One fifth of the books I review on my site were published between 1974 and 19811. Others are of a more recent but still venerable vintage2. Why, in a world where each passing day sees another wave of new books, would anyone bother with older fiction? Given that staying current with any genre is a Red Queen’s Race, time devoted to older works means falling behind at keeping abreast of recent works… so why bother?
Here are—can you guess the number?3—at least five sufficient reasons, even leaving aside “because I want to.”
First: Tranquility
As more books are published than any human can possibly read, failure to stay one hundred percent up to date is guaranteed. Reading classic works is at best simply one of many factors ensuring that there will always be worthy recent books to which one will never find time to read. Dreading the inevitable is a misallocation of cognitive resources, producing stress without constructive results. Reading old books—or at least doing so while accepting the logical implications regarding more recent books—could be one step towards achieving personal tranquility.
Second: Opportunity
Because I already own the books in question. Reading books within arm’s reach demands neither funds nor the time to track down and purchase new books. Even new ebooks, as close to instant gratification as one is likely to find, require one to find a seller, purchase the book, download a copy, correct the metadata, select which of various available covers one wants poorly reproduced on one’s eReader, convert to an appropriate format, and finally, load it onto an eReader. Whereas the books and ebooks in the collection I have assembled over the last half century are never more than a whim away.
Third: Association
On occasion, the element drawing one to a particular vintage work isn’t necessarily the work itself, but the memories associated with reading the book. Thus, the roleplaying game Universe will always be linked in my memory with a pleasant afternoon spent on Mount Tamalpais, Clarke’s Childhood’s End with certain implications of relativity4, and The Space Skimmer with the day I discovered a quiet spot at Waterloo Oxford District Secondary School of which no other student was aware, a space into which I could vanish whenever I had a spare moment.5
Sometimes the associations are so particular to a specific person they cannot be coherently conveyed even to the author of the book in question.6 Nevertheless, they can be summoned with a reread.
Fourth: Remembrance of Things Past
Publishing is an ever-evolving field. Many elements fall out of fashion. Therefore, if one craves some parameter no longer of interest to modern authors or their publishers, there’s little point to looking for it in modern works. However, thanks to paper’s durability or previously saved ebooks, the older books can still scratch vintage itches.
Take novel length, for example. There’s a lot to be said for short novels, but for various reasons modern Anglophone SF novels are likely to be around 100,000 to 120,000 words. Fantasy books tend to be even longer. The realities of the modern market dictate that if what I crave is a book I can read over the course of a couple of commutes7, the best option might be some work published half a century ago.8
As well, books already read offer comfortable predictability. If one wants a particular reading experience, success is assured if one has already read the book in question.
Fifth: Perspective
Older works can cast unexpected light on modern works. By reading classics, one may find that one better appreciates recent books. For example, Gardener Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction belongs to the same structural lineage as Judith Merril’s The Year’s Best SF and Lester del Rey’s Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, sharing features not found in other Best SF annuals. However, this is obvious only if one actually reads the Merril and del Rey anthologies.9
***
Of course, there may well be as many or more justifiable reasons to read an older book as there are readers of older books.10 These are just the five reasons most important to me. If you’re a reader of vintage fantasy and science fiction, feel free to explain why in comments below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
[1]Which is to say, during my personal golden age, the years in which I was a teenager.
[2]How is 1990 thirty-three years ago? I would like to speak to time’s manager.
[3]Why (almost) always five, you ask? I am happy to say there is a reason and it’s not because five is as high as I can count.
[4]Even if it seems that an older work is telling you something significant about the world, I should caution that it is unwise to learn science from science fiction.
[5]No, you can’t know where it is. I may have a use for a forgotten mystery room one day.
[6]It turns out that if one notices one’s stream of words is not, in fact, conveying the sense of an ineffable experience beyond the ability of mere language to convey to an increasingly baffled author, the answer is not to keep talking. In a phrase, more words, deeper hole. Vonda N. McIntyre was a very patient, gracious person.
[7]How wonderful the day I realized a bus trip I took every day was just as long as “X Minus One” episodes.
