It is as inevitable as the green sky above us, the annual migration of the giant oak trees, and the monthly return of the triple moons1: sooner or later, well-read fans will be inspired to assemble a list of recommended books for younger people or other fen.
I’m a list veteran, having compiled my first list in grade thirteen at a teacher’s request2. Surely my lifetime of reading and listing qualifies me to offer timely advice to others contemplating their first lists—lists that I am sure will end up being every bit as apropos as the ones that populate so many discussions of this sort.
The most important rule is do absolutely no research3.4 If the titles don’t come to mind at once, then how on Earth can they be significant works? Disregard those croakers who dwell overlong on just how many science fiction and fantasy books have been published over the decades and on the fallibility of unassisted memory. Consider this: if memory were notoriously unreliable, wouldn’t I remember that?
So set aside your Science Fiction Encyclopedias (print, of course), your ISFDBs, your walls of Locus magazines, the blogs, the notebooks, the vast libraries of information at your disposal. Full speed ahead, damn the research, and awe those darn kids with your effortless command of the field.
No real need to consider anything after 1980 or so. All the canonical works had been published by that point; everything after that is mere recapitulation. People are people, no matter the era, so it seems unlikely that someone in 1990 had something to say that a person in 1960 had not already said. (Don’t feel the need to doublecheck that. That would be research.)
It is vital to take your audience into account. Never forget that how grateful kids should be for the advice they so desperately need. Any consideration of the possibility that things might have changed since the time when digital watches were cool5 would be mere pandering. That might also require research, which we have ruled out.
Finally, remember that all art involves a certain level of risk. Having done the hard work of jotting down the first dozen titles that randomly came to mind, you may not receive the accolades you are assuredly due. Know that audiences often fail to appreciate the magnitude of your effort. They might be tepid, or even (I am very sorry to have to tell you this) vocally critical.
Hard-working book-recommendation-list-crafters may encounter outrageous claims such as:
- Women authors exist.
- Non-white authors exist.
- Leave It To Beaver did not encompass the entire range of human sexuality.
- There is a world outside of the region in which one grew up.
- There are languages other than English.
- Readers may no longer tolerate sexism and racism.
- Your list looks suspiciously like many other lists, but with the order slightly rearranged.
It is important to show your audience who is boss. Shouting (or pounding away furiously in ALL CAPS) is always a good start, as are the sort of typos one produces while typing in a rage. The audience’s job is a simple one: to adore the exact same things you did decades ago, without regard for the fact that times have changed since your tastes morphed into sedimentary rock. Do not be afraid to provide these readers with the guidance needed to help them understand how wrong they are. After all, you are the list-maker. You’re not the one who needs to learn something.
Photo: Heffloaf; edited from the original (CC BY-SA 4.0)
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Note how skillfully I work a reference to Robert Sheckley’s Mindswap into my text, demonstrating my knowledge of the eternal classics.
[2]I don’t remember what was on that list and cannot consult the other witnesses as I am the sole surviving participant in that experiment. [Note to Tor.com editors: please use a non-ominous font for the previous sentence.]
[3]Some might say “You do know a surprising number of people don’t get sarcasm at all and will take at face value concepts you mean to undermine by presenting them sarcastically?” To which I say “There is absolutely no evidence I understand your point. In fact, from my perspective, everything between “You” and “sarcasm?” might as well be mumbled Etruscan for all I comprehend it.” Others say “footnotes are less helpful than you think.” Well, I don’t care. I like footnotes.
[4]Even the self-indulgent ones, you ask? Especially the self-indulgent ones.
[5]Yes, a Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy reference. Worship me.
While I appreciate footnote 3, I actually do largely agree with the idea that if you can’t remember the title, you may not need to recommend that book. Maybe you can’t remember every title in the series, but you better be able to remember the name of the series. You don’t need to impress people with your knowledge – just share the books you’ve loved.
Well written, James!
the only issue i have with this article is that if your tastes a morphing in to any sort of rock, i feel metamorphic would be a better fit. because i’m that sort of geek, apparently. otherwise, bravo.
