Beyond SF

 

In a recent post I talked about having missed reading most of the most famous and important books in SF. In this post I will explore why that might be.

I’ve never been a reader of literary fiction. I am not curious about people or the exploration of the human condition. I try to look on life with as much humor as I can, so that books that take life very seriously or are deeply physiological or philosophical don’t appeal to me. Given my taste in reading, it is not surprising that SFF books like Dune, which take a very serious or philosophical approach to story telling, would not interest me.

Nor am I interested in reading grim, dark, or horror stories. I know a lot of readers enjoy those types of stories, but I’m not one of them. My taste in stories has always leaned towards light, popular literature. All of which might explain why I have read sofew of the most significant SF stories. However, there is one other contributing factor.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I wasn’t reading just speculative fiction, in my teen years. Looking back, it is interesting to see what I was reading besides SF, since it foreshadowed the type of stories I would enjoy my entire life, and aspire to write today. As a teenager, I was a big fan of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – I read them all – and Sax Rohmer’s stories of Dr Fu Manchu, and to a much lesser extent, some of this other fiction. These were books that my Dad had around the house.

So what were the elements of Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu that informed my reading life? First, they were character focused stories. Sherlock Holmes and Watson, Sir Denis Nayland Smith, Dr Petrie and Dr Fu Manchu where central to these stories, not fantastic futures, philosophies or abstract ideas. They were characters that you came to know as people. Compared to many of the cardboard thin characters in many, though not all of the SF books I was reading, these characters were far more nuanced and developed. While they may not have been written on the same level of  the best literary fiction characters, they possessed a certain verve that made them real. Indeed, both Sherlock Holmes and to a lesser extent, Dr Fu Manchu, are far better remembered a century later than most literary fiction characters. In any event, these stories offered characters that I could imagine as real people, not mere plot devices.

Secondly, these writers brought the romance of Victorian and Edwardian London to life in their writings. Conan Doyle accomplished this with all the various characters with their different stations of life and their unique situations that Holmes needed to investigate. Sax Rohmer’s London was a London of hidden mysteries, of the secretive Chinatown of the grimy East End, with the Thames a road of mysteries from exotic lands winding through it. Both writers knew how to create an atmosphere and infused their writing with a true sense of place, perhaps because they were writing about the London and England the knew first hand. But by the time I was reading these stories, time and distance made these versions of London as exotic and remote as any planet in SF. And perhaps because they were writing about their contemporary city, they brought an enhanced authenticity to their Londons that even the wildest imaginations of writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs could not bring to their worlds.

Of course one has to put these books in context with the SF I was reading at the time, which where often reprints of stories written in the first half of the century for the pulp magazines of the time. No doubt SF writing has grown and matured since then, but what I was reading was mostly pulp stories – especially since I had no interested in the more literary SF that was coming out in the 1960’s, books like Dune or Stand on Zanzibar, or Babel-17. So when I say that they were written in a style that was several notched above the rather nondescript writing of many of the old space opera and planetary romance stories I enjoyed, I will acknowledge that there may’ve been SF and fantasy books written at that level as well. I just wasn’t reading them.

And there is, I think, one more feature of these books – they both were British authors. Even back then I found the writing of British authors seemed to be several notches above the writing of most American authors. As a result, I have found, over the years, that British, or British educated writers, are my favorite writers. Not all British writers, of course, and not all my favorites are by British authors, but most of them are. There is something about the way British writers use their language that appeals to me. And there is something about the writing of late Victorian to the first half of the 20^th century authors that appeal to me, as well. They knew their language and how to use it evocatively. In my teen years, it was Conan Doyle and Sax Rohmer that carried the banner of wonderful British writers.

The next discovery in the joys of reading and writing was not delivered to me by a British author, but by a British educated American author. But I’ll save that subject for next time.