but I guess my question is: is there a sense of *fannish* generations & generational arguments. (sweating as I try not to offend sportsfans with my total ignorance lol) but like: are they still getting into heated fights because of a tailgating policy that Fred W. implemented in 1957
Yeah, & I mean to undercut what I'm saying & strengthen your point- the number of times I've been treated disrespectfully and all but called "kid," in my late 30s/early 40s, with gray in my beard, as I entered fandom for the first time, yowza
Occurs to me that in no point in this thread did I reference this being about SFF. Chef's kiss
I am overcaffeinated and just finished Two Hours Of Dealing With Car Things. I don't know much I'm actually disagreeing with @chloroformtea.bsky.social here but: don't know! As a chaser: I'm really wondering how these old/new guard discussions play out in other fandoms. Is it a thing in sports?
Maybe because I have a somewhat scholarly approach to the field—I can forgive a lot of BS and bizarre hang-ups from the old guard in return for a few nuggets of insight & theory here & there; as long as current stewards are rooting out old poisons the institutional knowledge is worth it.
There's an *immense* but I think somewhat subliminal/mostly-unplanned pressure in our culture to focus on the new, the current moment, that's all for nostalgia but against living traditions & memory, and I think we need to watch out for that as much as for over-venerating the past.
And I get as weirded out by closing doors on still-living or relatively-recently-dead authors & thinkers as I do by closing doors on the newer generations. (Particularly as *I* age, lol.) And obviously, don't want to discount the power imbalances that go w/age, in various ways.
Or that there's value to periodically saying "we've solved this" or "that's not something that interests me". But I get nervous about saying we can or should make some kind of generational break, IF we're trying to continue that thing of Reading Together. It's a young field in the grand scheme...
But—whatever this social thing is that we're doing, Reading Together, fandom + academia + pro/quasi-pro writing—what we're doing is continuing a conversation, picking up parts of it & building on it. Definitely don't want to deny there are parts we should drop.
(Certainly, as a pretty isolated reader, just grabbing stuff from the library & used bookstores, that's mostly how I started out; the context and theories and beefs came much later.)
On the one hand, you can only read a finite number of books, and I think to some extent you should always approach the work as it is, as you read it; to some extent you always do. There's a way in which books are Free Of The Discourse unless you're actually seeking that out, & that's good.
Not trying to be counter-spicy, and there is great worth in the "let the past die, kill it if you have to" approach, particularly in regard to fandom. But: I don't know! I'm of at least two minds.
2026 Philip K. Dick Award Nominee: UNCERTAIN SONS AND OTHER STORIES
Here’s my next post reviewing the seven short-listed nominees for the 2026 Philip K. Dick Award. A reminder–the awards are made by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and will be presented at Norwescon‘s annual conference on…
I can't remember if you've referenced it, but Walton's "Informal History of the Hugos" essays are a good source for could-have-beens & also-rans, too
Agree, he's one of those golden age writers that make me scratch my head about who is remembered/celebrated vs not. Also weirdly anticipating the "cozy" turn!
I think a lot of times, editing is really just remembering what people have said and repeating it back to them so that they can read it through.
—Aaron Bady
(and, yes! A lot of editing is listening)
This is a good start. Glad to see @reptimkennedy.bsky.social pushing for actual investigation & consequences.
brb writing a poem about Nietzsche weeping over Clever Hans, I know the timing's off but apparently I'm not sad enough today
ah man did not know this part
Jo, a small brown and white dog, licking an empty tub of Earth Balance plant butter.
the wolves dream of veganism
I also get choked up thinking about all the good jokes & tunes & spooky stories & clever mnemonics that humans made for the ~50k years before we started writing them down, so I may just be overly-attuned to this kind of cultural vanishing
Forever haunted by the lost paratexts of the internet. A bittersweet thing about NIMONA's mainstream success for example is that I initially read it with a whole subculture of commentary on Tumblr: running gags, debates, interpretative strategies. Less than vapor now.
As a used bookseller, I can attest that people love cheaper, shorter books, which used to be a lot more common. As a sometime creative writing instructor, my god, I would love to see the fat trimmed from so many books. This is a good take.
OMG, yes. Vagaries of internet & my worklife mean that I went from "check these 20 webcomic bookmarks every day" to "sporadically remember they exist and catch up on years at once" and there really is something interesting emotional/parasocial there.
something weirdly poignant about how the narrative forms most suited to long-form plotting (comics, television serials) both developed under capitalism and thus struggle at that very thing due to conditions of production, but can still excel in a kind of textural/formulaic/achronological mode
the peril of satire: every failure is a double-failure
So bad that I just remembered a Penny Arcade comic from 2004 mocking Kevin Smith, a mental event that a more just society would allow me to litigate over
Gorst, the torture guy from Andor, saying "a sort of choral, agonized authors responding to criticism."
I am hoping this is just very poorly executed satire, because if in earnest this is deeply embarrassing, and way below what I expect from Lit Hub.
Last month I was feeling guilty I'd run into so few cool pieces of SF-related criticism, so of course this month I am positively drowning in them. Some really good reads here.