One of life’s little ironies is that having been the one to have given the phrase ‘brain eater’ to the world as a term for writers whose book quality fell off a cliff, I have my own little brain eater [1]. One of the symptoms is anomic aphasia, which makes me forget nouns, proper nouns included. Once, I was reduced to pointing at a counter because I’d forgotten all the words for a horizontal thing on which objects are placed. Forgetting titles or mangling them is just one the endearing little quirks my memory now has.
Also, and I mean this in a supportive way, there are a lot of interchangable titles out there.
1: Weirdly, it’s improved greatly since I started following my brain doctor’s advice.
@1 A lot of people’s lists/memories might come up with, oh, “that Le Guin novel with the glaciers” but need a reminder that the title is The Left Hand of Darkness, because there’s no direct link between the title and the plot, characters, or setting.
If you look at your list and notice “these are all from the 1970s” that may be a genuine reflection of your preferences, and hell, go ahead and post it as “best SF of the 1970s.” But don’t try to tell us nothing good happened before 1970 or after 1980.
I wonder if people would like “James’ Top Ten Books That Are By Any Reasonable Standard Terrible That He Still Rereads.”
@5 Sure, I’d read that. My own list would be a lot longer than 5 entries… :)
So what’s the LD/50 of sarcasm? Because this has to be a toxic dose
@@.-@ it might also be a sign that the list-maker was 12 in the seventies.
The funny thing is I have roughly the same capacity to spot other people’s sarcasm as a cabbage.
I’m reminded for some reason of the time (in this century) my wife overheard a book store employee recommending a new SF author to a patron. The new author’s name was Ben Bova.
@5 @6
My list of, let’s call them “guilty pleasures”, would also be longer than 5 entries.
@5 I think I need that list very badly
Surely there’s room for lists of what the compiler thinks are books worth reading, regardless of who wrote them and when, or their adherence to current moral tropes?
@8 Do you have difficulty spotting cabbage? It’s possible that there might be a cabbage-identification, or perhaps even a more generic vegetation-identification course you can take online.
I know you’re not responsible for the photo at the top of the article, but what kind of monster keeps their Latin and Greek Loeb texts jumbled together like that?
I love footnotes! And I love dragging out old novels that I loved a million years ago (there may be some slight hyperbole here) and seeing if they stand up to the test of time!
It been noted that people brought into the Good Omens fandom by the show are going to find fanfics with an inordinate number of footnotes and won’t understand why (unless they go and read the book of course). But happiness can be described as really good footnotes. Sadness, of course, is endnotes (with an exception for well-formatted online sources).
You have inordinate difficulty spotting cabbages?
In some ways it depends on the list – if the list is intended to be a list of works that were especially formative or meaningful to you at a certain period of time, then it may well reflect what was known/available at the time in that mlieau. it doesn’t make them any less formative or significant.
But if it’s a more general purpose list it definitely behooves one to seek out what else is out there to provide a well-rounded list of the different options! I know I’ve been introduced to new stuff that way.
Surely unassisted memory is more likely to bring to mind recently read books? Which will favour recently written books that can only have been read recently.
Don’t forget ‘sensawunda!’ If a book can’t make you feel like books did when you discovered them at age 12, what good is it?
…CANT TYPE CRYIN LUAGHTEARES…
About 40 years ago, I prepared a top 10 list of SF novels (I don’t believe I included any fantasy titles). I suspect that it is long gone (or is buried in a box somewhere). I can’t remember all of the titles, but I think _Judgment Night_ was in that list and maybe a Leigh Bracket title as well.
@19 Available evidence suggests that you’re wrong, and unassisted memory is more likely to bring to mind books that you read when you were a teenager and everything was shiny and new than books that the older and jaded you read last week (assuming you’re not still a teenager, of course). The older you are, the better your memories of your younger years become when compared with your memories of more recent events.
@@@@@14: I’m more curious about the Volapük book.
“Take a teaspoonful of English,
A modicum of Dutch,
Of Italian just a trifle
And of Gaelic not too much;
Some Russian and Egyptian
Add then unto the whole,
With just enough to flavor
Of the lingo of the Pole.
Some Cingalese and Hottentot,
A soupcon, too, of French.
