On Science Fiction And Fantasy Of Old

 This past weekend, I had cause to pick up some of my older science fiction books for "light" reading.

In this case it was some oldies but goodies - Knave of Dreams by Andre Norton,  Uller Uprising by H. Beam Piper and Falkenberg's Legion by Jerry Pournelle, all reliable authors for whom I have a number of their works and enjoy them repeatedly.  Finishing reading them always makes me sad that there was a finite amount of books that these authors wrote, made perhaps more poignant by the fact that it felt, at least, that we used to have such authors in careless abundance.

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I was lucky growing up when I did.  We had the tail end of most of the great science fiction and fantasy writers with us or at least those that had come up in the era of those that had passed away and were, in turn, influenced by them.   I read a selection that was in the beginning overseen by my mother for content reasons, with Andre Norton and Edgar Rice Burroughs figuring prominently in those early readings (really, my first "fantasy" books were the original OZ series by L. Frank Baum and the Raggedy Ann and Andy series by Johnny Gruelle, of which I have a great many of the original series).  I slipped out of the barn a bit after that, reading Robert E. Howard (largely Conan, but some of his other works as well), Asimov (whom I have not touched in years), Heinlein, Fritz Leiber, and C.J. Cheyrrh.  Still lots of Andre Norton at that time as well (I have a shocking collection of many of her books that were either hard science fiction or Witch World; her other fantasies were less interesting to me).

And Tolkien, of course.  Always Tolkien, from the fifth grade on.  And C.S. Lewis as well, both his Narnia and his Science Fiction (which is a sadly neglected portion of his output).

More H. Beam Piper and Jerry Pournelle came right at the point that I realized that the genre was changing.

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It would be hard for me to "pinpoint" a time when the genre moved beyond me.  It had to have been the mid-1990's or early 2000's.  And it was a subtle thing, something that I cannot fully explain to you.  

One moment I recall was reading C.J. Cheyrrh's book Rimrunners.  I recall nothing about the book itself (other than the name, which I had to verify); I just remember thinking "This is not interesting to me at all".  Another moment was one of the innumerable books written by R.A. Salvatore about Drizzt Do Urden (a very popular D&D character and series, if you have never heard of him), when I realized that the book was really sort of a modern tale with elements of fantasy.

Modern tales with elements of fantasy have their place, I suppose.  But the point of Science Fiction and Fantasy - at least once upon a time - was to escape the world of the mundane, not see it reflected back to us in a mirror slightly distorted.  Yes, at the core a story is about people and their problems and some authors (Pournelle, for example) always does a great job of taking situations and walking them out to their logical conclusion in other settings.  But that walking out is always within the context of the story, not the main point of the story.  But that became more and more the case until I gave up.   And after one or two of those books, I never really looked back but instead started collecting authors that I had enjoyed from my youth.

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It is unfair, I suppose, to tar every author since the mid-1990's with the brush of "Not interested" - to be fair, I have enjoyed the David Drake books I have read, the first series by David Eddings was wonderful (and much superior to his second), and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time was quite enjoyable (up to the point I got tired of waiting for the release of the next novel - before his passing - and so moved on).  But it is also fair to think that my time has a certain value on it as well and "taking a chance" on an author who essentially will have "current world problems" writ large in their narrative is beyond my time (or pocket book).  And - for better or worse - we can know a great deal more about authors thanks to the InterWeb; there are a few that likely I might read except seeing their on-line presence is enough to convince me to take a pass.

Which is fine, of course.  I have more than enough of my favorites to read and re-read. And I have those others that I have not read all their works (Pournelle for example, or the aforementioned David Drake.  I should give Robert Jordan another go now that the series is complete - and there are a host of Golden-Silver age writers like Larry Niven that I have never read).  And all of that is probably more than enough to consume any time I might like to dedicate to reading.

A shame for modern authors trying to come up, I suppose.  Hopefully the best of them will find a way to make their way in a genre that has gone from the fantastic to the mundane, from escapism to "current world" with the tack-on trappings of somewhere else.