[8]Provided I don’t have an unread translated Japanese light novel to hand.
[9]Not to mention noticing from the ISFDB that Dozois assumed editorship of the Best SF series first helmed by del Rey.
[10]Of course, one can live a happy, fulfilled life without reading older works.
That is a lot of work for an ebook. I also read ebooks on my phone so I may be a barbarian who’s opinion on the absurdity of covers can be disregarded.
I assume there are five items because that’s what the editors want for these listicles.
My favourite reason for unread old books is to recognize the antecedents of newer books SF being a genre in conversation with itself. For read books, it’s usually comfortable.
Heck, I don’t have the time to read new books. Maybe if I ever retire… So old books are easier to pick up. Scalzi’s Kaiju book is slowly bubbling to the top of the TBR pile. Right behind Hyperion, which I never got around to reading before. Currently slogging my way through The Silmarillion which I haven’t read in a few decades. For good reason, it turns out.
I guess “Puck of Pooks Hill” was one of the first genre books I read, back a half century or so ago, and it gets reread occasionally. Before I was a teen I’d read both LoTR and Dune, which get revisited every few years. Somewhere in there I read “War of the Worlds” which is surprisingly good considering it’s age. Someday I will have to reread Verne’s “Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”.
This does not take into account the existence of the Suck Fairy.
2: Be sure to look for one of the decent translations of Verne.
Sixth: Quality
Some of these books are just, well, better. Especially if you’re not restricted as to genre and willing to go back a couple of centuries in your hunt for good reading, some of the older books are just better written, less bloated and more thoughtful. Some of even the realistic fiction works immerse you in societies that are not so recognizable, because the past is a different country, or however that saying goes.
There’s also a certain unnatural selection effect where older books that survive in libraries or reprints are often ones that readers over the years have enjoyed (or at least found value in). There may be passable imitators, but it’s hard to beat Alexandre Dumas for swashbuckling or M. R. James for spookiness. The problem with newer works is that, given Sturgeon’s Law, the 90% of everything that’s crap is still in print, while a lot of that has been winnowed away for 19th and 20th century works.
Every time you read a press release about another award being handed out, check out the list of fiction that’s won a Nobel prize, a Booker, a National Book Award, a Pulitzer, or any of the other supposed “acme of literature” prizes and consider how many you haven’t read and probably never will read. Even more genre-limited works that have won Hugos, Nebulas, Stokers, World Fantasy Awards, etc., will after a few decades be unfamiliar. Besides showing the true ephemerality of award-worthiness, this should also hint to a reader that the highly publicized and awarded works of the most recent decades will be forgotten soon enough as well, despite their prominence on contemporary critics’ and authors’ “best of all time” lists. Sometimes it helps to look back at older works and realize that much of what is current is currently overvalued.
5:”There’s also a certain unnatural selection effect where older books that survive in libraries or reprints are often ones that readers over the years have enjoyed (or at least found value in).”
This is the same reason why oldies music seems so much better than current popular music. 90% of music in (pick the decade to fit your personal definition of “oldies”) was in fact crap, but that crap has been forgotten about and the stuff that still gets played is the 10% that was actually good.
There is a luck factor for older books survival. We can all name well-regarded books that fell out of print for reasons not necessarily driven by sales: Vinge’s Snow Queen was out of print for years before Tor reprinted it and of course there is the matter of John M. Ford’s backlist. For out of print books to be available through libraries, they need to hit a sweet spot of being signed out frequently enough that the library won’t discard them for more popular books, but not so frequently that they wear out.
@@.-@ Which translations of Verne would you recommend, say, for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?
The best available translation of 20,000 Leagues is, I believe, Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter’s, published by the US Naval Institute.
Your reference to the Year’s Best SF anthologies resonated with me. It’s fun to go back to older anthologies and read the early stories of eminent authors who were the Young Turks then. I’m currently reading ‘Clarion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction and Criticism from the Clarion Writers’ Workshop’, from 1971. Includes early stories by Octavia Butler, George Alec Effinger, Ed Bryant, Vonda McIntyre. What’s also interesting are the critical articles by the instructors such as Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison, Kate Wilhelm, Damon Knight and Chip Delany.