Of native Scandinavian
A pretty thorough drench;
Hungarian and Syriac,
A pinch of Japanese
With just as much of Ojibwa – And Turkish as you please.
Now stir it gently, boil it well,
And, if you’ve decent luck,
The ultimate residuum
You’ll find is Volapük!
@23 What evidence is this, exactly?
@24:
I recognized that one, having a copy on my own shelves. It’s Andrew Drummond’s 2006 A Hand-Book of Volapük. (It’s a novel, but it does include a fair amount of information about the language – has a vocabulary at the back and grammatical exercises.) As I recall it’s about a Volapükist, an Esperantist, and Thomas Urquhart in 1890s Scotland. An interesting book.
@26/ngögam: It does sound interesting. What’s the plot?
@26: Thanks!
I have terrible aphasia for everything except the word “aphasia”. I’d edit an anthology of stories whose titles and sometimes authors I have forgotten. SPOILERS because I don’t know how to describe some of these without.
1. A cyborg society and biotech society locked in terrorist war, and then the cyborg protagonist’s wife has been replaced by a robot and his replacement robot chases him thru the streets. I’ve read this multiple times since I was 10-ish and it will not stick in my head who wrote it.
2. Space adventurers are starving, open a cannister of paste that probably says “Everyone Eats Goo”. Their translation is incorrect.
3. Space adventurers land on a station that seems like a spaceport terminal, recently abandoned. As they go further, the available space expands out before and behind them.
4. A man takes a drug that makes him shrink down to subatomic size which turns out to send you to another planet because “atoms are like solar systems, man!” and has wacky space adventures before returning to Earth when the acid trip ends. I know this is actually “He Who Shrank” by Henry Hasse because it was recently mentioned here, otherwise I’d be going “You know, that story!”
5. A couple discover that time doesn’t pass while they’re in bed together. They stock up on food, wine, & books and curl up. They finally beat the rent system!
I can probably do this all day, but five is good for now. I bet a lot of these were in OMNI, possibly a few in Galaxy.
@29: Number 5 is Rent Control by Walter Tevis – published in Omni
I don’t remember the names of anything, except maybe Lord of the Rings and The Cat in the Hat and my husband. Thank God Mom and Dad were just Mom and Dad. If I’m going to recommend books, I need to look at the ratings I put into my personal database after reading each book. Otherwise, I’ve got nothing to add.
But you know, as far as the lists this is making fun of, isn’t there room for everyone’s lists? Those lists of older books may have jewels I’ve never read, same as the lists of newer books. This week I just read for the very first time Olaf Stapledon, because someone put him on a list of great sf. I’m glad they did.
@27: I don’t recall the plot in detail, but here’s the précis from the blurb on the back of my copy:
Although AFAIK not marketed as SFF, the book contains a strong fantastic element. Justice (a repairer and tuner of church-organs) encounters 17th century nobleman Sir Thomas Urquhart in his tomb in Cromarty, and agrees to become his travelling companion. I’d never heard of Urquhart before reading the book, but he was a larger-than-life figure with an eccentric writing style. This 2011 article in The Scotsman gives a better idea of the character one encounters in A Hand-book of Volapük than the Wikipedia entry I linked before. In 1652 and 1653, while imprisoned in the Tower of London for having fought for Charles II against the English Parliamentarians, he wrote two books in which he claims to have created a universal language of surpassing perfection, a language which he does not describe in detail but for which he makes various unlikely claims, such as that it has eleven genders and every word has at least ten synonyms. Hence his suitability for a story of 19th-century universal language enthusiasts.
Anyway, it’s an odd book, but if what I’ve said here makes it sound intriguing, it may be worth tracking down. Talking about it here makes me want to reread it.
@32/ngögam: Thanks!
@30: One down, 3 to go!
@34: #2 also sounds familiar to me (sounds like something Sheckley would write). I note that there is a movie with a similar sounding plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stuff
I keep thinking the goo story is part of A.E. Van Vogt’s Space Beagle series, but it’s not. All those stories would make great parts of my Aphasia Anthology, tho, since everyone knows them from the various ripoffs, not the originals.