Veteran Readers: From SF and Fantasy to History and Biography

[Extollager]

This thread is intended primarily, but not necessarily exclusively, for veteran readers of science fiction and fantasy, which I'll define arbitrarily as 25+ years of reading lots of adult sf&f.

It seems to me that such veteran readers often become confirmed readers of history and biography, sometimes developing considerable knowledge of areas of interest, whether those be the Roman Empire, the American Civil War, the dynasties of Mitteleuropa, etc. These readers may develop, or retain, an interest also in science and technology. While they may continue to read sf & f--books new to them, or rereading favorites--the proportion of history and biography may increase relative to that of sf & f in their reading diet.

This impression is based on my reading of fanzine letter columns (e.g. in Alexiad), personal correspondence, etc. It may even be part of the truth, that it's the readers who are more active in fannish correspondence who read more history and biography as time passes, while people who are not active in fandom read less history and biography relative to sf & f.

It would be interesting to get others' observations on this, perhaps confirming my impression or suggesting I'm mistaken. Then it might also be interesting, if what I'm saying does seem to be the case, to discuss why this reading preference develops.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Turns up as the first debunker of the theory.

I've been reading sff for 30 odd years and, whilst I don't exclusively read the two genres, they're my primary genres. I don't have any real interest in history books (I have read the odd one, like the Lighthouse Stevenson's, which I found a great book) but don't seek them out. I have read around the Arthurian myths, but mostly when I was much younger than now. And I have nil interest whatsoever in reading about science or technology.

My reading mix probably goes:

sff - 50%
crime - 10%
general fiction - 25%
Young adult - 5%
Irish interest - 5%
Research for writing books - 5% (which might include some non fiction but only if relevant.)

 

[Peter V]

Debunker number two. 40 plus years of reading the genre and still primarily SF / fantasy /horror in a 59 / 35 / 4 mix (as an estimate). Outside of these maybe the other 2% across various other genres.

I do very much enjoy watching factual history programs though. Much less so biography.

 

[Vince W]

I can partially confirm your theory. I've been reading sff for 35+ years and I do have an interest in history and have read several biographies in this regard.

I started with obvious interests in ancient and medieval history from fantasy reading, but eventually took an interest in the Napoleonic wars reading several books on the subject and biographies of Napoleon, Wellington, Nelson, and a couple of very good ones about Thomas Cochrane.

Also my sff reading lead me to my path of study in biochemistry. I've also been very active in the use and programming of computers since the late 70's (programmed Fortran on punch cards).

While most of my reading is sff, I would estimate a ratio of 75% sff, 15% fiction (various), 7% history, 3% biography.

 

[Gonk the Insane]

veteran readers of science fiction and fantasy, which I'll define arbitrarily as 25+ years of reading lots of adult sf&f.

Oh, cripes, I've just done the maths and technically that's me.
I'm a veteran now? If this was a film I don't think I'd be the wise sergeant who gets his men home safe.

And I'm also Debunker #3:
My reading mix is about 60% Fantasy, 30% Sci-Fi, and 10% everything else. I haven't read a history or biography for years (I'm a few chapters into a biography of Alan Turing and have been for about a year. Before that... years since I read history/biography).
There is a little more about this - with particular regard to SFF writers - in another thread: https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/565366/

It seems to me that such veteran readers often become confirmed readers of history and biography

To be honest, I'm not sure you're likely to find any correlation between reading SFF and reading history/biography. It seems very general, and I would think that many people who don't read SFF do read history/biography. The level of engagement with history/biography and might be different between the two groups, but that would be tricky to judge, I would think. Interesting for sure though.

 

[TheDustyZebra]

SFF has led me to read many things in history and biography that I would not otherwise have been interested in, so I suppose that's a bit of confirmation for you. I wouldn't say it's made me a serious reader of those things, though. More of a dilettante, just poking into things that catch my interest along the way.

 

[Extollager]

My own experience is that, in my teens, I read essentially nothing but sf and fantasy (including Lovecraftian horror). Every month, Ballantine was turning out releases in its fantasy line edited by Lin Carter. I rarely bought these new, but they often showed up in stores selling used books. Plenty of other fantasy, including swords-and-sorcery, was available. I wonder if the last time I actually had read all the books I owned wasn't when I was about 13. Later I got deeply into the British ghost story tradition represented by M. R. James and others. I also took up mystery/detective fiction to some extent. (This is to say nothing of a great deal of reading connected to my teaching.)

