Ignorance Is No Virtue

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Deliberate ignorance of your chosen art form’s history and past works is not something that should be lauded or encouraged.

It’s not edgy. It’s not “punk.” Hell, punk rockers–the good ones–are very aware of the history of their art form and work to expand upon it.

The canon, of anything, matters. It’s how civilizations communicate with their past and their future. Prior works matter. The old masters matter. They matter more than conforming your art to the fleeting political pieties of the day.

Some things are eternal. Others are not. Yet we see modern creators, particularly in the fields of science-fiction and fantasy, discuss how the canon is “dead,” “doesn’t matter,” and is “irrelevant.”

It’s dead, doesn’t matter, and is irrelevant because you hacks have decided to kill it.

I understand wanting to forge a new creative path. If you want to “kill the past” for your own purposes, that’s fine. But if you want to kill the past for the rest of us, you’re going to run into some fierce resistance. Canon matters because it is the only way you can have the much-vaunted conversation lots of current writers talk about wanting, but act as though they do not. In the words of E. Darwin Hartshorn, it’s hard to stand on the shoulders of giants when you have cut these giants down. Imagine the state of science when we decide we’re going to ignore research and discoveries done in the past because they were made by straight white men–

Oh, wait . . . 

HItching your wagon to the dominant, ephemeral, ever-shifting cultural forces and topical subjects will make your work dated and insubstantial. It’s as simple as that. Nobody cares about how many trans, non-binary, POCs you cram your book full of if your book is bad. Nobody cares about the identity of the author if the book is bad. If one uses the demographic density of characters or creators as a litmus test for a work’s quality, then they must be a moron.

This explains so much of the current state of sci-fi and fantasy, why it’s dying out, and why most people still prefer the old, irrelevant classics. There is a reason why Hollywood is working on yet another Dune movie, but nobody is beating down John Scalzi’s door to make an Old Man’s War film franchise. 

I’m not saying that movie adaptations are an indicator of quality–one would have to be a moron to believe that–but I am saying that the canon is far from dead or irrelevant.

I think much of this animus is based upon jealousy. There’s also the willful ignorance factor to think about. The current crop of angry, axe-grinding authors of various demographic groups who are, like, totally the first ones ever to write sci-fi seem to act as though Octavia Butler, Charles R. Saunders, Samuel Delaney, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula K. LeGuin, Leigh Brackett, or Margaret Weiss, among others, never existed. Nope! History began yesterday when these badasses totally kicked down all sorts of barriers, started giving themselves awards, and locking people who didn’t look like them out. So there is residual racial anger and sexuality anger, because straight white men are the worst, but there’s also professional anger because THE OLD WRITERS SELL BETTER AND ARE MORE POPULAR AND WELL-KNOWN THAN THE AWARD WINNERS OF TODAY.

America reads plenty. They just aren’t interested in reading what’s shoved down their throats.

Yesterday’s heroes will become today’s monsters at the whim of the woke. And the rest of the hordes will go along with this thinking at the drop of a hat, like a school of not-too-bright fish, because the one thing they fear above all else is exclusion. They want to be a part of this group so badly, they’re willing to forfeit core beliefs they held for years in favor of their new core belief they were instructed about five minutes ago. Is it any wonder why the NPC meme took off?

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I understand wanting to blaze your own creative path. I understand doing so without reliance on what came before. All of this makes sense to me. You aren’t beholden to the past in the sense that you don’t have to do everything exactly the way it had been done before. Without deviation from the norm, as Frank Zappa was fond of putting it, progress is not possible. Yet even Zappa based a good chunk of his music on blues, jazz, rock, and classical that came before him.

I can also understand liking what you like. What I don’t understand is hating–literally hating–other people for not liking what you like

What I similarly don’t understand or condone is the active destruction of the canon, the desire to burn it all down and have a Year Zero–with the cultural arsonists as the new arbiters of canon–and ruin everything for everyone. We’re at a point now, in this inverted world we call home, where encouraging people to read and understand writers of the past is considered fascist, while throwing the canon in the memory hole, discouraging curiosity about the past, and, presumably, burning books and destroying digital copies of said canon is considered the heart of progress.

But what do you expect from a bunch of Godless communists?

I’m aware that I don’t know the exact political bent of the canon-destroyers, but my guess is that they’re probably big fans of the hammer and sickle, or at least its methods of attaining power and control. I’m also aware that I don’t know their exact religious bent either, but I have a sneaking suspicion it ultimately involves worship and praise of that guy with the horns and pointy stick.

Because at the end of the day, the dismissal and destruction of those who came before is based on resentment and does not lead to the creation of good culture, but the destruction of good culture, and its replacement with garbage that will not stand the test of time because it is not based on anything good, beautiful, or true.

Maybe you’ll like my writing. Maybe you won’t. One thing you’ll notice, though, are nods to the past, a vision for the future, and the fact that I don’t insult anybody. Check out The Last Ancestor here.

If people like other works better than mine, fine. I don’t take that personally. It just means I have to work harder.

I love my readers! All of you!