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A while back, Gwern wrote an interesting essay arguing against the reading of new fiction. Since there are innumerably more books than any person could reasonably consume, there’s no reason to read fiction that hasn’t been filtered for quality by time. Reading just the Hugo and Nebula award winners in science fiction could take years; why waste time on other books that are probably significantly less good?
However, I think his argument fails to take account of two benefits of reading new fiction.
First, fandom. The experience of being in Harry Potter fandom around the Goblet of Fire/Order of the Phoenix era is indescribable, and permanently addicted me to fandom as a form of consumption. The rampant speculation about every aspect of the book! Ron/Hermione versus Harry/Hermione! The reams and reams of Year Five fic! The frantic attempts to finish your Year Five fic before Order of the Phoenix came out and turned it AU! Knight to fucking King! God, remember when Mugglenet put out a book before Deathly Hallows came out about their predictions of what would happen in Deathly Hallows? They gave Dobby 100:1 odds of surviving and to this day I wonder if Dobby’s death was solely to spite Mugglenet.
Now, obviously, most fandoms are not quite as… uh, big… as Harry Potter fandom. But it remains true that– with a few exceptions, such as Good Omens and Lord of the Rings– fandoms mostly happen to book series that are coming out right now. If you are reading the 1966 Hugo winner for best novel, it is very unlikely you will get to meet a whole bunch of other people willing to talk to you about how great it is. And you don’t get to play the intellectual game of speculating what is going to happen with a book series that has already been published; either the question has already been resolved, in which case few people are interested in arguing with you about it, or the question will never be resolved, in which case you do not get the glory or shame of having totally called it or completely missed it.
Second, his argument neglects the fact that things change. Consider language. For me at least, most books published before about 1900 are not useful junk-food/leisure reading, because of the amount of effort I have to put into understanding the prose; Elizabethan-era works may be utterly incomprehensible without footnotes. (Interestingly, this suggests that junk-food books have a much faster turnover than classic works of Literachur, as you have to put effort into understanding Literachur anyway, and that ‘read old books, avoid new ones’ is a much better strategy for the latter.)
Similarly, technology changes. If I am reading a book set in the present day, it will be extremely weird to me if none of the characters have cell phones– and even weirder if they’re talking about how they can’t get on the computer when their mom is using the phone. Again, this doesn’t apply to all fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, and other-world fantasy fiction survive unscathed, as does any present-day fiction that can seamlessly transition into being a period piece. But nevertheless I feel like I would sacrifice some quality in order to get to occasionally read books in which people use Facebook.
More importantly, values change. Of course, values dissonance can be valuable– it gives you insight into what people believed in other times, and makes visible the historical contingency of your own values. But again that isn’t necessarily what people want out of their leisure reading: sometimes I don’t want to be improved, I just want to see things go boom and clever people be clever. I do not want my things going boom to be interrupted by comments about how the place of women is in the home or villains being stereotypically greedy Jews or conniving Asians. That is likely to annoy me, throw me out of the book, and generally make my reading experience less pleasant.
Furthermore, I would like many of the clever people I read about to be women, LGBT people, or ideally lesbians. Only in modern books can I both read about lesbians and not have to put up with tedious long lectures about how Accepting Lesbians Is Morally Right and Love Is Love and Lesbians Are Just Like Us. (I mean, have you read the Last Herald Mage series? Historically important, I know, but Jesus Christ yes I get it gay people aren’t pedophiles move on with the plot.) And God forbid if I want a trans character: we’re still not in the stage where trans characters can just be people. Similarly, while of course many older books have excellent roles for female characters, if I pick up a random book in the twenty-first century it’s much more likely to pass the Bechdel Test. As a person who was female for nearly half my life, it is a bit annoying to only read books that are sausage fests.
Something seems to have gone missing in the first paragraph?
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Thank you! Fixed.
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I think that a lot of fiction and fandoms, especially large ongoing fictional universes, functions as a sort of gossip simulator where instead of gossiping about the latest drama with the Kardashians you instead gossip about the new way the Flash and Superman found to combine their powers to beat up Metallo. I’ve had lots of conversations with friends that mirror gossip almost exactly, but instead of “have you heard what Taylor Swift just did?” it’s “have you heard what the Daleks just tried to do?”
I think this provides a valuable source of Gossip for People Who Don’t Like Gossip. It feels creepy and voyeuristic of me to spend time scrutinizing some poor woman’s out-of-fashion dress, but scrutinizing the crime-fighting techniques of a fictional character doesn’t, since they aren’t real.
So suggesting that we focus only on old fiction is sort of like suggesting that people gossip about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Gwern’s essay seems very “Hollywood Rationality” to me. It focuses purely on the explicit “main purpose” of fiction and ignores all the other purposes it has.
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I think that you’re on to something here. Contemporary fiction, at the very least, foments *conversation.* Contemporary fiction can be valuable on two fronts: (1) it can be a future classic, or a work of such general quality that people will be reading it fifty or a hundred years from now; and (2) it can be relevant to the present situation in some way, as a topic of discussion or theorizing, as commentary on society, etc. Being valuable in one way neither precludes nor requires value in the other way, so I do not think that there is anything paradoxical in saying that a work could be valuable today, and have been worth producing, but not be valuable fifty years from now.
