In the past couple of months I have started rereading books I read last in the 1990s and liked a lot then. The surprise and excitement of discovering a new world is less, of course, for I am already familiar with the worlds in those books. What surprised me the most, is that some books still hold up while others have become boring, bland, or otherwise uninteresting.
For example, I was unable to even get into Williams’ Otherland series. And I devoured Feist’s Magician almost like I did when I was in my teens.
How do you experience rereads from your youth? What writing characteristics makes a book eternally fresh or almost immediately dated?
That’s a really good question.
There’s so many books that age incredibly badly, and I’ve always been adamant that I won’t get marooned in an increasingly outdated past. Just because I enjoyed something decades ago, doesn’t mean it’s good now.
For now the best I’ve got is Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crud.
A combination of perspective, experience, and no longer relying on the discount tables at secondhand bookshops makes it a lot easier to pick the raisins out of the oatmeal of mediocrity that we once had to plough through longhand. Those other books were always kind of ehh, but we just read them anyway.
Or perhaps better-aging books pick more-universal themes and anxieties to work with, rather than more novel, topical approaches that are flashy at the time but quickly lose their relevance.
Perhaps people could find some examples from each pile, and we can try to draw out some commonalities.
Or perhaps better-aging books pick more-universal themes and anxieties to work with, rather than more novel, topical approaches that are flashy at the time but quickly lose their relevance.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books have aged INCREDIBLY well. Like, scarily well.
(Fair warning: I didn’t actually read Lois McMaster Bujold in the 80s and 90s. But she DID publish then.)
She had a hermaphrodite character which, aside from the unfortunate pronoun choice of “it”, very much anticipates non-binary and trans people. There’s also a character who does a FTM transition, going from an aristocrat lady to an artistocrat lord…although that’s been written more recently. Still, it’s in a series that was started in the 80s, and the herm character was there from the very start.
She delves into many mental disorders with perspectives that are still mostly accurate–and when they aren’t, you can see that her then-depiction WAS following the medical understanding at the time the book was written instead of something entirely made up.
And even when they aren’t totally accurate, she always treats the subjects with some level of compassion. She writes more out of compassionate curiosity it seems on such subjects, and has some level of scorn or displeasure for treating people like spectacles. She even lampshades it when her character Miles is musing on his relationship with Taura…Miles is quite aware if the relationship got out people would treat it as a spectacle. (Which is exactly what would happen IRL if someone as short as him was seen with a woman like her.)
Bujold doesn’t get everything right, though. I suspect the character of Bothari–who was a schizophrenic rapist–was killed off early in the series probably because she realized she’d goofed up with him. We know now that schizophrenia and rape are not connected, and that schizophrenic people are more likely to be the target of violence than the one being violent.
Even so, his character is given respect as a person by the Vorkosigans, instead of mocked and belittled or made fun of. He’s seen as a tragic broken person who was used cruely by a different sadistic character as a weapon against others. He’s allowed to redeem himself in the service of the Vorkosigans as an armsman–he’s allowed to get as better as his condition will allowed him, which does not happen in all series. He’s even made the main armsman guarding the main character…despite his condition and past, he’s trusted THAT much. And his daughter, instead of being written as tainted or rejected due to who her father is as many authors might, goes on to live a fulfilling life and is even an object of the crush of the main character.
(You could also suspect that one of Bujold’s characters in another series, Penric, is an attempt to make up for the horrible depiction of Bothari, because in modern terms Penric would very much be considered schizophrenic given he has a voice in his head talking to him.)
All in all, Bujold does pretty good with her books, and I think it’s because she did her research on biology and sociology and correctly predicted where the trends of the 80s would end up if things continued. I also think her believing in humanity in an optimistic way, and her habit of showing “odd” or “different” characters compassion at every turn has helped a great deal with making her series age well.
One of the books I’ve really enjoyed rereading several times is The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke. I loved reading it as a kid, and I find it still holds up quite well today.
I have not read this book yet, so thanks for the recommendation! Can you explain why you think it holds up well?
Although science fiction from before the 1980s feels often dated, I do find the reflection of the time it was written in very intriguing. More so than from books of different genres written in those years. Might be an interesting topic for historians to explore someday.
I find a lot of sci-fi authors fall into a trap of being anchored to the society of the day. So, their world end up being basically reflections of the world they live in where doors go whoosh.
Meanwhile, Clarke understood that there is a symbiosis between society and technology both necessarily shaping each other. So he doesn’t simply imagine how some new technology would apply within the society of his day, but how a more advanced society shaped by advanced technology might function.
Clarke also had a knack for describing things in a way where he gives the reader the idea of the general concept and the science behind it without going into too much technical detail regarding how it might be implemented. So, as long as the general idea is still valid, the reader can interpret it in a way that makes sense to them based on the technology of the time.
There are a couple fantasy books that always pull me in and seem to resist the erosion of time. Recently I read, Villains by Necessity by Eve Forward after not touching it for about fifteen years and the story still sucked me in, mainly because it’s about balance in the world and how even so-called evil characters are fully capable of being heroes, just for different reasons. Simon Green’s Guards of Haven (and at least the first related book to that series, Blue Moon Rising) also have help up pretty well over the years.
A lot of what I think makes a book survive time are my favorite books deal with general beats of life (invasion, fear, the strive for perfection at the exclusion of all else) as opposed to gimmicks, twists, and reveals. You can only be surprised one time when Senator Palatine ends up being a Sith but it is easier to have an empathic feel for the fight against a sense of self or saving one’s love one.
Books can have both. In the above example, Villains by Necessity has a twist. I remember the twist, even after not reading it for fifteen years. Even as I went through the book, in the back of my head, I’m trying to anticipate it and that sense of wonder will never come back. As such, the book was grand because of the other foundations were solid that even though I knew what was happening, I came back for the struggle.
The other is perfection. I dislike when a novel is basically “we’re awesome, now we’re going over there to be more awesome, and then we’ll be awesome again”. I feel that about the protagonist in Pyromancer by Don Callander. (And the Exalted RPG, but that was the point.) I want to see failures, idiocy, and brain dead decisions in the reader’s eye that make sense in the character’s. Those stories pull me in a lot more and keep over time.
I recently enjoyed rereading the Hyperion series. I had forgotten much of it. That’s science fiction though.
I tried rereading the dragon riders of pern series but I couldnt get back into it.
Pern is one of those series that didn’t age well. The concept itself is still solid in that you COULD write it for a modern audience, but the way McCaffrey handles various subjects is no longer adequate for the modern perspective, in my opinion.
As a society (despite the horrific last few years) we’ve had a lot of success moving forward with discussions about gender, gender roles, sexuality–and the things that were “better than nothing” to those groups and which drew people to Pern in the past are now jarringly wrong-headed.
Why didn’t Menolly become Masterharper? Why did Lessa devolve into a shrew? (And Aramina?) Why did Brekke the queen rider have to be torn down and her dragon killed before the second-best-man after F’lar (F’nor) could have her? (Why is that trope repeated in the Talent series, with Damia needing to be diminished by an evil alien killing her brother off before she could mellow enough to accept Afra as her partner?)
I still love the books, mostly for the characters and ideas. But they very much don’t work in the modern day.
