A literary tradition that I've learned to respect
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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John Cheever
15 min read
The author explicitly mentions Cheever multiple times as a key figure in postwar American literary fiction they regret not reading earlier, calling him essential to understanding the genre's rules and traditions
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Hugo Award
10 min read
The article discusses how Hugo Awards shaped science fiction writing through popular voting, creating a specific aesthetic of combining emotional stories with thought-provoking concepts—central to the author's argument about genre rules
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Gardner Dozois
11 min read
The author describes Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction anthology as formative to their literary education and a bucket-list goal, representing the institutional infrastructure that defined quality in the sci-fi genre
When I was younger, I loved science-fiction short stories. And my biggest dream for myself was to be a successful story writer—someone like Robert Reed or Michael Swanwick, who appeared regularly in the sci-fi journals and was a routine contender for the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
During this time of my life, from ages 17 to about 22, I read every major sci-fi writer and most of the minor ones. At some point I bought a lot of fifty sci-fi anthologies from eBay, and I’d spend my afternoons and evenings reading through Full Spectrum or The World of If. Later when I had access to a university library, I read all of the twenty plus volumes of the Gardner Dozois Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology, and many volumes of the Hartwell / Cramer Year’s Best as well. One of my bucket-list items was to eventually be reprinted in that Dozois Year’s Best—I loved it so much, and when Dozois died I was sad the dream would never come true.
I sometimes subscribed to sci-fi journals, but didn’t read them religiously. However, I followed the blogs and forums fairly closely, and if a story writer started getting a lot of buzz, I’d read their stuff. If I enjoyed an author’s stories, I also tried to track down whatever collections they’d released.
Then when I was about 23, I started thinking, “What about everything else?” That’s when I started reading the classics, and stopped paying such close attention to science fiction.
Literary fiction didn’t interest me as much
A few years later, I entered an MFA program, and I drifted more into the literary fiction world.
But I never really paid as much attention to American literary fiction as I’d paid to science fiction. With sci-fi, I made sure to read everything. I went through the lists of Hugo winners, even from decades past, and I read their books. Even minor writers, like Alfred Bester, C.M. Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl, Clifford Simak—I read them.
When I started reading the classics, I read the big consensus American authors—Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Henry James, and a few dozen others—but those writers are mostly from before World War II. I really did not pay that much attention to post-War American fiction. I mean...I read more than a civilian: I read Cormac McCarthy, Richard Yates, Jonathan Franzen, and dozens of others—but I never
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