“One of the markers of [the] current age is that we’re starting to talk about who sets the classics,” The Stone Sky author N.K. Jemisin said at NYCC’s recent panel The New Classics of SFF. In response to moderator Petra Mayer’s (from NPR Books) opening question—what makes a classic work of SFF?—Jemisin explained that having conversations about whose stories are central helps to expand what constitutes the canon of science fiction and fantasy works. The notion of a canon was Provenance author Ann Leckie’s contribution, likening it to her study of the classical canon of music in college. But where she received her training from one or two handpicked textbooks, today’s readers have the internet, which allows for so many conversations to be seen simultaneously. Leckie made the argument that there is no longer “a single list of canonical classics, but a bunch of intersecting and interpenetrating lists.”
Here Jemisin respectfully disagreed, pointing out that the “literary commons are not open to everybody just yet” and that there are still divides to be breached in terms of internet access. In fact, she said, “I don’t know how I feel about a canon anymore. … The sheer volume of books that exist out there means that a canon is no longer possible.” Instead, she focused on the notion of classics themselves, defining them as “the books that change your thinking, that blow your mind, that reorder your world.”
That could easily describe both writers’ series: Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, with its thoughtful meditation on gender in a futuristic, space-faring human species, and Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which masterfully combines epic, apocalyptic fantasy with wrenching emotional stakes. As Hugo Award winners and “two of the most ass-kicking, mind-blowing writers working today” (as Mayer introduced them), they’re perfectly situated to talk about shifting notions of what makes a classic in the genre. Another fascinating angle is that both are active on social media, engaging with readers in ways that only one generation of authors have thus far.
When asked how authors’ social media presence and readers’ ability to “process the personality along with the writing” would affect the perception of classics, Jemisin looked at the attendees and said, “Raise your hands if you still think of Ender’s Game as a classic. My guess is if I had asked that 10 or 15 years ago, the number would be larger.” She went on to say, “Knowing about authors’ beliefs helps you understand how those beliefs influence their writing, and things you thought meant one thing, once you’ve got enough information about that writer, you suddenly realize mean an entirely different thing. That makes a difference. … And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
“Nothing means anything without a context,” Leckie added.
“I think the people who believe that works can and always should be divorced from the context are people who have the privilege to do so,” Jemisin said.
Speaking to a different sort of context, Mayer pointed out that SFF is often automatically perceived as a metaphor for contemporary issues in society at the time it is written. “That’s a lot of emotional labor,” she remarked, asking if either author ever wanted to tell people to just read the story. “I can’t speak for other writers,” Leckie responded, “but I don’t sit down and say, ‘Now I’m going to tell a story that critiques our society and culture’; I sit down and say, ‘Now I’m going to tell a story about a sentient spaceship with a thousand bodies.’ … In the end I wind up saying a thing because stories say things. … The nature of science fiction is that it will make a comment about society because we are writing within our certain context.”
To that end, panel addressed important areas for readers, critics, and authors to unpack; for instance, how having white people be the central race in a story is not a neutral narrative choice, with Mayer asking if the authors believed that things are starting to change.
“It is changing,” Jemisin said, “because the pushback tells us it is changing.” She went on to describe “the people who know full well that whiteness and maleness and straightness have meaning—the people who like that is has meaning—the people who like that its meaning is centrality and, in their mind, superiority, and who like the privilege that come with those things,” and how she has perceived that population’s reactions to “[t]he slow changes that we’re beginning to see in all of the media forms and entertainment forms that exist out there— they know that that shapes how we think about reality. They know full well that we didn’t start thinking that a black president was a thing until we started to see a bunch of them on TV, until we started to imagine them in our media. If you can imagine something, it will be.”
If I discovered tomorrow that Orson Scott Card liked to burn down orphanages, I would still think that Ender’s Game is a science fiction classic. Rudyard Kipling was a terrible human being, but he wrote good poetry. There are many kind, decent people who could not carry a tune in a bucket, while Richard Wagner is no less capable as a composer for being an anti-Semite.