I am kind of tempted to crack out my complete run of New Voices, featuring stories by the winners of what is now the Astounding Award.
(Well, almost complete: I’ve never seen volume six, although I think it got as far as the MS stage)
@9; Verne could also be a good reason to finally get around to learning French.
The smell. Don’t forget the smell of an old book.
Why strive to stay abreast of a genre at all? Even if you could, what would be the point? The longer a genre exists, the more formulaic, insular, and provincial it will tend to be, the more apt to present even the most minor variations of its hoary tropes as statements of bold originality or subversion, the more likely to be contrived by cynical budget-crunching marketing departments and driven by dubious and ephemeral fashions. How many of today’s slickly-produced, blurb-encrusted fantasy trilogies will be read in a decade, still less remembered in a generation? There’s a great quote from Michael Moorcock somewhere to the effect that, if he was a young writer today, he’d have nothing to do with fantasy, that the genre had degenerated to a series of degraded xerox copies: a folk art. He said that back in the 90’s, or maybe even 80’s, but his words have become only more relevant. Another great fantasist, Ursula Le Guin, has made similar points. Yes, there was plenty of crap in the old days, too. And no doubt there’s good stuff being written even now. But the notion of eschewing the classics in order to keep up with all the latest products of the cliché mill is foreign and, frankly, rather repugnant to me. For my own part, I wish I’d spent less of my adolescence reading Tolkien knock offs, and more of it on original Viking sagas. Avoid the imitators of what you admire, and look to their source.
I reached the saturation point with new books, particularly fiction of any genre, almost 20 years ago. With the occasional exception all of my book purchases are used book store finds. Some are the result of merely wandering the stacks until something catches my eye while others are books I’ve heard or read about. Being a lover of old, mostly mid-century movies, a favorite thing of mine is to track down books that were filmed in the 20s through early 60s. Quite a few of them turn out to be damn good reads by authors now sadly forgotten.
Not to quibble or pick nits, but Gardner Dozois, no “e.” Misspell Johansson or Skarsgård all you like, but R-E-S-P-E-C-T: he was the greatest scifi editor since Campbell and I once shared an elevator with him.
Of course, some of the old sf/f is crap, and keeps getting read because a) nostalgia b) it’s very well-targeted crap. Some of it also bears rediscovery or rereading.
I’m not going to name specific, long-idolized authors of the Golden Age and before here, so I’ll just say that quite a lot of older work, even once-revered older work, hasn’t only been attacked by suck fairies, but, when asking for style and characterization to be passed out decided on cheap wood for the style and barely linear characters.
@13
Has anyone ever tried to bottle that smell?
I can see it now… TOME by Calvin Klein! Sold at every bookstore.
16: I think I just discovered the most recent Dozois I reviewed preceded my new computer and I have not fully rebuilt my default dictionary.
17:
Most of the fiction I read is old. So much dross is published these days that it usually takes a while for something properly worth my time and money to distinguish itself from the pile. In the meantime, there are tons of certified classics I haven’t gotten around to reading yet.
I’m an older reader, and much of what obsesses the Kids These Days is just not that interesting to me personally. Although there is also more amazingly good new work being published than I can keep up with.
Also, sometimes when I reread a long forgotten story I discover things I never noticed before.
…and, of course, C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism winds up being a book-length appeal to the reader to read old books (one old book for every new one you read was, I believe, the plea): perhaps a financially infelicitous maneuver for a man who was still writing new ones, and had no reason to suspect that only two years later he would abruptly stop doing so; but then, CSL wasn’t all that motivated by £.s.d.
But, frankly, I don’t think any of the answers given in this column, or the replies thus far, come close to “because I want to” as a good reason…
Thank you for the recommendation on the Jules Verne. I had no idea there was a newer translation. Makes me wonder what other newer translations of classic works I’m missing.
Hmm, looks like Stanislaw Lem had a newer translation of Solaris published a while back. Wonder if I’d like it any better.