Also, I kind of find myself sympathetic to the “art as propaganda” idea, at least in some sense. What is “greater representation of X group in the media” if not an attempt to shape the way that we think? Among other things it is intended to increase acceptance of that group by outsiders and help insiders feel like they have a place in the world.
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This explains why I’m baffled by so many aspects of fandom. I can still barely wrap my head around the idea that people invest time into imagining relationships between fictional characters, but I guess it comes from the same place as the (equally foreign) impulse to speculate about their friends’ relationships.
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As someone who’s tried both, I trust my own ability to filter literature by reading the back cover and remembering the names of good authors more than I trust the supposed verdict of history.
And in particular- one of the poorly kept secrets of the speculative fiction world is that the Hugo and Nebula winners usually aren’t that good as literature, especially with time. There’s a strong tendency for both awards to reward speculative novelty. If you’re the first author to come up with some fascinating concept, your readers will focus on how cool and interesting it is and not even notice weak plot and characterization. Which is fine, the joy of contemplating new concepts is part of the fun of speculative fiction. But twenty years later the concept won’t be new anymore, and someone with better writing skills will have tackled your idea in a better way. See, eg, every award winner from the sixties, seventies, and eighties that got an award for coming up with a mind blowingly cool engineering or astronomical wonder that is now commonplace in speculative fiction.
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My brain is usually able to factor historical details like that into my enjoyment of a book.
I don’t know how, but somehow knowing that a book used an idea first makes me like it more, even though other books would later do that idea better. I will often enjoy an old and original book as much as a new derivative one, even if the original is weaker in other measures of quality. (I suppose part of this might be because later iterations of that idea will accrete cliches that the original might lack)
Something similar happens with special effects. I like old stop-motion effects that were good for their time more than I like bad new CGI effects, even though the CGI might look better from a timeless perspective.
The same thing happens in regards to morals. I appreciate a book from 1913 that has a message of racial and religious tolerance way more than a book from 2016 with the exact same message.
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Another objection I would add is that, for me atleast, I often want to read a specific sort of story in terms of plot or “themes” or setting, in which only a few examples exist, often very recent. While this doesn’t save the vast majority of fiction, it does mean that there are probably new ideas for plots that do not have any existing examples, or whose examples can be improved upon. Rationalfic is one example of this, of an entirely new (or atleast mostly, there may be a few older works with similar themes I’m not aware of) sort of genre that greatly appeals to a certain group of people.
But I think the strongest objection is actually that it ignores the benefits to the authors. While at a slower rate, new novels would still be written even if there was no profit in them, because some people enjoy writing them. (This applies to art in general, and is a big part of the reason I object to many criticisms of fiction)
Also, as for the filtered by quality thing, there is no objective standard of literary quality for time to filter by. Many people will have substantially different tastes than the past majority of consumers (and classics are often not even favored by that, they are popular within the small group of people who read older works, and can become something of a status symbol that obscures their actual appeal to even the group in question, see “literary fiction”). Now, Gwern points out that artistic preferences are often conditioned by past exposure, making this sometimes self-perpetuating, but I don’t think this is always the case (and those preferences are still real of course).
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I think the Argument From What If Everyone Did This applies here. If everyone only read old fiction, then new fiction would never get a chance to become “filtered by the test of time” to become old fiction. The fiction well would dry up as writing ceases to become a worthwhile pursuit.
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And if that happened then we’d still have more fiction than any human being could reasonably read in one lifetime. That’s not a good argument against Gwern’s post.
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I consider the production of new fiction a terminal value.
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No, it works. As we add new works to the pool, we increase the quality of its “best possible works” set. Suppose that, as Gwern says, by 2060 there will be a thousand times as many songs recorded as have ever existed. And assume that their quality is distributed much the same as prior songs. Then the number of songs N standard deviations above the mean will go up by a factor of a thousand, and the thousand best songs will markedly increase in quality.
Now, we may not be able to detect this in 2060—we won’t know which songs are the best. But by 2160, the question “which songs available in 2060 were the best?” will surely be answerable.
Of course, I think Gwern’s argument is silly across the board. But I do think this objection holds.
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Gwern argues that the fact we don’t mourn the loss of almost all art from hundreds of years ago proves that it doesn’t matter, and that recent fiction (<100 years) doesn't suffer from a language barrier, but both of these effects mean the amount of available fiction decays over time in both number and quality as excellent works are lost or grow unreadable. That necessitates the production of new works to replace them, and the "filtering" effect that supposedly makes old art so much better requires that we produce a lot of it.
Of course, that isn't my true rejection – Gwern also admits that this filtering is basically random under "THE EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS", and doesn't seem to address the existence of new themes and new techniques at all.
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Your essay is reminding me of a bit from Russ’ How to Suppress Women’s Writing— when you see fiction described as good, ask “Good for who and good for what?”
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Fandom is common for many old books, it’s just that the fans tend to prefer it if you call it literature. (Yes there is the caveat that academia is not as fun as the internet.)
