The Sword and Laser discussion

I was poking around over at the Sword and Laser wiki where Tassie Dave keeps statistics:

https://swordandlaser.fandom.com/wiki...

and the curve of books read by decade has a very COVID-19 look:



If we're going to flatten the curve, we need to explore over a hundred years of publishing history for Sword and Laser books. Fortunately, people sheltering in place are making lists.

Folks over at HiLoBrow have compiled a list of the best 250 adventures of the 20th century, plus a couple of dozen 19th century adventures. Many of these books are science fiction and/or fantasy. The cover scans and photos are also fun to look at.

http://www.hilobrow.com/250-adventures/

There are many more lists at HiLoBrow. A good resource for flattening our reading curve.

Weird, I didn't think about it but it looks like we've never read H.G. Wells, Jules Verne or Edgar Rice Burroughs. Some great books in there and all free to read.

But FWIW I would tend to think a book club would be interested in newer books. The results don't surprise me.

John (Taloni) wrote: "Weird, I didn't think about it but it looks like we've never read H.G. Wells, Jules Verne or Edgar Rice Burroughs. Some great books in there and all free to read.

But FWIW I would tend to think a ..."

True, and also many others. I don't think we've read Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, H. Rider Haggard or the hair-raising E.M. Forster either.

I do seem to remember this coming up and Tom mentioning that they do tend to favor newer books as it's less likely that people have read them (because they are new) and they are less likely to have "issues" as even progressive, forward thinking writers of the 19th century might use terms or have preconceptions that may cause... let's say heated discussion.

I also seem to remember such heated discussions on books just a few decades old, so books over a century old might be even more problematic. I totally understand this position though as someone who has binge read ancient Greek and Roman texts, I've built up a bit of a tolerance.

As I have found some amazing new authors through this group I feel that the group's picks are safe in the hands of the Supremes (with the added fun of March Madness).

I myself love H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs and would love to read some of their work with the group. Jules Verne's descriptions of a moonshot are spookily like Apollo 13 - while being surprisingly similar in style to Terry Pratchett. H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds is totally different to every adaption I've every heard of and his "Sleeper Awakes" has had a huge impact on a host of dystopian writers including Isaac Asimov. Edgar Rice Burroughs was more of an adventure writer imho, but he wrote grand adventures that inspired the imagination of those who came after him.

Having said that I'm pretty sure that while there would be delightful discussion of how they influenced later writers, there would also be some threads with some readers quite rightly pointing out some negative preconceptions and language in the books, and there may a be a signifcant number who would not feel comfortable reading such works.

I think any true fan of SFF should read the classics, just to see where we came from if nothing else.

That said, I think that we should primarily support living artists with our money, time and attention. Works by dead artists have value but the living need the support.

A few things occur to me...

1) Pre-1980 was a very different world and while it continually surprises me, most people here don't seem to be able to read works from a world that isn't like their own and evaluate them on those terms. It surprises and dismays me because so much of SFF asks us as readers to accept wild premises - time travel, different worlds, etc. But people seem to have a very real block on reading a work from the 60s and dealing with the fact that those were very different times with different attitudes.

2) Post LotR epic fantasy is mostly lesser re-works of that same idea until A Song of Ice and Fire. And much of SF was also stagnant and derivative of earlier, better work. This turned around with cyberpunk in the 80s but that's not to everyone's tastes.

3) In what I think is only to the good, the last decade has seen an explosion in the amount, quality and diversity of SFF so it's easy to choose a recently published work.

4) Finally, we only do 6 fantasy and 6 SF works a year. You can only cover so much ground in a given year with that schedule.

We'll pull that curve way down when we start reading books from the 2020s ;-)

I just wrapped up a book, so willing to do my part to flatten the curve. !

Looking at my GR books, here are my top 10 oldest books:

* = SFF

The Art of War - 5th century BC
Don Quixote - 1615
*Gulliver’s Travels - 1726
Pride & Prejudice - 1813
Emma - 1815
*Frankenstein - 1818
*A Christmas Carol - 1843
Moby Dick - 1851
Origin of Species - 1859
*Journey to the Center of the Earth - 1864

Get the 1880s in there with Flatland. I suppose if I did GR lists my second oldest would be the Hagakure.

