It's always interesting to see your perspective on SF vs Great Books vs Contemporary Literary fiction, and I think it makes a lot of sense.
I have in some ways a similar viewpoint -- I have been for most of my life a devoted fan of science fiction, and I think I can say with full modesty that I know the field very well, both historically and up to the present day. I probably had a dream once of some day writing something that might win a Hugo, but my efforts at fiction have been pretty lame. So my dream morphed to, well, editing anthologies like Gardner Dozois -- and I guess I achieved that! (OK, I'm not close to the editor Dozois was, but still!) (And, you know, I did eventually get two Hugos, but really those were due to the efforts of John Joseph Adams.)
But even as an SF reader, I never stopped reading Great Books and Contemporary Literary fiction. I would say that while it's true that people within the SF field WILL urge one to read outside the genre, lots of genre fans ignore that advice, often with a very reverse snobbery attitude. But for me, everything I read (including romance, including mysteries) enhances my enjoyment of everything else I read.
For what it's worth, and as I hope you know, I definitely considered you a writer to watch, and a potential Hugo winner, for your science fiction stories. (And I nominated at least a couple of your stories for Hugos, not that that helped much!)
Well, Bester and Pohl and Simak are all SFWA Grand Masters, so there's that! Kornbluth might have been too had he not died so young!
But, yes, there is a sense that they are slightly forgotten. Pohl less so, I suppose -- partly because he lived long enough that you could have gotten to know him, as I did (very slightly) as recently as 15 years ago. Bester still has The Stars My Destination, which is a great novel -- but which is also in some ways VERY problematic for lots of readers (for completely understandable reasons!)
I think there's another issue -- the very best work of all of those writers (Pohl again possibly an exception) is short stories. And -- as you note even for literary fiction -- it's hard these days to make a reputation with just short stories, unless you are Ted Chiang.
Yes, that blog was very fun. (People in the know say you should take some of what he wrote there with a grain of salt, but that's true for every blog I think!)
I took it with no grains of salt. Whatever he wrote was downloaded directly into my brain and will certainly be reported as fact in this blog. Not joking at all :) Pohl’s version hit me when I was too young! I had no critical awareness!
Loved this essay. Your mention of Ted Chiang made me think about how as a professor I've taught SFF classes to students coming both from SF backgrounds and literary backgrounds and I often notice how they will react differently to the same stories. Chiang is equally popular with both groups, but the literary students almost always gravitate to the longer more character-driven stories (e.g., "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom") and don't connect with the more idea-driven stories (e.g. "Exhalation") that the SF students love.
I feel there may be a missing group, a link between SF and lit fiction, what I called social SF in school, or apparently speculative fiction is the current term.
These would basically be near-time extrapolations of current society and might include Brunner and some Brin.
As to the authors “lost connection” after WW2, I might suggest post war europe—german and czech writers who had the angst to produce and a cultural imperative to make sense of their world having gone crazy.
This is great. I've loved all these pieces on the short story, and especially the ones that have contextualized it in terms of the magazine ecosystem. I really hope you are the one to introduce a new strain into American short fiction. As someone who strongly prefers the tale or fable tradition to the realist short story, but finds even well-regarded SF stories not literary enough (I'm sorry, SF people, I've tried), what you're doing is so exactly what I would like to read.
There's an argument to be made that none, or I suppose very few, of these postwar literary authors have been canonized (or rather that they aren't anywhere on the road to canonization). After all, they aren't read in middle/high school. And it's not that serious authors from the mid 20th century on aren't included in high school syllabi -- it's just not the ones favored by the literary world. The authors on their way to canonization include Harper Lee, Ken Kesey, Ray Bradbury, JD Salinger, and Cormac McCarthy (there is at least one, I guess). I've never heard of anyone teaching Ray Carver in high school.
I don’t think presence on high school curricula is the main determinant of an author’s literary reputation. Many works are rarely taught (David Copperfield and Anna Karenina, for instance) but are definitely canonical.