I was probably around the same age as you when I also read and enjoyed Space Skimmer (no “The” in the title BTW); I found the pseudo-computer typeface of the first Ballantine printing very futuristic and comforting back then.
Re: translations
The Great Courses have a course on science fiction and in it, theVerne translation mentioned is the Frederick Paul Waller version. I found 20,000 Leagues didn’t hold my attention the way it did when I was young, but I still adored Around the World.
It also sounds like the only direct to English translation of Solaris was done byBill Johnston and can ONLY be found as an ebook. I enjoyed it.
I was a teenager in the 80s, but I’m also female. That does change the calculations of what a “good book” is. Tamora Pierce, Anne McCaffrey, and Robin McKinley were where I could see myself in SF or fantasy. I LOVE the new works being published and generally prefer them to the older works. It is pretty tough for me to enjoy reading books where my gender relegates me to a role as an afterthought if I’m there at all.
And “The Cold Equations” can f** right off into space itself, although some of the responses to it are interesting.
@24: I got a few pages into the new translation, said “This is a standard horror novel!”, and gave up. Others in my book club disagreed, but I don’t intend to beat myself up over this one. (I reread much of The Cyberiad a few years ago, and quit when T&K found (after too much faffing around) that they were in #N of a series of paranoid tyrannies that were obvious standins for the USSR. What do you do when a satire is so focused that it loses point when the target disappears? No, the current Russia is not a substitute target, no matter how hard it tries to be.)
There are books I go back to because I’ve gone back to them before and the Suck Fairy hadn’t got hold of them. (This will be personal; I’ve had a couple of old favorites dissed by most of the local book club, but rereading can recall the Good Parts Version of when I first read them.) There are books I go back to and find the Suck Fairy has gotten to them; IMO, that’s life. (I reread LotR after the first movie; my goodness, he goes on, and on, and on….) I probably should be reading more old works; OTOH, I start ed reading SF in 1961, and for a while read just about everything I could find including older work because there wasn’t enough current work to keep me busy (I was in a small town with an astoundingly good library nearby — I’d go through 6-10 books in a week) so I may not have as much backlog as our host. Possibly the key to reading old books is to listen to why somebody (or several somebodies) recommend(s) a particular book — not just “It’s a classic!” but “Here’s why this is still worth reading.”
A plug here for -really- old books!
Here in chronological order, newest to oldest:
1. Kurd Lasswitz, Auf Zwei Planeten, 1897. (I read an annoyingly somewhat abridged German version; don’t know if the English translation is any good. There’s a complete version on the Deutsche’s Textarchiv) Ever wonder what anti-imperialist hard science fiction from before WW1 would look like? Not sure what surprised me more, the relatively 3-dimensional Martian characters or the relatively 3-dimensional female characters. Also a sympathetic alien-human hybrid many decades before Spock.
2. Pu Songling, Liaozhai zhiyi , posthumously published 1766, most easy to get but sadly partial translation John Minford’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. The pinnacle of the amazing 1500+ year Chinese tradition of strange tales. Not saying more because this one’s too tied up with my day job.
3. The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz. 1616. This one I read in John Crowley’s English translation, 2016 Small Beer Press. Alchemy and allegory; I was intrigued but enjoyed it less than the other two.
I have never read Kepler’s Somnium but I want to!
But I’m with Dana: the wide range of voices being published in my preferred genres right now makes me incredibly happy.
James’ 4th reason covers one of the great advantage of older SF works – brevity. How wonderful to be able to knock off an entire novel – possibly two – in a single day of reading!
To cite a single example – well, maybe three – a couple of years back I reread the original Foundation Trilogy in anticipation of the TV series. All that story content, crammed into less pages than a single volume of a typical modern six-or seven book trilogy.
Also – how great it is to be able to hold a physical book without first undertaking a rigorous program of wrist-strengthening exercises!
@13 – it was a terrible day when I first dragged my future wife into a second-hand bookshop and she commented (rather loudly) “It stinks in here!” Could I really spend my life with this person? Fortunately we came to an arrangement that has underpinned our marriage for over3 35 years – she doesn’t have to go into second-hand bookshops and I don’t have to go into fabric and craft shops.
