to avoid “lower” because, as others have said, this isn’t about quality”). I’m someone who generally floats in the 200-500 range and I’m perfectly happy with that. A reader might not be able to fully appreciate a 600-700 level book without having read X, Y, and Z classics, but they certainly should be able to appreciate anything in the 100-400 range.
Plus, the insistance that everyone read the classics seems tinged (perhaps unintetionally) with the idea that one isn’t a real true fan unless they’ve got a PhD, when really, anyone can be a fan and that interest should be embraced.
I have’nt been into this type of book very long. Frankly, I really did’nt think I’d like it. But a new author to me changed my mind about it. Jeremy Robinson puts a lot of detail into his books. The Last Hunter series is one you can’t put down. The depth of his of stories are actually fascinating. It would definitely take a year or more to just figure out what it all means. I would also say its more than an entry level book.
I actually did take a course on fantasy literature in University, though it seemed to be rather weighted towards older literature with the Hobbit and the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe being the “newest” books in the course. I believe it also included Frankenstein, Jeckyl & Hyde, Turn of the Screw and Metamorphisis. Honestly the course was rather a disappointment though, with a poor instructor.
Like @43, I thought Cherryh should be in this list, along with Anne McCaffrey.
I would hand a copy of Bujold’s Ethan of Athos to someone who hasn’t read much genre fiction, so I guess I would put that in 101. To be clear, I love that book, and I think it has an exciting story and good world-building. Calling it 101 isn’t an insult. I just think it is exceptionally accessible and clear, and even people who don’t generally like SF seem to like it. It has been a gateway book for several people I know.
@56.
I think that might be a point that people are overlooking. A 101 class isn’t an insult – I know at university I regularly took entry level courses in all sorts of disciplines all the way through my degree, just for interest sake.
The key to a 101 course is it provides a simplified taster to what is available. It is that bridge between “Stuff Everyone Knows” and “Why That Isn’t Entirely True”. In the case of fantasy … often the most common gateway texts are heroic fantasy – Hearken to the Tale of Old … which puts people into childrens fairy tale mode and lets them dream a little wider.
Think of the tales that have survived for centuries – Beowulf, Aeneid, or the Australian Dreamtime. Worlds that are both part of our world, and yet apart from it as well. Worlds where the fantastic is part of everyday life, as Gods walk among us, and water is a gateway.
Now take those wonderful deep stories, and simplify them – boil them down to clean plots, and more accessible language. And you don’t get bad books, you just get easy readers. Comfortable environments to learn with, or to pick up after you’ve been put through the wringer by a Malazan or a Covenant.
David Gemmell’s Legend is one of the greatest gateway fantasies I’ve used for friends, and at heart it involves a handful of characters, and a simple siege.
The first Harry Potter book is exactly the same … it takes the classic English Boarding School trope, and twists it a little – to reveal that hidden world. And like most others where a normal person is exposed to the fantastic .. it was popular .. because every one dreams of secretly being more than they are. In NZ we had The Halfmen of O, which took the same idea, and was so popular it became required reading in schools, yet is practically unknown overseas.
I like the idea of setting up the fantasy and sci fi curriculum as some kind of leveled course of study. However, the way it gets approached by most readers (and writers) doesn’t fit with this framework. The roots of fantasy for many readers starts with childhood fairy tales. And then people decide that it’s just silly to let kids have *all* the fun and they just keep reading and writing their own stories.
And the made up histories and mythologies come up because it’s much easier to make it up then to try and do research on things like Atlantis or other earlier myths.
For me, and most people, fantasy 101 is Hansel & Gretal or Cinderella and then you get stuff that’s written down like CS Lewis’ series or The Wizard of Oz or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The sad part for me as a kid was realizing that there wasn’t a never ending supply of books that were that well written.
I actually taught a Sci Fi class to a bunch of Freshman once. I thought
it would be fun. I had failed to fully think through this very concept.
Instead of getting to tackle the course’s stated topic of “Science Fiction
as Social Commentary” and diving right into the meat of the stories, I
instead had to backpeddal and attempt to teach How To Read Sci Fi.
Even new contemporary short stories set in the near future had them bewildered on a reading comprehension level. I finally got them on something of an even footing with Ender’s Game (a good 100 level), and we managed to finish the semester with Snow Crash (100-200? solidly 200?).
You learn to read for clues about setting in SFF, in a way you don’t have to in other genres. Off hand comments in the narrative can give you important information about How The World Works. In other genres, you know how the world works, you are usually just learning about these specific characters and their specific circumstances, with the expectation that those characters and circumstances are within the scope of real day to day possibility.
Some books make that learning curve easier, explaining terms and important points as they come up, even reminding readers of them later. Others just write from the POV of someone used to that world, making the reader really work to catch up. That’s why I’d now put something like Way of Kings (fantasy) or A Fire Upon the Deep (sci fi) in the 500 level just based on the beginning–the learning curve is steep; you want some practice climbing those sorts of mountains before you can really enjoy it.
I have been reading SF/F since I started reading around 1950, growing up in a house with special bookshelves built in the dining room to accommodate Astounding and similar format SF pulp ….I agree that the older works…( like The Roads Must Roll) which were hard for me to read in the mid-1950’s, though in context, they were leading edge of that kind of fiction…but I think you miss the BREADTH of SF/F….Gormenghast is not an easy read….but then neither are China Mielville and other newer authors….but they all need to be read and absorbed, because there is an expanding range of thinking required.
Thats what makes me continuously searching for a new author, a new way of preceiving what goes on around us…