Although historical material was included with the travel books I began to read in the early 1980s, I date the onset of my ongoing reading of a lot of historical and biographical writing that wasn't pretty closely related to my teaching, to an event about 16 years ago. For some reason Sam Tanenhaus's book about Cold War figure Whitaker Chambers caught my attention and I picked up a remaindered copy and devoured it. But I'm sometimes amazed by the historical interests and expertise of veteran sf/f fans. You can find issues of Alexiad online at efanzines.com. Check the articles and letter columns! I also correspond with an old-time Tolkien fan, and it seems to me most of his reading is historical/biographical.

Perhaps this reading trend, if it does exist in any widespread way, sometimes relates to one's own experience of growing older. One has the sense of having quite a few years to reflect on, and this might ally itself readily to a less self-focused kind of inquiry too.

But my impression might be due to reading Alexiad and a few other 'zines and to correspondence that are not all that representative.

Or maybe Chrons isn't representative and my hypothesis is right!

 

[Paul_C]

40 years or so since I started reading Sci-Fi, if I'm not reading it now then it's mostly "humorous" fiction like Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin or Jasper Fforde or crime fiction (I was an huge Agatha Christie fan in my youth).

I read some military history in my teens and twenties and the occasional auto/biography but not for quite a while.

 

[The Big Peat]

I'm probably a little young for this thread (although I'm not that far from the 25+ years thing) but I can't say its struck me yet. I can see where he's coming from though.

I actually sorta came to Fantasy through History. Fantasy was all the Medieval History Textbooks and Shakespeare that I'd been fascinated by turned into actual story form. For me, they are scratching roughly the same sort of itch. I can see how others might feel the same.

I can also see older readers drifting away from the genre. I grew up on series that started in the 80s and the genre feels pretty different in a lot of ways now, ways that I often don't approve of. All these punk kid authors need to get off of my lawn!* So maybe there's something to it although I'd be wary of placing too much faith in the idea.


*Punk kid authors who are all about a decade older than me. Old before me time, that's me.

 

[svalbard]

From reading almost 100% Fantasy my reading is broken down into

70% HF
20% Reference books ie history, bios, political journals etc.
9% Crime, Drama, Literary Fiction.
1% Fantasy.

I will not be reading another Fantasy book until George RR Martin or Mark Lawerance publish their next books.

Unless Brian get's his second installment of Chronicles before them.

 

[BigBadBob141]

Reading SF since I was young got me into Maths. Physics & Astronomy ("He Built A Crooked House" Heinlein & "The Star" Clarke).
Later I became interested in History especially Military ( Napoleonic, American Civil, WW1 & 2).
I think reading SF can really broaden your horizons!

 

[MWagner]

My reading 30 years ago:

90 per cent fiction (70 per cent SF/F, 30 per cent historical fiction)
10 per cent history

15 years ago:

70 per cent fiction (40 per cent literary fiction, 30 per cent SF/F, 30 per cent historical fiction)
30 per cent history

Today:

50 per cent fiction (40 per cent SF/F, 40 per cent historical fiction, 20 per cent literary fiction)
50 per cent history

From what I understand, it's not uncommon for people to read less fiction as they get older. Not just is volume, but as a proportion of what they read. It's harder for many people to get into that state of imagination where fictional worlds come alive. I've seen articles that show even many established novelists stop reading fiction when they hit their 50s and 60s.

As for the SF/F vs history transition, it probably has to do with when people started reading. I know when I was a kid and adolescent, there simply wasn't very much fantasy out there. I was interested in warriors and battles and epic struggles, and I could get that from historical fiction or fantasy - didn't really matter which. There wasn't the enormous number of books catering only to fantasy readers that there is today.

Conversely, having been immersed in historical drama, either in fiction or history, since I was 10 or 11 years old, I can find just as much excitement in the campaigns of Napoleon or the intrigues of the Triumverates of Rome as I can in any novel. I think younger readers who have always read nothing but fantasy have a mental barrier to enjoying history. Which is a shame.

Even much of the fantasy I read is rooted in history. I know too much about how pre-modern people see the world and live to buy into the settings and characters of most fantasy novels today.