@6 – Talking of old music, one thing I’ve noticed about Hits ‘n Memories radio – at least here in Oz – is that often it plays songs that weren’t actually big hits when originally released, but have since become highly-regarded classics. There must be SF equivalents – one that springs to mind are Philip K Dick’s books. Yes, they were generally fairly popular when originally published, but I doubt if too many readers at the time would have predicted that he and his work would attain their modern levels of popularity and mainstream acceptance.
I love to read old books because they have the spirit of the past in them , not just the mainstream or what we might think of the past, but the weird edges, and for SF, their past visions of the future, their ideals and fears. And for other genres, I get an understanding of what stories the people of that time were creating ( and why they thought it necessary to write them, to advance particular ideals, or meet some need ) and what the readers were absorbing. That can be both political and personal! So, for example , to understand how my grandmother raised me, it is so helpful to read what she read as a young girl. It gives us so much context!
And to argue with Paul Connelly a bit about award winners, I think about the awards of today and how many fabulous books there are that can’t all win. It is often amazing to go looking at the runners up in some past year and realize there isn’t a standard of universal quality and what I actually like best may have been or may even be more likely to be in the shadow of the winner. Very interesting to look at novel prize for literature “contenders” from the past.
Has there been a post on “5 Classics the Suck Fairy Not Just Visited, But Also Smacked, Hard, With a Louisville Slugger”? Or would that be too fun divisive?
My excuse for buying a lot of old books over the years was that I was finding stuff that was out of copyright and turning it into RPG material. But I suspect that you mean more recent stories…
ok, familiarity is one obvious reason – I’ve read e.g. Poul Anderson’s original Time Patrol collection enough times to know that it’s a fun read that doesn’t annoy me (apart from a lack of strong female characters) and will keep me entertained for a few hours because my memory for details is not so good that nothing will take me by surprise.
On the other hand, you’d have to pay me to read most A E Van Vogt again.
Has anyone ever tried to bottle that smell?
I can see it now… TOME by Calvin Klein! Sold at every bookstore.
I know you meant this as a joke, but: yes, they have ! https://goodereader.com/blog/technology/the-hot-new-trend-are-perfumes-that-smell-like-books
The longer a genre exists, the more formulaic, insular, and provincial it will tend to be, the more apt to present even the most minor variations of its hoary tropes as statements of bold originality or subversion.
Hear hear! And what should we be reading instead of fantasy? What’s the new, bold, innovative genre that is in no way famous for its reuse of the same plot elements and figures of speech?
I wish I’d spent less of my adolescence reading Tolkien knock offs, and more of it on original Viking sagas.
Ah.
I’m reading a lot of Verne and other adventure writers of the time, and one thing I enjoy is how they reflect the ways of thinking of the time. Many modern historical novels set during that time have characters who act like modern people in the wrong century. Just things like how no one saw anything wrong about hunting, for example.
I’d echo that as I get older I drift a bit away from the preoccupations of newer writers and can find it hard to get much from the work, which is only right! No stagnation! But it does mean that older texts are things that I can find talk to me more. Although conversely books written before I was born always feel like they hold some past wisdoms – that is if they do hold any wisdom and aren’t too bound up in political constructs of the time. They also tend to do things sincerely that nowadays are only ever done ironically. But my TBR is always a mix of things.
I do remember when I hoped to be a writer, the advice was always to read current works so that you knew what was going on in the market and your writing wasn’t out of date style-wise.
35: I think I could do that, even with the qualifier that they have to be books I once legitimately enjoyed. So not going after low-hanging fruit like They’d Rather Be Right.
[added later]
I could also do with with classic roleplaying games, touching on such topics as “why did the designer feel the need to incorporate rape monsters as a frequently encountered foe?” and “why exactly does this game have a table to determine how submissive one’s slaves are?”
36: It struck me as potentially amusing in the next stage of Young People Read Old SF to use the stories in 2020 Vision (visions of 2020 written in the early 1970s) except there’s a particularly dreadful A. E. Van Vogt in there, about a rogue penis in the regimented world of Tomorrow.