It's not the only way, but I think it's one significant avenue, with another being saturation in pop culture references (though that's probably downstream of inclusion in k-12 curricula). Most people have very little interaction with the literary world after high school, so that's how stuff enters the popular imagination.
Following from this, I would not say that "Stoner" is a piece of canonical literature. I'd like it to be, and I may even wager that it will be one day, but as of now it's not known by anyone outside of those most plugged into the literary world. You can't argue that it was important to the development of any literary tradition. It's a great book, I think, but it has not yet been canonized.
If something is known by everyone who (for example) gets an MFA, has that work been canonized? I guess in a narrow sense, yes. But they haven't reached general knowledge.
The next avenue is college English Literature courses, which include more of those postwar writers, but not nearly to the same extent that MFA programs do. In getting my BA in English Literature, I read Shakespeare, beowulf, 18th century lit... in one class (a class on the short story) I read Alice Munro. That's probably the only time in that degree I read any of these guys.
It's worth mentioning that, while David Copperfield and Anna Karenina are not often taught in schools, Dickens and Tolstoy are, or at least have been (recent decades have kind of thrown this off, but the basis for teaching them in schools is there).
I don’t know that the opinion of people who don’t care about literature is necessarily that important for canon formation. It’s just like science fiction. People who care about sci-fi have formulated a canon of sci-fi classics—none of these books are known outside the world or are taught in school—but that doesn’t mean this canon doesn’t exist or that there isn’t broad agreement about who belongs within it.
Can Harper Lee really be canonized if she *literally* has just one book? Good a book as it is, of course. Naomi is right that you can be remembered off the back of one book or story, but... don't you *have* to have other stories? Even if no one actually reads them?
I don't think you do. To Kill a Mockingbird has to be one of the most read books in 20th century American literature (maybe in all of American literature) and it's one of the most often liked by students as well. If that isn't canonized, then I don't know what is.
Also, for what it's worth, she did have a second novel. Go Set a Watchman may have a lot of controversy around it, but it is another work. And she had some short stories too. Apparently a posthumous collection was published just this year -- something I didn't know. I'm surprised it didn't make more of a splash.
Yeah, the controversy is definitely that she wasn't of sound mind when it was released. Of course, now she's dead, and they just released some more of her short stories. Is that better? Somehow people seem to be more ok with it.
There's some truth to the idea that it's a first draft (certain incidents and paragraphs are repeated) but it's a substantively different novel, and it deserves to be read on its own, I think. Watchman presents a far more cynical outlook on the south's racism than Mockingbird does. Watchman is probably more true to Lee's real feelings as well, as it was written entirely on her own -- her editor had a heavy hand in reworking it into Mockingbird.
That being said -- Watchman is definitely a first draft and needed some revision. I wish we had a revised version that kept its moral coremore intact, but alas, we do not.
Hm... fascinating! Maybe I should *check* this out. I am only invested in the "Harper Lee only wrote one book" narrative insofar as I really really love Suzanne Vega, and thus love the record where she pretends to be Carson McCullers and writes a Harper Lee diss track ("she only wrote one book / I wrote THREE!")
This is such a rich, thoughtful piece, but I'm especially struck by the Great Man Theorising of the literary canon. I think this is implicitly behind both my least favourite defences (You Haven't Read If You Haven't Read Shakespeare etc) and critiques (the canon is only dead white men etc) of said canon.
I think the main thing I learned from this is that I wish I read as fast as all of you on Substack, holy smokes. I either savor too much or ADHD too hard. How many books / pages do y'all read in a year? And how on earth can I increase my pace?
Love these longish pieces. You have such a great writing style Naomi! HOWEVER, Fitzgerald can not be counted as a "One Story Wonder." He was the Beatles of the short story. He banged out hit after hit. "Bernice Bobs her Hair" and "Winter Dreams" are his "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand" of his early career. "Babylon Revisited" is from his later reflective period. All the Basil and Josephine stories are great. And there's even excellent bits of non-fiction and then his Pat Hobby stories, which are thought of as lesser work, but still resonate, and put you so solidly into that world, so much so, you feel like you are in a time machine.
