Why Are so Many of the Great Writers in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Falling into Neglect ?

[Teresa Edgerton]

A quick look on Amazon shows a number of fairly recent collections of his work (which include introductions and analysis), plus some older books one can buy used. Among them is The Supernatural Tales of Fitz-James O'Brien, a two book set I bought used, and which I think may have everything —although by the time I bought the set, I think I'd located most of the stories online for free. I really would not call him neglected.

For other authors, I believe most of the books in Wordsworth Editions series Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural are pretty readily available. A lot of classic and lesser known stories by 19th and early 20th century authors brought back into the light during the last decade or so. But they are mostly single author collections, which doesn't give the same opportunities for discovering new authors while enjoying revisiting those one already knows. (But a variety of authors one may know from other types of fiction, for which they are these days more famous.)

 

[KGeo777]

I meant in the 70s and 80s--he was not talked about. I am surprised by that. Today, he is not.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Well, as I said, it depends on who you are talking to (on this forum, for instance, we've talked about O' Brien before), and also these things go in cycles.

____

Also, that two book set I was talking about, that was published in 1988. So someone was paying attention to O'Brien then. A big publishing house like Doubleday would not have brought out two volumes of his stories unless they had reason to expect there would be significant interest=sales.

 

[KGeo777]

He's in the Penguin Encyclopedia, but as I suspected, it's a tiny entry. They mention the influence What Was It? may have had on Bierce, but not Guy de Maupassant which is what made me take notice (having read Lovecraft heaping praise on his work).

 

[Parson]

Interesting thread. But I never expected to see this said seriously:

I though the Diamond Lens was like Poe combined with Dr Seuss.

 

[KGeo777]

Interesting thread. But I never expected to see this said seriously:

Haha well it IS a miniature world like Horton Hears a Who combined with one of Poe's obsession-murder stories.

 

[hitmouse]

This was on the table of stocking fillers a couple of Christmases ago at Waterstones. I perused it at the time and thought it had a bit more heft than the usual Christmas fare of silly quiz books, lightweight humour and celeb biogs.

Actually looks quite interesting and might add something useful to some of the fragile arguments on this thread.

 

[Extollager]

But are Fower's authors, writers in the genres of sf, fantasy, and horror?

So far, this thread's takeaway for me is that "great" or even "really quite good" writers who've made a mark in those genres almost never do become forgotten or "neglected."

Once Ballantine Books, especially, saw, back in the 1960s, that there was money to be made by reprinting out of print fantasy, they brought a lot of it into print in inexpensive editions, and other publishers had to scramble to find things to revive. And of those revived books, a great many of them remain in print or easily available.

Since I've been so critical of the premise of this thread, I'll say, though, that, if not an author, there is at least a book that I think's sort of been neglected -- Rachel Maddux's The Green Kingdom. And yet it is in print!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0870497804/?tag=id2100-20

But you never see people mention it.

 

[BAYLOR]

But are Fower's authors, writers in the genres of sf, fantasy, and horror?

So far, this thread's takeaway for me is that "great" or even "really quite good" writers who've made a mark in those genres almost never do become forgotten or "neglected."

Once Ballantine Books, especially, saw, back in the 1960s, that there was money to be made by reprinting out of print fantasy, they brought a lot of it into print in inexpensive editions, and other publishers had to scramble to find things to revive. And of those revived books, a great many of them remain in print or easily available.

Since I've been so critical of the premise of this thread, I'll say, though, that, if not an author, there is at least a book that I think's sort of been neglected -- Rachel Maddux's The Green Kingdom. And yet it is in print!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0870497804/?tag=id2100-20

But you never see people mention it.

The Green Kingdom By Rachel Maddux . Ive never heard of it. and based on the description, It sounds quite interesting .

 

[anno]

Hemingway will never be a forgotten author, his prose is astounding and he reflects his time, however I think it will be recognition of his short stories that will endure.
In my opinion he is and indeed was a literary genius.

