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How Do You Get Science Fiction To Have "Book Club Lit"? |
Science Fiction's Presidents Of The 21st Century |
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io9 
09/11/09
I can't have book discussion with my peers because they talk about what was on Oprah and Dr Phil! Or they are Hockey Moms and they constantly talk of the drama that is organized hockey in Canada. I smile nicely while my eyes glaze over. Depressing I know.
io9 you are my only hope!
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09/11/09
I have found most everything that I have looked for and ordered those that weren't in stock. I have found new releases and older books as well.
The only ones I can't get my hands on are Alastair Reynolds' first two books which are unavailable for order at this time. I will have to hunt them down in used book stores but my allergies deter me. We seem to have many British authors that I have heard are not as easy to find in the States but it could just depend on location.
09/11/09
Didn't have one of them, although possibly they could have ordered them. The problem is I live quite some distance from Toronto and any other Chapters/Indigo store, so I mostly get my books from Amazon--but they've been hopeless with the American new releases lately.
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- Partly by its author being high-profile, esp. online - i.e. have not John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow made their new books indispensable in some substantial part by way of their prominence in online conversation? Ditto Jeff Vandermeer, Charlie Stross.
- I do still think it's something slightly peculiar to the specific field, though. Gender issue has gone unmentioned - but I do find that recommendations from (to crudely generalize) male SF fans (i.e. "best book ever"-type recommendations, which fall under your rubric) have often fallen flat with me. Randomly chosen ex.: Robert Charles Wilson's "Spin." A lot of the central-to-the-conversation books in SF are lengthy and ideas-rather-than-prose-driven in a way that is somewhat counter to the things I read for.
- Still not sure that the book club/consensus-driven fiction model is a genuinely attractive one! Often I would rather read an almost-off-the-radar book than a culturally central one... there is often something a little easy/middlebrow/dull about the books that get this sort of attention!
09/11/09
It's the same problem I've seen with other niche things, and it seems you can only have these niches in a world with the internet. To draw from a comment below for instance, steampunk in my mind has been entirely an online thing. I've never seen any of the accoutrements in "3D". I suspect that if you really want to put together a book club, online is not the way to do it, as otherwise you'll have a very skewed view, which produces stories like Escape Pod's latest offering "Penumbra's 24 hour book shop" or somesuch, which while a good story had as much "neat" tech crammed into it as would fit, making it sometimes awkward.
09/11/09
This is an interesting question, and I think you have done a pretty good job covering a lot of the issues concerned here. But I think that a major reason that there isn't a consensus list for SF readers is there is too much sub-genre specialization. Within what we could paint as the SF book community, you have your space opera fans, your Star Wars EU readers and so forth, your Dickheads, Stephenson fants, etc. There isn't necessarily a lot of crosstalk among those groups, since those novels don't have that much in common apart from the basic SF label. Most of the books enjoyed across these subgroups are really classics like predate the later specialization- Wells and Verne, Asimov and Bradbury, etc.
However, I think the same thing exists in "mainstream" book clubs as well. You have your Oprah-influenced, mass book club reads, which are mostly pretty lowbrow novels dressed up as being more literary than they are (Dan Brown, Mitch Albom, Life of Pi, etc.). Then separate from that, you have your actual highbrow literary must reads list (Delillo, Roth, McCarthy, etc.) These are really pretty separate, although the occasional literary novel creeps into the Oprah set, just as the occasional SF novel (Stephenson, Nifenegger, etc.) can invade those.
But I do think that part of the appeal, and at this point, the responsibility, of communities like io9 is to try and bridge this gap and put some of these specialized reader communities on at least a similar foundation. It would be cool for io9 to create more definitive lists, if not of current books, at least of the classics of the various subgenres that they could recommend to all readers. The Onion AV club has a cool feature called "Gateways to Geekery" that they use to orient readers to different specialized genres- recommending things to give people a foundation in a new area and a path to potentially pursue. I personally followed their recommendations to immerse myself in Steampunk, reading a few of the fundamental works to at least understand the essentials of the genre, while steering clear, initially anyway, of some of the more esoteric works. I think that approach would be a good way to get people on a similar footing.
