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?
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.