Revising the canon
Maybe it's time to leave some classics behind
Through no particular plan, the last four books I’ve read for the review series were two old “classics” by cisgender white men from before I was born and two relatively recent novels by queer women.
Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert: ★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5)
Foundation (1951) by Isaac Asimov: ★★☆☆☆ (2 out of 5)
Autonomous (2017) by Annalee Newitz: ★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)
Light from Uncommon Stars (2021) by Ryka Aoki: ★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)
Although my idiosyncratic rating system somewhat obscures this, both of the newer books were great and both of the older books were meh. Dune was a re-read and got a bump up in the stars purely out of nostalgia. The 2021 movie is a better take on the story than the novel. I’d started reading Foundation when I was a kid but never got beyond the first chapters because I thought it was dull1. My review makes fun of it as a bad session of Dungeons & Dragons in space. Dune is much better than Foundation, but neither were as good, as dense with theme, or as intelligent as the two recent books.
I think early sci fi from the 50s and 60s suffers from two major issues. One, it was basically just men. Two, as it wasn’t taken seriously — what some today still call genre fiction with derision — there were very few people (men) writing things that aimed higher than pulp. That means the selection pool is much smaller, which tends to yield an inferior product. It’s true that Asimov and Herbert were pioneers in the modern era for making science fiction that aspired to be more than magazine serials2. However, just as Le voyage dans la lune (1902) is objectively not as good as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), I think we can compare Dune and Foundation more to the former than the latter — at least in terms of craft.
Today’s best science fiction is drawn from a huge pool with far more diversity, which results in a far superior product. As such, maybe it’s time we leave some of the classics behind — doing our best to judge them on their merits, not for being at the beginning of the Hugo Award list.
I’ll link the reviews below as they are finished and published:
Apparently so did some contemporary reviewers!
I should add that the first real work of science fiction was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); it was as literary (if not more) than any sci fi from the 1950s and 60s.