To be fair, I only ever encountered one VV I thought was readable and that was Voyage of the Space Beagle.
40: There’s also reading current works to determine what reader desires are not presently being fulfilled.
Ultimately, why not?
Without reading old books, history gets forgotten.
It seems like some of the respondents think “reading old books” only means dusting off the stale classics of 1950s and 1960s “science fiction”, but it’s much more rewarding if you don’t limit yourself to genre works in the currently marketed genres.
Believe it or not, these genres didn’t always exist (at least, in their current forms) and they won’t exist at some point in the future. Even so-called “mainstream fiction” (or “literary fiction”) at this point is a genre much more formulaic than what you might have classified as that a hundred or so years back.
Notice how “cyberpunk” has been fading as a genre since ordinary people actually started using computers in their day-to-day life, and the “brilliant hacker” hero has been on the way out since bot farms in North Korea or Bulgaria or wherever started trying to hack us all around the clock. When we’re all (those of us still alive) living in a environmentally ruined, barely habitable future society, “cli-fi” will be a thing of the past. Outer space fiction now has so little science in it that it feels totally insincere compared to the inaccurate but more earnest attempts of Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clarke, and other diminished giants of the past.
Many speculative genres are outmoded when reality finally hits. And others devolve into almost parodies of themselves. Like the Reddit users wanting you to “Recommend me the most disturbing, visceral, repulsive, gut-churning horror, I can’t get enough of that!” This for a decayed branch of a tree that once featured writers like Oscar Wilde, Edith Nesbit, Walter de la Mare, Alfred Kubin, Horacio Quiroga, Stefan Grabinski, Robert Aickman, Shirley Jackson…now the writers are required to outdo each other in grossing you out.
I guess if all you want is to read about characters just like you, then the current times abound with publishers eager to market that to you, with dollar signs lighting up in their eyes. If you don’t mind reading about different people in different societies, ones that may not even have cell phones, then there is a lot of interesting literature to be found among older works. But, like they, you be you.
Maturity. When I first read my favorite author’s largest series, there were words and concepts I just couldn’t grasp as a preteen.
Stephen R Donaldson needed decades to compete the work, and the life experience gained in that time significantly changed my understanding of the extensive character development. I had to reread the early novels to get reoriented before resuming with the final 4-book trilogy.
Here’s a one sentence manifesto.
There are only two good reasons to read a novel: because you want to, or because you have been assigned to read it (either professionally or for a class you must pass).
Personally, I find the adventure of an old book twofold. First, each time I hold one, pausing to spend even a moment contemplating the other hands and lives this tome has entered and second, savoring the utilization of language. I delight in the quality of words seldom used in the reality of our day to day discourse.
I read them because the text can be like time machines .on a library shelf
I colllect the Edinburgh Review for this 1805 -1929. It was like the Time and Look magazines of the era. All and everything came under its gaze including how the Brits lost the naval war in the War of 1812. But it’s described in the then conteporaeneus language of feelings of the time. Like a live report from a battlefield.
Example- it’s description of Daguerreotype photography when it first surfaced
It described it as “painting with light”
Isn’t that just delicious??
Speaking as a woman of a certain age, I will never stop reading older sci-fi, especially pre 1970. I do enjoy some of the newer authors, especially N.K. Jemisin, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Naomi Alderman just to name a few.
To steal a line from Ben Franklin, “They are so grateful.”
I like to think of myself as a book collector, which is something I picked up from my adoptive father. When I look at my collection I find that the books I cherish the most are the older ones. I read The Lord of the Rings at least once a year, partially for all the memories of when I was first introduced to it at 8. I just got my own copy of Dracula, which I’m very excited about seeing as I’m reading it a second time. I’m also reading Moby-Dick, which is vastly different from anything I’ve ever read, but it’s fun, and I find that that’s important to me. Classics have a lot that’s enjoyable, and some of the long-windedness of them all can be nice. I like fast-paced action, but also getting to sit with the emotions of what happened is really fun. I also have The Wheel of Time, which I first read in high school, and enjoy rereading because it makes me think of my dad. My dad introduced me to so many books, and I introduced him to the joy of re-reading. After all, why own a book if it’s just going to sit there.