And why not a book club feature here on io9? You could recommend a book, or two, and a deadline date, and people could get ready to join in a more interactive discussion. I think that would be a lot of fun, having everyone commenting on a work that they have just read (or re-read). You could even have readers help suggest selections going ahead. This could be a feature to expose the community at large to the real cornerstone books under the SF umbrella, and could be spun off into separate clubs for people with different interests down the road. Just a thought...
09/11/09
1. Life is too short to read crap.
2. 90% of everything is crap. (Theodore Sturgeon)
3. It's a different 90% for each of us.
4. Finding the common subset is probably an NP-Complete problem.
09/11/09
Kidding, kidding. That'd be kinda ironic for a topic about reading!
I'm doing my part by scaring away all the weaklings that would be able to pass muster in an io9 book club, by being completely and utterly insane.
09/11/09
To know you have arrived in the mainstream? To sell to these book clubs?
I can see the economical point, but no other worth to this.
You want a neverending revenue stream, get books into the lit curriculum of colleges. It's how the classics stay in print.
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09/11/09
A literature canon (in the broadest sense) only limits the conversation by limiting the things and the angles to examinate those things to discuss. Especially since an established canon usually comes with established interpretations. It is entirely possible to discuss the idea space of SF without taking recourse to discussing (a) specific book(s). In fact, that makes the discussion more interesting. Of course, that doesn't work for discussing plot and specific meaning of any particular book. That's what the internet is for - finding the people who (like) read the same things you do. Those freaks.
I would claim it is relatively harder to have a good discussion about movies. Sure, it is easy to have a discussion about Transformers 2 or Terminator Salvation. But it is no problem discussing Anathem or Terry Pratchett's new one, either.
Try to have a discussion about Sunshine, or the Fountain, not so easy. And these are not particular obscure or cheap movies. There are a lot fewer genre movies than there are genre books, and accessibility is much higher for movies.
IMO, book clubs are selling tools and do not have much use besides that. The general visibility of a certain piece of art in society does not enhance the conversation, it just adds a lot of noise and a few general consensus interpretations, each for a subset of the audience.
In other words, in every way but financially, book clubs are the devil. Which I took many, many words to say.
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09/11/09
I also live in a small backwater town, far from most of my friends, and where there are not that many science fiction readers.
I guess I come to io9 for most of my SF discussionary needs. I agree with (I think LittleDragon's) earlier comments that there needs to be an open thread or something so that we can talk about recent books.
This is also where I get a lot of recommendations for books--either from the discussions (thanks Grey_Area!), or from articles and reviews themselves.
Now I just have to wait for some of the recently released books mentioned on the site to make it to Canada. Sigh...
09/11/09
Same reason I like Roger Ebert's movie reviews: Ebert was once (and probably really is still) a fan, published a 'zine, and his tastes frequently run similar to mine.
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Otherwise a good chunk of people I know have read Dune and maybe Starship Troopers...
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09/11/09
I'm really leery about trying new scifi authors for that exact same reason. Once I decide I like them though, I'll read pretty much everything they've ever written. It's just so hard to find stuff that's not total tripe.
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But during the 60s the field began to expand expotentially, and the number of reprints of older books (from Ace, from Ballantine) began to increase and it became impossible for everyone to read everything. (Although I did develop a taste for the sf of every decade.)
Also, remember the entire history of the arts in the 20th (and even now) is increased targeting in audience and specialization in genre. When technology dictated there was only AM Top 40 radio for rock/soul fans to listen to, that's what people listened to, and you were exposed to wide variety of music. But one of the side-effects of classic rock as it developed in the 70s was the absence of those black artists, with a few exceptions, on those stations.
When my wife and I had our sf bookstore, I noticed there was no book — NO book — that was read by everyone. Including me, though I did become familiar with the blurbs of each and every one.