The importance of a work is not dependent on whether or not we like the people who write them or the ideas they express. That’s not divorcing works from their context; it’s understanding that good writing in the service of vice is still good writing, while bad writing in the service of virtue is still bad writing. I read and enjoy both Jemisin and Leckie, but I would consider their writing good whether or not I liked what they said on Twitter. There’s something intellectually dishonest about denying the skill of an author’s writing because you dislike what they have to say, just as it would be dishonest to deny a surgeon’s or an architect’s skill because they used their abilities in a destructive way.
I would go further than Jemisin in defining a classic. Any book can be mind-blowing if it’s the first to show you something you’ve never seen before. When a book blows minds and changes thinking on such a scale that it changes the way SF is written or thought about from that point on, that’s a classic. The books that change thinking, that blow minds, that reorder the world – not yours or mine but everybody’s.
Ender’s Game was fun at the time and it did blow the mind of 17 year-old me but it doesn’t seem that mind blowing now and it really doesn’t seem to have changed anything.
They asked a Chinese what what he thinks of the French revolution. The answer was: It is too early to tell.
It is a joke, of course, but it contains a grain of truth – all these books, including the ones from the Golden Age, are too modern and they are too close to the contemporary politics. Any of them could turn to be a classics, but we won’t know. I would give any books a few centuries, e.g, like with Shakespeare works for example, to prove itself.
I love the Ancillary trilogy. They are, by a significant margin, my very favourite works of science fiction.
But I’m utterly at a loss as to why anyone would call them “a thoughtful meditation on gender”. The ungendered nature of Radchaai society is a neat bit of setting detail, but it’s not relevant. It has more-or-less nothing at all to do with the story, a fact which becomes visible as soon as you realise that absolutely nothing about it would change if you simply declared that the characters were all female or a even a mix of sexes chosen by tossing a coin for each name when it first appears. All it ever does is provide a little flavour when Breq accidentally picks the wrong pronoun for someone.
I came perilously close to not reading the series because all anybody talked about in the run-up was how amazing Leckie’s use of pronouns was, and I figured that if that was the only thing people were talking about, then the story itself must not be much to write home about. Then I did read them, and the story is fantastic and moving, and the characters are wonderful and vivid, and the setting is gorgeous, and the pronouns are the least, tiniest bit of what makes it great!
@@.-@. Crane. You don’t think that the fact that you can read/write an entire trilogy without knowing the gender of 95% of its characters and it not impacting the story at all doesn’t say a lot about how we as a society use and perceive gender?
I’m with Crane on how the Radch trilogy was much greater than all the babble about pronouns had led me to expect.
And call no book a classic till its first generation of readers are all dead, and people are still reading it. That which endures is classic; that which keeps blowing minds and speaking to heart after heart, generation after generation.
@5: No, frankly, I don’t. What, exactly, do you think it says?
I don’t think it actually says anything about gender. It simply ignores it entirely, which is hardly the same as a ‘meditation’ on the topic!
I love the pronouns in the Radch trilogy, but there’s nothing progressive about assigning one pronoun to everyone. That’s why it’s cool. The Radch are a horrific bunch of colonizers, merciless in battle and unwilling to face the flaws in their own system. And they give everyone a one-size-fits-all pronoun. That’s cool worldbuilding. Anyone who bounced off it because it was “too progressive” has the intelligence of a very small dog.
Ooh, I hadn’t thought of it from that perspective, actually. See, if the trilogy had actually brought up what it was like for someone from a culture with distinct gender identities to be annexed and have that identity erased by Radchaai culture and language, that would make it worth remarking on! That would be a statement about gender, and an interesting one at that!
oh boy wow. Do I disagree. Classics are books that stand the test of time – have something to say that transcends time place and genre and are generally popular later as well as current time of publication. Various things more important for each work (certainly popularity and sales numbers are usually the least important) but the idea there are not classic works or that which work is a classic is completely personal and arbitrary no no no no no. UG. Also I love how the internet access arguments and other economic rights arguments seem to always work their way into things where they have no place or import.
Sigh.