How about simply liking to revisit old friends now and then?
I was particularly pleased last year to discover copies of Lomax’s (non-SFF [1]) Folk Songs of North America could be acquired for a very reasonable price, as it was a source from which my family often drew its musical repertoire. Having acquired it, I of course have not sat down to reread the text, although perusing the table of contents makes it clear some of its vernacular has not aged well.
1: Although Lomax had a science connection, being a consultant for the Voyager Golden Record.
I didn’t read all the way through the comments, but for me, #6 would be: a new novel in the series has been published. I often re-read a series when I get the new volume if a lot of time has passed. For instance, if GRRM ever finishes I will read at least the last volume before I read the new one.
I find it interesting , but smell has never been a factor (lol), too many allergies.
I just read Barrington J. Bayley’s THE SOUL OF THE ROBOT – the problem of an AI who seems to be conscious although there is apparently no way for that to be true. His fellow robots can be very glib and even eccentric but they are no more conscious than an iron. Interesting take on a current problem.
#33 and #39 both came close to something I’ve noticed reading old books (of any or no genre): they can give you a sense of how people thought when it wss written. Old sci-fi can be notable for what the author never considered would change such as Asimov’s married women will never work in the Foundation Trilogy, Heinlein thinking the stigma against out of wedlock births and the pressure towards marriage (of some sort) would persist even when free love was acceptable.
I happened to read a mystery and a romantic suspense novel in the same month, both written in the 1950s by women, and noticed that in both books, the married female narrator spent time and effort enabling a 17/18 year old male to be a man rather than a boy – small things like holding doors, lighting cigarettes, placing the food order, to larger things like giving the boy an opportunity to protect the female, to show off his knowledge of cars and other mechanical devices, to be in charge. It wasn’t that the women were sexually interested in the boys. It wasn’t that they couldn’t have managed on their own. It was more like a duty to society to help train the boys so they thought of themselves as men and learned to be responsible and dependable.
Attitudes towards drinking in James Herriot’s stories. Attitudes towards gender, race, and class in 18th – mid 20th century British novels. Medical beliefs and treatments esp in mysteries. Reading lots of works written in a period can make recently written but not adequately researched historical fiction set in that period even more jarring (the protagonist completely modern in beliefs and prejudices mentioned above somewhere)
Note that enjoying figuring out how people thought doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing w them. And your disagreement with a particular belief can make some works unpleasant to read. It’s a matter of figuring what you can read and be glad things have changed and what will make you feel like flinging the book across the room and ranting for 20 minutes.
@29: “Pu Songling, Liaozhai zhiyi , posthumously published 1766, most easy to get but sadly partial translation John Minford’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.”
Seconded. It’s one of the few books I’ve read in three languages (English, Chinese, Manchu). Great fun.
56: entirely agree. There is a good line in Gorky Park where someone asks the hero why he became an investigator, and he says that a murder investigation allows you to take the whole of the front of a house off and have a look inside at how people live their lives. It’s the closest you can get in the USSR to being a sociologist.
And that’s definitely one of the reasons I like reading period novels (detective and otherwise) – it’s the incidental details. Same with foreign films; Ring was a great horror film but it was also interesting to see how typical Japanese families lived, because I’ve never been to Japan.
Your mention of changing attitudes to drinking reminds me of one of the funniest bits of lost-in-translation: there’s a Tom Clancy novel in which a US surgeon, on an exchange in Britain, is aghast that a surgeon would leave the theatre mid-operation (it’s a long operation and they aren’t required for the next few hours) and go and have a pint in a nearby pub.
Now, obviously, surgeons in Britain don’t do this, because it would be grossly unprofessional, so I was baffled as to why Clancy would portray them doing it – and then a few months later it popped into my head: the only explanation is that Clancy must at some point have heard a British surgeon saying that he would often take a break in the middle of a long operation to “go and have a brew”. To an American, a brew is beer. To a Brit, it’s a cup of tea…
@27 have you read Cory Doctorow’s take on Godwin’s barbarous “Cold Equations”? https://locusmag.com/2014/03/cory-doctorow-cold-equations-and-moral-hazard/
Awesome essay. He also lambasts a bunch of Heinlein’s more egregious stinkers.
