Topic: Must Read
So what do you do on a rainy Wednesday in Newport, Rhode Island? (We had one of those the day before Thanksgiving.) Well, if you’re me you head to the nearest bookstore—a Barnes & Noble in this case. There’s nothing like a leisurely browse through the aisles to while away a wet autumn afternoon.
As usual, I headed first for the SF and fantasy section. But this turned out to be a slightly depressing choice, leading me to reflect on the sad decline of a once-vibrant genre of popular literature. For while it’s true that there are still talented writers doing good work in the field, it’s hard to feel optimistic when perusing the “just published” shelves of B&N’s SF section.
In the first place, those shelves were dominated by fantasy titles. Science fiction in the classic mold ran a distant second. And lots of the purportedly SF titles were in fact tales of alternate history of the type popularized by Harry Turtledove—in other words, only nominally science fiction. Now of course many SF classics—Ward Just’s Bring the Jubilee, Phil Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, H. Beam Piper’s Paratime stories—fall into the alternate history category. But alternate history titles have proliferated wildly in the past ten years or so, and for every one that’s half-way decent there are eight or ten poorly written turkeys.
Finally, I was depressed to note the usual slew of vampire titles. This cult, arguably launched by Ann Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (itself a classic, I admit) has grown into a mania. Rice herself contributed to this unfortunate situation with a barrage of lackluster sequels. And the vampires themselves? All too often nowadays, they’re fey, sensitive, conflicted, lonely—college sophomores majoring in fine arts who happen to have pointy incisors. Count Dracula must be rolling over in his, er, coffin.
It’s lucky for an SF aficionado like me that the classics are still readily available—often via Kindle at a knock-down price. I want to mention a few of these, but let’s leave that happy task for a future post.