For reading pre-1900 books, I recommend post-1900 translations of works in foreign languages, as well as finding translators you like.
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Probably a bad year to choose for your example, given that the Dune fandom is—from what I’ve seen—definitely still a thing! The observation does hold true for most years, though.
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There’s a much simpler way to cut through the argument: recognizing that there’s no “should” in taste — read what you want to read.
If you want to only read old books mostly written by old white men, then by all means do so and don’t let anyone bully you into inflecting your reading habits for the sake of “progress”.
And if you only want to read very recents books by diverse authors with diverse characters, again, by all means do so and don’t let anyone bully you into inflecting your reading habits for the sake of “culture”.
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> Again, this doesn’t apply to all fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, and other-world fantasy fiction survive unscathed
Even this is not always true. Asimov will have characters that can fly using Nuclear Power, and robots that use typewriters.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust
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I think that you might miss the most obvious counter to Gwern’s argument, which is that cultures and tastes change over time, and that literature crafted for even, say, 19th century English-speakers likely fulfills different preferences and emotional needs than fiction for contemporary audiences does. A lot of the novels that have “stood the test of history” actually weren’t popular or critically well-regarded when they were written. Some of them may have been overlooked, but others might just fit different tastes. I would guess that contemporary fiction is more likely to satisfy contemporary preferences than its older counterparts.
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I agree with what you’re saying, but I’m super lazy and I don’t know how to find good stuff that hasn’t already been vetted. Even with the more challenging language, old books are the low-hanging fruit from my perspective.
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I have a bit of a thing for old sci-fi but it really does jar quit often.
Particularly when you hit a story based a thousand years in the future with intergalactic space ships…. but the ships computer can only be communicated with through paper tapes or the plot hinges on the delay to have a mathematician get out pencil and paper to work out a course adjustment by hand.
The default position of the wee little women as damsels to be rescued or wives to complain about all the important characters adventures is also pretty jarring compared to modern fiction.
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I’m pretty astounded Gwern wrote an essay with that number of logical holes.
Half his points can be disproved by things in other sections of the essay, and many of the rest don’t have any evidence at all (like his assertion that we’ve finished developing all possible cinematic techniques, a claim that would be news to anyone actually involved in the production of films.)
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Have you read On the Steel Breeze by Alistair Rennolds?
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Apparently Gwern deigns not to apply this argument to the production of new blog posts.
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Ozy, can you explain your last paragraph to me, please? This is utterly alien to me and I would like to understand that POV better.
I can sort-of understand the mechanism I’ve heard about (Be under-represented in fiction –> Feel bad), but the arrow is a black box and the badness is unspecified. It seems like the kind of thing humans do get upset about, but I can’t imagine the internal experience of being upset by it. I can understand feeling that Cool Thing X is not for members of Demographic A upsetting members of Demographic A, but I really don’t understand feeling bad even when you don’t feel that you’re being excluded.
Is it about not liking and/or caring about characters outside your favoured demographics? If so, why do you find it hard to do that?
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It’s about mirrors.
You want to see yourself in a mirror, people who are like you but not entirely like you, compare ‘me but if i wore black’ with ‘me but if i was annoying’ with ‘me but if i was a queen’. You want to see your friendgroup in a mirror – “us but if we were adventurers”, “us but if we were 19th century nobility”, “us but if we were magic politiicians”. Pointing at things and going “haha yes ME” is a joyful experience, and the closer the characters in the book are to you and your close social circle, the more of it you get.
This goes especially for marginalized groups that don’t get a lot of this mirroring in most culture surrounding them. “I am real”, “I exist”, “other people like me exist”, “I didn’t make this up”, “I am not misremembering”. People need mirrors, and those who don’t get enough of them suffer for it. It’s like being thirsty in a desert – often, you won’t even care if the water is dirty (the fiction is bad), you just care that it’s water.
Also, once you’ve read feminist critique of not enough representation, you can never unsee it. “But what were the women / the gay people / the poor people / the disabled people doing at the same time” becomes a question deeply seated in your brain, and a work of fiction that provides answer to those gives an incomparable amount of satisfaction relative to one that ignores them the entire time.
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That doesn’t seem to be universally true. I share Chrysophylax’s sense that the concept Ozy referenced is pretty alien, and I find this just as alien:
I’ve literally never found that to be an enjoyable experience, at least if we take “yes ME” to mean “yes that is a person who shares many of my demographic traits”.
The only time I’ve found it to be enjoyable at all has been when “yes ME” meant “yes that is a thing I do sometimes, but I never really thought about it until now”. And even that only really works in the context of memes or asides.
When it comes to fictional characters, looking in a mirror is the last thing I want to do. It’s almost like looking at a group photo – if I look at myself, all I can think about is how my expression looks weird, my shirt is crooked, or whatever. I’m too familiar. If I watch a movie filmed in my home town, all I can focus on is trying to figure out where and when they shot it, which things they had to cover up, etc. I don’t want to be focusing on the differences between my “idealized” demographic identity and how it’s being presented through characters in the work, I want to focus on what the characters are actually doing.
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