Know Your History? Some Guidelines For Reading
Every now and then the debate over reading genre classics pops up and rears its ugly head. On the one hand you have folks who feel we’re losing a literary heritage and forgetting too many old great books as new great books get published. Mike Swanwick had a recent blog post to that effect. The genre was once smaller, you could read everything in it, and stay on top of it. It was easier not only to find the firsts in a genre, but also the outliers. Having a hungry curiosity for this stuff is good.
On the other hand you have the opposite position of just knowing what’s current, which in its extreme form might resemble this five year old blog post from Karen Traviss about not needing to read to be a writer. (I don’t know if Traviss still agrees with that blog post, but I’ll keep it until I learn otherwise because it’s useful.) In its milder form, it’s not needing to read every alien invasion story ever, but just those in recent years in order to see how alien invasion stories are being told now in this era.
There’s also a third hand, which shows up in the comments of Swanwick’s post, stating that the “classics” might not be so classic and why navigate through books dripping with the prejudices of their eras. This too is a valuable point, but my reading of Swanwick’s post is one not so much telling writers to know their history and cling to it, but to sift that history and find the gems in it, the outliers as he dubs them, or the books lost in genre’s shadow like the ones I mention here and here.
However there are ways to reconcile these three arguments when you keep these guidelines in mind:
1. Read only what you enjoy, but cultivate a curious and complex palette that enjoys challenges.
2. Make your own genre history. Lots of stuff gets lost in the margins or ignored because it doesn’t tidily fit in with someone’s imposed narrative. Bring these works to light.
3. The early work in a genre has more immediacy than subsequent iterations. It can sometimes be as fresh as more recent works.
4. As far as knowing your genre goes, once you’ve read the initial spark, focus on what’s been done with it in the past decade. But…
5. Always remember there are likely more amazing books that you haven’t heard of than ones you have.
And here’s another post where I carry on in more or less the same way.
Junk From the Notebook 1
Politics won’t harm a writer’s career. It’s talking crap about the genre and “loving” it insufficiently that do you in.
Their enthusiasm for writing doesn’t match their enthusiasm for talking about their enthusiasm for writing.
When someone asks what your tastes are and all you do is hold up your hands and say, “Gah! Who the fuck knows?”
People that talk about “geek cred” should probably see an analyst to resolve their middle school hang-ups.
Fruit on the bottom. Hope on top.
Do Not Deny the Eye
I gotta listen to this guy more often.
Last Rites Audio
The audio podcast of my story “Last Rites For A Vagabond” is now available at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It’s 21 minutes long and read by Rajan Khanna. Listen to it as you drive to work, do laundry, or any other task in which you might listen to stories. Ideally, you should listen to it at work, so that way you make money while you listen.
Last Rites For A Vagabond
My story “Last Rites For a Vagabond” has been published over at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It’s about ghost-hunters, drugs, and making poor life choices. It’s neither “lovely” nor is it just a “good story”.
Here’s a snippet:
The dispensary was so organized it made my skin creep. Give me a hovel little better than a roofed-over hole and a crone with teeth as black as night. She’d hardly care what you bought or why; might even give you more if you spoke straight to her. No one likes a liar, but life forces you to it.
Et al.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies Issue #126 is already available at Weightless Books for electronically inclined readers. The issue includes my story “Last Rites for a Vagabond”, which I’ll talk more about when the issue gets published later this week*.
And while you’re over at Weightless Books you might also want to check out Minions of the Moon and Dust Devils on a Quiet Street both by Rick Bowes, Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria, and Jim Nisbet’s Snitch World.
All of them are pretty great.
* When it’ll be free to everyone with an Internet connection.
Journey Planet 15
I have a short piece in issue 15 of the fanzine Journey Planet. Click that, scroll down, and download the free PDF. It’s the “write stuff” issue edited by Lynda Rucker and includes articles by Lynne Thomas, Jason R. Ridler, Kameron Hurley, and plenty of others.
My piece is a dandied up version of this blog post. For the record I’m no longer reading slush in any fashion.
A Month or So Ago
It is frustrating at times because one day you will be reading a book and thinking “This is great – This is the way to do it”, then two days later you’ll be reading another book and it’ll be doing the exact opposite thing, but you’ll think the exact same thing.
When faced with two opposite truths the issue is no longer to find the fault in one, but to decide between them. Which path will lead you to the place you want to go.
Shadows of Lost Rivers
Here’s something.
Back at the beginning of this year Beneath Ceaseless Skies published a story of mine called “Shadows Under Hexmouth Street”. (That’s the link to it. You can read it later.) One of the inspirations for that story was an article I read about subterranean rivers in Greenwich Village. The article included an apocryphal story of someone fishing for blind crayfish through a manhole cover in the basement of their apartment building.
Today I found out about a documentary called Lost Rivers.
It sounds pretty neat.
Yesterweird 