You know I love Fitzgerald! He is the first literary writer I ever loved. But 97 percent of people who have read a Fitzgerald story have read just one: "Babylon, Revisited".
Is the split between “proper literature” and sci-fi a global phenomenon or just an Anglo/American one?
I’ve been wondering a while about this, because I look at Borges and Calvino and the Soviet sci-fi authors, and it seems like writers of the fantastic in other nations never had their books chucked into the drawer that critics like to piss in.
But maybe those authors are the exceptions in their cultures.
I raised myself on writing novels, only because I wanted the elbow room. After five of them--only to learn that trad publishers wanted a hook in the first paragraph and had no patience for exposition--I discovered Substack and, with it, the beauty of the short story. Now this is mainly what I write here. I've been posting something new every day since October 2023, and I've loved it. They are not all gems, but they are great training for writing the gems that finally gel. I'm too old to make a career of it, so I give most of it away for free, and I write for myself. Having read the "classics" of many genres has allowed me to appreciate a side that I love the most--to write something the likes of which has never been read before. Sometimes this works, and many times it doesn't. But loving it, especially knowing my great-great-great-whoevers will be able to visit my mind. Thank you for this erudite piece, Naomi.
It's always interesting to see your perspective on SF vs Great Books vs Contemporary Literary fiction, and I think it makes a lot of sense.
I have in some ways a similar viewpoint -- I have been for most of my life a devoted fan of science fiction, and I think I can say with full modesty that I know the field very well, both historically and up to the present day. I probably had a dream once of some day writing something that might win a Hugo, but my efforts at fiction have been pretty lame. So my dream morphed to, well, editing anthologies like Gardner Dozois -- and I guess I achieved that! (OK, I'm not close to the editor Dozois was, but still!) (And, you know, I did eventually get two Hugos, but really those were due to the efforts of John Joseph Adams.)
But even as an SF reader, I never stopped reading Great Books and Contemporary Literary fiction. I would say that while it's true that people within the SF field WILL urge one to read outside the genre, lots of genre fans ignore that advice, often with a very reverse snobbery attitude. But for me, everything I read (including romance, including mysteries) enhances my enjoyment of everything else I read.
For what it's worth, and as I hope you know, I definitely considered you a writer to watch, and a potential Hugo winner, for your science fiction stories. (And I nominated at least a couple of your stories for Hugos, not that that helped much!)
Frederik Pohl a minor writer! Aaaaaaaa! Heresy!
I thought Alfred Bester would be the one to trigger people 😂
I thought it would be Bester too!
Well, Bester and Pohl and Simak are all SFWA Grand Masters, so there's that! Kornbluth might have been too had he not died so young!
But, yes, there is a sense that they are slightly forgotten. Pohl less so, I suppose -- partly because he lived long enough that you could have gotten to know him, as I did (very slightly) as recently as 15 years ago. Bester still has The Stars My Destination, which is a great novel -- but which is also in some ways VERY problematic for lots of readers (for completely understandable reasons!)
I think there's another issue -- the very best work of all of those writers (Pohl again possibly an exception) is short stories. And -- as you note even for literary fiction -- it's hard these days to make a reputation with just short stories, unless you are Ted Chiang.
At some point Pohl had an incredible blog that I loved. He must’ve been ninety, but he was blogging away
Yes, that blog was very fun. (People in the know say you should take some of what he wrote there with a grain of salt, but that's true for every blog I think!)
I took it with no grains of salt. Whatever he wrote was downloaded directly into my brain and will certainly be reported as fact in this blog. Not joking at all :) Pohl’s version hit me when I was too young! I had no critical awareness!
All of them triggered me.
That's fair…Martin Prince would agree. https://frinkiac.com/caption/S02E19/211858
Truly.
