Making Lists

[womzilla]

james_nicoll points to a discussion of the SFBC's list of the 50 most significant works of fantasy and science fiction of the past 50 years which bemoans the fact that there is only one work of fantasy on the list from the last 20 years (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone) and wonders what this says about the creativity of fantasy.

Of course, of the fifty books listed from the last fifty years, only two of the sf are one of the sf is from the last twenty years (Snow Crash, 1991; I had mis-remembered Ender's Game as 1986, but it's 1985). For that matter, only 15 of the works on the list as a whole were published in the last thirty years (and one of those was written decades earlier and not published until the author was successful enough to get a second look for it), meaning that more than twice as many of the major works of sf and fantasy were published in the first two decades of this period than in the three decades since.

Which indicates that, of course, fantasy and science fiction were vastly better when I was a kid than they are now, and the music you punks listen to is just noise.

This type of list is always going to be slanted towards older works, for three reasons. One is that the older works have had longer to find their audience and show their influence. Does anyone think that someone making a list like this in 1982 would have put The Book of the New Sun or The Mists of Avalon anywhere near the top ten? I mean, the brilliance of the former and the popularity of the latter were both instantly obvious, but New Sun was assumed to be too much its own thing to ever be influential and the latter was dismissed as minor and likely to be forgotten. It takes time to see what time is going to say. In fifteen years, Perdido Street Station will have pushed something off that list.

Another is that the canon is a pyramid. As a genre, or art form, begins, the audience is smaller and each work is more likely to contribute something huge and shaping to the body of work. The canon begins to cement almost immediately, and works in it at the start are likely to continue to influence it, for better and worse, for a long time.

Combinging the above, of course, is the fact that the golden age of science fiction is twelve.

These effects are visible in almost any list of this kind--the VH-1 "100 Greatest Songs of Rock 'N' Roll" a few years back had only one song from the preceding decade, and only five from the decade before that. (It was a fairly good list of the Greatest Rock Songs 1963-1983, though.) The AFI Top 100 Films list in 1998 did a better job of including recent works, including eight films from the 1990s--but of those, only one finished in the top sixty.

What this all says to me is that the makers of this kind of list should automatically disqualify any work less than N years old, and the list-makers should make conscious efforts to resist the "of course it's important, it has always been important" effect that keeps minor works like Fill in the Blank Here on lists like this instead of Much More Important Recent Work Here. And I stand by that.

Comments

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

It was a landmark year, but that wasn't an accident. Notice that all four of the books you listed here were from Ballantine/Del Rey. It might have been steam engine time, but someone has to actually build that first engine. Ballantine had been trying for years to capitalize on the success of The Lord of the Rings, but their first attempt--Lin Carter's "Adult Fantasy Line"--was much more varied and much less commerically successful. The Del Reys deliberately set out with Shanara and Thomas Covenant to make a line of commerical fantasy built on books specifically targeted to appeal to Tolkien fans, and it worked.

Anthony, Donaldson, and Brooks are all very unlike Tolkien in various ways, but Del Rey marketed them all to the same audience and achieved tremendous commerical success with them.

I don't disagree with you that the primary aesthetic message of Brooks is "you can publish any crap you want, and if it's shamelessly enough like The Lord of the Rings, it will sell"--a message which has somewhat, but not completely, burned out.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Eh, brain-slip there. The original American edition of The Silmarillion was from Houghton-Mifflin. But I'm fairly sure that Ballantine knew it had the paperback rights sewn up, and I would be very surprised if the impending publication of The Silmarillion wasn't a major impetus to the Del Reys to reinvent the fantasy line when they did.