I want to add a little parallax on the subject of perspective. For a writer’s toolbox, few tools can provide the breadth and depth of erudition. Without it, whence derives the pleasure of savvy allusion (Easter eggs, as the kids say)? It’s true, what Ecclesiastes tells us, at least in fictional tropes, there is nothing new under the Sun. Cory Doctorow (apologies for repeatedly dropping just one author’s name) has used allusion to great effect in stories inspired by Asimov and Heinlein, as others have done with Le Guin, Ellison, Bradbury, McCaffrey, Moorcock, et cetera, to say nothing of Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, both Shelleys, Hugo, Nietzsche, Joyce, Woolf, Hemingway (seriously, without Hemingway, would SF have had Zelazny?), und so weiter.
The postmodernists act like they invented metafiction, but have you read Ovid’s Metamorphoses? In 1968, John Barth published Lost in the Funhouse, which contains the short story “The Menelaiad.” In that (truly exhausting) story, Barth’s Menelaus and Helen spin tales that take the reader down a path to a level nine quotations deep (something that looks like: “‘“‘“‘“‘“‘“‘“‘“‘“‘What?’”’”’”’”’”’”’”’”’”). But, hey, Ovid did something similar (without all the annoying punctuation) in the tale of Arachne (tale within a tale to six levels deep), almost two millennia earlier.
Invention requires a degree of recycling and reinvention. Recycling and reinvention require reading the classics—the literal Classics as well as the literary canon and the SFF canon.
I think I love old books because they’re like old friends, familiar but still containing surprises. My extensive ’60s/’70s sci-fi paperback collection perfumes my reading room with the scents of adventure, youth, discovery, and contentment. And there’s no comfort in reading a screen for me- I do enough of that at work. I have a two volume “Treasury of Science Fiction” from the early ’70s that I keep within reach of my comfy chair, simply because the stories are superlative. Oh, I enjoy a lot of newer Lovecraftania- Ellen Datlow collects great stuff, and Laird Barron is my modern favorite. But I love old stuff. Scalzi? Looking at “Old Man’s War” right now. Oh- JDN, I know all about paragraphs, however, most of the sites in which I care to participate have very limited word counts; paragraphing eats space. Sorry that my prior comment so annoyed you, but I’m used to compressing my writing online as much as possible.
I was a teenager in the 80’s, and I honestly feel some of the fiction from that era is superior to current offerings. Not all, some of the newer works are worthy of collecting in physical form. The sheer volume of books available now renders the search for such works akin to panning for gold.
One of the reasons I love reading older books is because they are time capsules. A piece of the world, culture, tech levels and attitudes towards all kinds of things. I also collect antiquarian books (though I am but a neophyte, my earliest collected volume was published in 1820). For me, it is an author long dead reaching forward to share with me.
Another of the reasons is comfort. As a neurodivergent individual, certain things will trigger in me a desire for the familiar. An excellent book can be read many times, and knowing what is coming next is helpful, but it still scratches the itch to be entertained by immersion in another world.
And yet another reason is that I am obstinate and too many times I have been told “you MUST read this” and been disappointed. So, it made a bestseller list, did it? Increasingly those bestseller lists are NOT recommending works to me, rather I may avoid them. I want a story, not a thinly disguised lecture castigating some aspect of current culture. I’m here because I don’t want to deal with things as they are! Transport me, delight me, elevate me; let me latibulate in peace.
Mature Insight
Past me was, with distressing regularity, a blinkered pig-ignorant philistine. When I reread the classics today, subtle things pop up all the time — things that that guy rolled right over. Despite my best efforts, I _have_ learned a thing or two from all the pages, miles, and years since the first thirteen times I read The Hobbit.
The Fog of Memory
If you have never gotten 3/4 of the way through a book and only then realized that you had read it before, you’re too young to appreciate this reason. But, as memory piles upon memory, even old stories can seem new again. And that is also cause for joy.