Of Old Genre Fans

As I have often remarked in the past, the history of science fiction has in the main been written by science fiction's writers and fans (in which capacity the writers tended to be operating when they took up historiography), rather than the kinds of scholars who generally handle literary history--especially when we look away from the college professors handling bits of the genre in abstruse ways to those attempting to provide a broader picture of the field.

Reading my way through their books I was often surprised, and not pleasantly, by how negative those writers often were about their field, not least in their constantly trashing its classics.

Later I ceased to be surprised. The eager fan new to a genre is likely to be very open to different kinds of material, and comparatively uncritical about what they look at, and respectful of received opinion. But as they get to know a genre better they form preferences--and develop antipathies. It also takes more to impress them, because they have something by which to judge what they see. And as a result they can get a lot more questioning of the "conventional wisdom." By the time they are in a position to write a book they are likely to be well past that point--and indeed many seemed simply cantankerous.

However, they often had plenty of insights to share, too, insights I often came to appreciate a good deal later--and which in hindsight seemed to me to make the cantankerousness well worth bearing with.