 

[KGeo777]

He has already slipped. He may not have as many artificial boosters as Lee, Salinger or Steinbeck did, but for the time he was enjoying some of the same concentrated focus on mundane reality which was guided by publisher taste more than audiences. Burroughs enjoyed no such critical or educational boost yet remains more culturally relevant. Fantasy just has a longer shelf life. Read Hemingway in school and it is a complete blur--yet the opening 60 lines of Paradise Lost remain committed to memory.

 

[hitmouse]

He has already slipped. He may not have as many artificial boosters as Lee, Salinger or Steinbeck did, but for the time he was enjoying some of the same concentrated focus on mundane reality which was guided by publisher taste more than audiences. Burroughs enjoyed no such critical or educational boost yet remains more culturally relevant. Fantasy just has a longer shelf life. Read Hemingway in school and it is a complete blur--yet the opening 60 lines of Paradise Lost remain committed to memory.

But that's just, like your opinion, man.
I don't see much agreement here.
Give us some evidence for a reasoned discussion.

 

[KGeo777]

How many slice of life works from antiquity are fondly remembered today? How many from the Elizabethan era? The Journal of the Plague Years (I am not sure I would call that mundane though). The 20th century saw the splitting of art into two camps--art for the elite and art for the public. I don't think such a distinction existed in Shakespeare's time (indeed-the Globe theater was designed to house all segments of society--thus the groundlings and "rotten tomatoes" come into the language because of that). Certainly not in the time of the Borgias.
Another thing with Hemingway specifically is how much the man was considered a topic of interest--same with Picasso--as much as the works, if not more so.
But anyway this is what Lovecraft said which I tend to agree with (although he has a pompous way of expressing it) when comparing the wave of writers in the 1920s and 30s to a couple of decades earlier. Interestingly, Truman Capote said much the same in 1968.

"The feelings & ideals presented are not our feelings & ideals—so that today our newest authors are as exotic to us as the French symbolists or Japanese hokku-writers. This, of course, applies to literature as a whole. Naturally, a good deal of representative stuff manages to get published. It is not difficult to point out what is meant by this insidious exoticism. What is happening is that books are preferred when they reflect an emotional attitude toward life which is profoundly foreign to the race as a whole. The preferred writers are detailedly interested in things which do not interest us, & are callous to the real impulses & aspirations which move us most. Anderson & Faulkner, delving in certain restricted strata, seldom touch on any chord to which the reader personally responds. We recognise their art, but admire them at a distance—as we admire Turgeniev & Baudelaire. Whether our own representative authors do as well in their art as their foreign-influenced types is beside the question. If they do not—as is entirely possible—then the thing to do is to stimulate better & freer expression among them; not to turn away from them & encourage expression in exotic fields. This can be done without injustice to the admitted intrinsic excellence of the exotics & decadents." from a letter 1933

 

[Extollager]

KGeo777 wrote, "How many slice of life works from antiquity are fondly remembered today? How many from the Elizabethan era?"

For this to be a meaningful question, we have to know if such works were written at all. "How many" is a numerical question. Then, too, "fondly remembered" -- ?

But It seems that writing fiction with a kind of photographic approach to recording states of mind belonging to "ordinary people" living "ordinary lives" is a late and basically unprecedented literary discovery. Similarly, in the several thousands of years for which we have pictorial art, the exquisite rendering of perspective is pretty recent. Why the writers and artists weren't, apparently, interested in such effects is an interesting matter.

But if you're suggesting that such fiction was written, but hasn't survived as something people like to read -- I think that's a very questionable assertion. It seems, rather, that we don't have those works because they weren't written in the first place. (We don't seem to have allusions to a host of "slice of life" poems, plays, stories, or novels in the literary works that did survive. I think that's because they never existed, rather than that there was an abundance of them once, but they lacked staying power with readers.)

