Tasteless

I was at Borders this afternoon, and while waiting for Middle Daughter to finish finding a birthday gift for her friend I perused the science fiction collection. Things have changed.

Vast swaths of shelving hold Star Trek franchise books, and Star Wars franchise books (The Making of Star Wars is classed as SF!), and copies of Tolkien's unfinished works. It seems as though they don't allow anything on the shelf thinner than ¾ inch thick, and most books are volume M of N. Covers include lots of horses, dragons, swords, and implausibly clad Amazons.

When I was a teenager the fashion was to use psychedelic covers with no noticeable meaning, or wild combinations of motifs and characters from the book. Most books were relatively thin, and most of the contents had something or other to do with space travel or aliens. Not all—the psychological SF novel was also fashionable, and we had DeCamp et al for fantasy, and quite a few authors were experimenting with alternative social/moral/religious worlds.

I can't say the quality of writing was better years ago—I've no good way to tell, since I generally remember only the books I finished, and I relied on advice. Some was very good then, and some (Pratchett, for instance) are enjoyable today. But I'm suspicious. Someone once said that within every novel is a short story trying to get out, and I suspect that the 5 volume paperweights are not very well edited.

I was urged to read The Phantom Menace. I plowed through about 10 pages and decided that it was even worse than the movie. The His Dark Materials series is inconsistent, sloppy, and surprisingly malicious—and it won awards and a stage deal. I read a review of Wicked (including a few quotes): and concluded “same old, same old.” When the first Star Trek collections (short stories from the TV show) came out I saw that authors trying to work with other people's characters generally wrote paper dolls and unconvincing stories; and spot checking the vast shelves of franchise novels hasn't modified my conclusion much. To be fair, Zahn's Star Wars books were good. But the Dune prequels don't even make good compost.

You might point out that this is genre fiction, and suggest that perhaps my tastes matured—perhaps I should look at mainstream fiction and the “modern classics.” I regret to report that these are no better, and often quite a bit worse—genre fiction is required to at least tell a coherent story. Most modern literature I've struck doesn't pass Twain's test: I dislike the good characters, am indifferent to the bad ones, and wish they'd all fall down a well together. Why the hunger to describe life as though nothing were real but stupidity and suffering?

It feels strange to look over a section that used to interest me and see nothing that I'd care to spend ten minutes on, much less ten dollars.

It is even stranger to find myself talking with someone who has so immersed himself in SF and fantasy that he seems to actually believe that we'll one day invent a warp drive, and that societies can be run on principles and mores from SF novels.