Loved this essay. Your mention of Ted Chiang made me think about how as a professor I've taught SFF classes to students coming both from SF backgrounds and literary backgrounds and I often notice how they will react differently to the same stories. Chiang is equally popular with both groups, but the literary students almost always gravitate to the longer more character-driven stories (e.g., "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom") and don't connect with the more idea-driven stories (e.g. "Exhalation") that the SF students love.
I feel there may be a missing group, a link between SF and lit fiction, what I called social SF in school, or apparently speculative fiction is the current term.
These would basically be near-time extrapolations of current society and might include Brunner and some Brin.
As to the authors “lost connection” after WW2, I might suggest post war europe—german and czech writers who had the angst to produce and a cultural imperative to make sense of their world having gone crazy.
This is great. I've loved all these pieces on the short story, and especially the ones that have contextualized it in terms of the magazine ecosystem. I really hope you are the one to introduce a new strain into American short fiction. As someone who strongly prefers the tale or fable tradition to the realist short story, but finds even well-regarded SF stories not literary enough (I'm sorry, SF people, I've tried), what you're doing is so exactly what I would like to read.
There's an argument to be made that none, or I suppose very few, of these postwar literary authors have been canonized (or rather that they aren't anywhere on the road to canonization). After all, they aren't read in middle/high school. And it's not that serious authors from the mid 20th century on aren't included in high school syllabi -- it's just not the ones favored by the literary world. The authors on their way to canonization include Harper Lee, Ken Kesey, Ray Bradbury, JD Salinger, and Cormac McCarthy (there is at least one, I guess). I've never heard of anyone teaching Ray Carver in high school.
I don’t think presence on high school curricula is the main determinant of an author’s literary reputation. Many works are rarely taught (David Copperfield and Anna Karenina, for instance) but are definitely canonical.
It's not the only way, but I think it's one significant avenue, with another being saturation in pop culture references (though that's probably downstream of inclusion in k-12 curricula). Most people have very little interaction with the literary world after high school, so that's how stuff enters the popular imagination.
Following from this, I would not say that "Stoner" is a piece of canonical literature. I'd like it to be, and I may even wager that it will be one day, but as of now it's not known by anyone outside of those most plugged into the literary world. You can't argue that it was important to the development of any literary tradition. It's a great book, I think, but it has not yet been canonized.
If something is known by everyone who (for example) gets an MFA, has that work been canonized? I guess in a narrow sense, yes. But they haven't reached general knowledge.
The next avenue is college English Literature courses, which include more of those postwar writers, but not nearly to the same extent that MFA programs do. In getting my BA in English Literature, I read Shakespeare, beowulf, 18th century lit... in one class (a class on the short story) I read Alice Munro. That's probably the only time in that degree I read any of these guys.
It's worth mentioning that, while David Copperfield and Anna Karenina are not often taught in schools, Dickens and Tolstoy are, or at least have been (recent decades have kind of thrown this off, but the basis for teaching them in schools is there).
I don’t know that the opinion of people who don’t care about literature is necessarily that important for canon formation. It’s just like science fiction. People who care about sci-fi have formulated a canon of sci-fi classics—none of these books are known outside the world or are taught in school—but that doesn’t mean this canon doesn’t exist or that there isn’t broad agreement about who belongs within it.
That's a good point.
We read "Cathedral" in high school English. I do agree more generally that he's not as common in syllabi.
That's great! First time I've heard of that being included.
Can Harper Lee really be canonized if she *literally* has just one book? Good a book as it is, of course. Naomi is right that you can be remembered off the back of one book or story, but... don't you *have* to have other stories? Even if no one actually reads them?
I don't think you do. To Kill a Mockingbird has to be one of the most read books in 20th century American literature (maybe in all of American literature) and it's one of the most often liked by students as well. If that isn't canonized, then I don't know what is.
Also, for what it's worth, she did have a second novel. Go Set a Watchman may have a lot of controversy around it, but it is another work. And she had some short stories too. Apparently a posthumous collection was published just this year -- something I didn't know. I'm surprised it didn't make more of a splash.