 

[KGeo777]

Virgil did write about beekeeping. There were some ancient Greek novels-although their content, like Shakespeare, drifted to fantasy. But if slice of life was not written--then it just confirms the point all the more-that the move away from fantasy in "respectable" literary criticism was not something engineered by public taste. In Canada there was an author Margaret Laurence who wrote about alcoholism and welfare problems while living on a reservation. She received massive government and "respectable" media praise--required reading in school (so many other more worthy works could have been read instead, alas). Was there widespread audience appreciation? We have our doubts. At the same time, A.E. van Vogt was completely ignored in Canadian schools and media, even though I believe his earliest works were published when he resided in Canada.

 

[Extollager]

"...the point all the more-that the move away from fantasy in 'respectable' literary criticism was not something engineered by public taste."

That's a big subject, but, yeah, that sounds about right to me, too, for what that's worth. I think writers developed what could be called "surface realism"* as a legitimate expansion of literature and they brought members of the reading public, which was expanding, with them. For example, more women (who did not have the same education as males) were reading in the 18th and 19th centuries than previously; they enjoyed reading stories about women with whom they could identify, in settings that seemed relatively close to soceity as they knew it. And this was an element in the rise of the novel, which became the prevalent literary form -- for the first time in history, I suppose -- where formerly, literary endeavor was primarily undertaken in the various forms of poetry and drama. Men and women with literary talent thus naturally gravitated to the novel, which lends itself to surface realism.

*I like to say "surface realism" to refer to the familiar kind of writing that emphasizes emotions and physical experiences we readily feel we recognize (e.g. when a writer describes the sensation of drinking the first cup of coffee of the morning), and "commonplace" scenes and so on. I don't like to say that this is "realism" per se because that begs some questions. An allegorical fantasy or a fantastic satire may convey more realism about our experience of the inner life, of temptation and so on, than a "realistic" novel often does, but it would seem awkward to say that, say, The Screwtape Letters is a work of "realistic" literature. It's fantasy. But it's very realistic about the inner life. Or take even Spenser's Faerie Queene. Here the story makes no effort to evoke "surface realism"; it's knights and enchanters and nymphs and dragons -- all in elaborate verse. But it can be very realistic about, e.g., despondency.

 

[Ogma]

But Hemingway can't be forgotten. The Hemingway Hoax would make no sense.

 

[hitmouse]

But Hemingway can't be forgotten. The Hemingway Hoax would make no sense.

Nor would Key West.

 

[hitmouse]

The 20th century saw the splitting of art into two camps--art for the elite and art for the public.

Really?
I would have thought that the 20th century was the great era for the democratisation of the arts, hand in hand with widespread education, public health, and the social safety net. The fact is that orchestral music, opera, and ballet were inaccessible to almost all but the urban and the monied in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, mass media (TV, radio, periodicals) and mass literacy mean that the arts became geographically accessible in the 20th century. Also the sheer quantity of material increased. One could see ballet or opera on TV, listen to all sorts of music, drama, debate on the radio. Go to the cinema. Printed literature is relatively inexpensive, and its distribution is widespread: certain types may be read more or less in certain societies or subcultures, and reading skills will be a factor, but beyond that, access to art and culture, if one excludes status symbols like the box at the Albert Hall, became much more a matter of personal choice in the 20th century than it ever had been before then.

 

[KGeo777]

But that is a work about the man as a figure in the story, not about his work--which is what I am referring to. The Man Who Collected Poe was more directly about the author since he was being held captive to produce more writing. The Hemingway Hoax appears to only use the author as a peripheral character--if the title had been The Faulkner Fake, a different author might have served much the same function. The name Hemingway will remain known for some time, the question is whether his writing will be referenced with the similar frequency as Poe. I think even Lovecraft now enjoys more popular affection than Hemingway--and how much attention did Lovecraft get when Hemingway was writing his early work? Lovecraft's ascent is mostly due to interest in his writing or ideas, outside of what so-called official literary criticism was interested in.