I hope everyone has read the Art of War. It's both fascinating and horrifying. The author killed two concubines just to make a point? They weren't even combatants! And that's before you think over the implications of what he's teaching.

Following that I'd be hitting Verne and Wells. Oh, I guess I'd be getting Romance cred courtesy of a Bronte Sisters jag shortly after college. All of their books plus Pride & Prejudice. Several Dickens books too. Actually read Tale of Two Cities on my own, no school involved.

Trike is doing pretty well. Except for Frankenstein, my reading starts later, around 1889.

The Last American, 1889
The Time Machine, 1895
The Island of Dr. Moreau, 1896
The War of the Worlds, 1898
My Invisible Partner, 1898
A Princess of Mars (and the rest of ERB's Mars book), 1912+
Brave New World 1932
To Walk the Night, 1937
The Hobbit, 1937

I don't have a problem with choices made for S&L. I've been introduced to many great authors chosen by the Supremes.

But, for my own edification, I'm going to look at some older books. I have a dozen paperback editions of Jules Verne's books, but I've never read them. I'll start there.

We've, probably, all read old literature that goes back much further than we think. I've read everything on Trike's and 7 of Mark's.

I'm sure many of you read Shakespeare back in school. A lot of that is Fantasy. (400+ years)

Even us heathenistic Atheists ;-) have read parts of the bible. Parts of that date back 3000+ years and the original versions of those stories go back into prehistory.

Homer (the Greek writer(s?), not Simpson) stories which many of us have read are up to 3000 years old.

Norse mythology 1500+ years.

Tassie Dave wrote: "We've, probably, all read old literature that goes back much further than we think. I've read everything on Trike's and 7 of Mark's."

To be fair, you had a head start, being so much closer to them in time.

(You have GOT to stop setting me up like this. 😂)


Tassie Dave wrote: "I'm sure many of you read Shakespeare back in school. A lot of that is Fantasy. (400+ years)

Even us heathenistic Atheists ;-) have read parts of the bible. Parts of that date back 3000+ years and the original versions of those stories go back into prehistory.

Homer (the Greek writer(s?), not Simpson) stories which many of us have read are up to 3000 years old."

That’s a good point about Shakespeare, et al. I don’t have those listed on GR, but we read most of them in high school.

I’m not sure how to count books not in English, because I’ve only read translations, some of which are fairly recent. In my genre studies I’ve read lots (and lots) of Greek plays, but the oldest translation would be from the 1960s. I’ve also read two different versions of Gilgamesh, the oldest narrative story, but not in the original Sumerian. 1,001 Nights is similar.

There are quite a few books I haven’t added to GR which would skew it even older, plus more SFF. One that comes to mind is The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which is 1820. Edgar Allen Poe is 1840s. Uncle Tom's Cabin is 1852. (Edit: that’s not SFF.)

Oh, yeah, Paradise Lost. 1667. An ex-girlfriend had a collection of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which was a translation, but the translation itself was from the early 1800s. (And wow, are they horrifying.)

Yeah Grimm's versions are certainly a lot darker than the Disney versions

Tassie Dave wrote: "To be fair, you had a head start, being so much closer to them in time.

(You have GOT to stop setting me up like this. 😂)"

I feel like I've ended up as second banana in this Grumpy Old Men coalition ;-)

How can you not put Homer in the Fantasy realm ? Dipping a baby to make it immortal but leave the heel exposed? Classic. And also the adventure tales that are associated with the characters' story arcs started by Homer, are actually FanFic added decade and centuries later.

Stephen wrote: "How can you not put Homer in the Fantasy realm ? ."

I thought I did reference the works of Homer(s?) as being Fantasy :-?

If it wasn't obvious, then all the works I mentioned, I was classifying as fantasy.

This thread was discussed in the latest podcast (#381) and a comparison of SF vs F books was requested.

A graph showing who picked the books by decade.