Ah, I was under the impression that there's some controversy in calling that one a novel rather than a first draft of "...Mockingbird" released without her consent. (Hence the memorable Onion headline: https://theonion.com/harper-lee-announces-third-novel-my-excellent-caretak-1819577999/)
Yeah, the controversy is definitely that she wasn't of sound mind when it was released. Of course, now she's dead, and they just released some more of her short stories. Is that better? Somehow people seem to be more ok with it.
There's some truth to the idea that it's a first draft (certain incidents and paragraphs are repeated) but it's a substantively different novel, and it deserves to be read on its own, I think. Watchman presents a far more cynical outlook on the south's racism than Mockingbird does. Watchman is probably more true to Lee's real feelings as well, as it was written entirely on her own -- her editor had a heavy hand in reworking it into Mockingbird.
That being said -- Watchman is definitely a first draft and needed some revision. I wish we had a revised version that kept its moral coremore intact, but alas, we do not.
Hm... fascinating! Maybe I should *check* this out. I am only invested in the "Harper Lee only wrote one book" narrative insofar as I really really love Suzanne Vega, and thus love the record where she pretends to be Carson McCullers and writes a Harper Lee diss track ("she only wrote one book / I wrote THREE!")
This is such a rich, thoughtful piece, but I'm especially struck by the Great Man Theorising of the literary canon. I think this is implicitly behind both my least favourite defences (You Haven't Read If You Haven't Read Shakespeare etc) and critiques (the canon is only dead white men etc) of said canon.
I think the main thing I learned from this is that I wish I read as fast as all of you on Substack, holy smokes. I either savor too much or ADHD too hard. How many books / pages do y'all read in a year? And how on earth can I increase my pace?
I have found that Ulysses makes a superior door-stop.
This was a great read which taught me a lot. I also followed your links and found Bears Discover Fire which I read and thought was fantastic.
That is amazing to hear! What a beyond classic story :)
Lovely reflection! Thanks for writing it :)
Love these longish pieces. You have such a great writing style Naomi! HOWEVER, Fitzgerald can not be counted as a "One Story Wonder." He was the Beatles of the short story. He banged out hit after hit. "Bernice Bobs her Hair" and "Winter Dreams" are his "She Loves You" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand" of his early career. "Babylon Revisited" is from his later reflective period. All the Basil and Josephine stories are great. And there's even excellent bits of non-fiction and then his Pat Hobby stories, which are thought of as lesser work, but still resonate, and put you so solidly into that world, so much so, you feel like you are in a time machine.
You know I love Fitzgerald! He is the first literary writer I ever loved. But 97 percent of people who have read a Fitzgerald story have read just one: "Babylon, Revisited".
Is the split between “proper literature” and sci-fi a global phenomenon or just an Anglo/American one?
I’ve been wondering a while about this, because I look at Borges and Calvino and the Soviet sci-fi authors, and it seems like writers of the fantastic in other nations never had their books chucked into the drawer that critics like to piss in.
But maybe those authors are the exceptions in their cultures.
Very interesting Naomi. I like this chipping away at the ‘literary fiction’ narrative.
I raised myself on writing novels, only because I wanted the elbow room. After five of them--only to learn that trad publishers wanted a hook in the first paragraph and had no patience for exposition--I discovered Substack and, with it, the beauty of the short story. Now this is mainly what I write here. I've been posting something new every day since October 2023, and I've loved it. They are not all gems, but they are great training for writing the gems that finally gel. I'm too old to make a career of it, so I give most of it away for free, and I write for myself. Having read the "classics" of many genres has allowed me to appreciate a side that I love the most--to write something the likes of which has never been read before. Sometimes this works, and many times it doesn't. But loving it, especially knowing my great-great-great-whoevers will be able to visit my mind. Thank you for this erudite piece, Naomi.
I admire this a lot