 

[J-Sun]

I'll de-debunk the theory a little, in that I'm a history and SF fan but I was actually probably into some aspects of history even as a little kid before consciously being an SF nut and have swung back and forth more than once and have read much else besides, so it isn't exactly, "I read SF and little history but then much history and little SF" or anything simple like that. It just makes sense, to me. While I don't like "creative" history and don't much care for backwards speculative fiction, I am interested in all time and space so honest efforts at history and imagined/extrapolated futures both appeal to me. But I can also understand people not having any such connection or history folk not liking the non-"good ol' days" or future folk actively disliking the past (indeed, I don't much care for medieval times and don't think I'll care very much for the very near future either). So I don't think SF and history have to go together but probably often do.

 

[BAYLOR]

Ive been reading science fiction and fantasy for about 40 years, My first science fiction book that I read , Thats a bit of tough one. I would have to say Ray Bradbury's book Dandelion Wine in Junior High School . I read a few other books afterwards Starship Troopers, an anthology of Philip K Dick Short Stories, The Preservation Machine , Logan Run , The Hidden World by Stanton Coblentz, Day of the Giants by Lester del Rey But I was not all that avid an reader. There two writers that changed that, Robert E Howard and Harlan Ellison . I found Howard book one of the Ace edition of Conan and preceded to read all 12 books in that series and then I found The book Stalking the Nightmare one of Ellison's anthology books . After that My reading accelerated. I began to read alot more books ithe different genres. I read Asimov, Bester , Clark , Steven King, Dashell Hammett, Chandler , Dickens, Tolstoy B Traven, jack London. Lovecraft , Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, James Branch Cabell and many many more in the different genres then I can remember at this point. Ive read a quite a bit of History and other non fiction topics as well.

 

[Parson]

This thread was made for me, but unfortunately a debunker I think. I have been reading S.F. for at least 55 years. I read S.F. like Jules Verne before that but I hadn't quite caught on that it was the S.F. part of it that drew me to it. But the book that really opened it up for me was Andre Norton's "Cat's Paw." From that point on I read S.F. almost exclusively as free time reading. In the last 3 years or so, I have started listening to books on my phone and I have started reading about 80 mysteries to 20 S.F. novels. --- Mostly because there are not many S.F. novels with narration at a price that I like, $3 and under, and there are many mysteries in that range.

I am also a history major in college so I've read my share of history, but almost never for fun.... Save church history.

 

[galanx]

I follow the pattern- my early reading interest was in history/historical fiction and science fiction, but history gradually took over.

 

[Toby Frost]

I follow this pattern as well. I've always found history, especially Renaissance history and the English Civil War, very interesting, partly because the people and settings are both familiar and strange at the same time. Also, I've started to feel that SFF doesn't quite measure up to what I was hoping for. It seems to miss a sense of grandeur, but also of depth in the setting.

I also find that, unless it has something very clever to say, a fair amount of modern fantasy resembles badly-researched history with the odd monster thrown in. At that point, I find it hard to see why you shouldn't just read about the real thing.

 

[Bick]

I like the connection, and I (sort of) conform, as I read lots of SF, but as I get older, I'm getting pickier with some modern works, and have found myself gravitating to history also. If you hadn't suggested a commonality here I'd have said it was simply two separate things - liking SF and increasingly enjoying history. I'm not sure the two are connected, but it's interesting if I'm not alone as apparently I'm not.

When I was at school, 3 or 4 decades ago, I was very uninterested in history and didn't take any history options beyound the age of 13. I bitterly regret that now and read books on the dark ages, ancient Greece, Rome, etc. If I won the lottery I would give up work, and enroll in classical studues or history (preferably at Oxford). This is a million miles from my work as a biotech consultant... work I'd happily abandon but it pays the bills.

 

[vanye]

For me it was the other way round. Started out very broadly, just reading anything that had pages to turn. Then came a phase where I would seek out certain genres for a time: detective novels, adventure, political thrillers. Then at university I did literature, linguistics and history and - again - read those broadly.

This was the time I discovered first fantasy and a little later SF. So every day I would do my course reading first and then - I admit, as a treat - fantasy and SF during the night hours.

Ever since I left academia behind me to search for greener pastures, my reading has been primarily fantasy and SF (not counting the professional reading I need to do). Altogether, I make it some 30 years of these two genres and the wonder is still alive.