More teenage bookcase embarrassments

[mmcirvin]

Crooked Timber has a thread up on the ever-popular subject of books you're embarrassed to have loved, as discussed here over a year ago.

What's striking is that the same names keep coming up over and over: Erich von Däniken, Richard Bach, Ayn Rand, Piers Anthony, Robert Heinlein (though several people point out that the shame with Heinlein is not to enjoy his work but to take him as your personal guru). And Jake even mentioned Colin Wilson in a very different context.

Somebody quoted Ursula Le Guin as saying that kids might like junk but no kid is dumb enough to like Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Wrong.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

No, but there's a big pile-on-Dan-Brown festival going on over here (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007095.html#007095)... I think his celebrity is still too recent for him to be somebody's youthful embarrassment.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I'd found Elaine Radford's "Ender and Hitler" essay somewhere on the Web some time ago, and that really changed the way i felt about "Ender's Game" (no doubt helped along by the fact that OSC is a psycho right-wing Mormon nutbag). I was wondering if i was the only one; i wish i could find that essay again.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Ah, i found the page that referred to the Radford essay in most detail.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Which i found via Kuro5hin.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I like Kessel's essay (haven't read Radford's), but it's also important to observe that this sort of special-bullied-kid-revenge fantasy does not begin with Card but runs through the whole history of the SF genre. I think it's the basis of the whole Odd John/Slan/Tomorrow People subgenre of stories about misfit super-mutants (particularly common in YA stories).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...In fact, I seem to recall Phil Dick saying at some point that it seriously creeped him out, and he tried not to write stories like that. When he wrote misfit super-mutants they were usually villains.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Slans, that is, not Ender (I think Dick was dead by the time "Ender's Game" came out).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Lots of people dislike "Ender's Game". I recall james_nicoll saying as much recently.

I liked it when I read it, and eventually chalked up the disturbing aspects of it to conscious "Starship Troopers" homage. Note also that while I'm sure he always had the thing about gayness, Card seems to have gradually drifted further into right-wing nutbag territory over time; I have vague memories that back in the Eighties some of what he wrote sounded like centrist critiques of Reaganism.

A few years back I read the long-delayed second volume of his collection of good stories of the Eighties, Future on Ice. His introductory material was absurdly cranky, consisting of equal parts excoriation of the cyberpunks and excoriation of Bill Clinton. I can certainly understand the drive to bash a US president you don't like, but doing it in a collection of stories explicitly selected from a decade in which he was not president is a little odd. Bashing the cyberpunks at least did have something to do with the 1980s, though, as Gardner Dozois remarked, it seemed like a sad reenactment of a battle that nobody could remember the reasons for any more.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I collected all the blog entries about Dan Brown by Geoffrey Pullum here: http://4-ch.net/book/kareha.pl/1133815847/

I don't know the first thing about Dan Brown, but I do know those blog entries are amusing.