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Look On My Works Ye Mighty and Despair: the Literary Future


The Marquis de Leech

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(Originally a blog post I thought I'd share)

I think everyone has these thoughts occasionally. You know, pondering what the world will be like long after you’re gone. Matters of great importance, or even the entire human race, reduced to eventual insignificance by the tyranny of chronology… it’s an underlying staple of a certain pessimistic branch of science-fiction. H.P. Lovecraft had something to say about this, but he was not the first, not by a long chalk. Olaf Stapledon engages with the idea even more directly, first through exploring the next few billion years of human evolution (The Last and First Men), and then having a work on such a scale, that he resorts to characterising sentient stars (Star Maker).

There is, I think, a certain awe-inspiring terror to truly Deep Time… but as Lovecraft implies, the human mind cannot properly comprehend it. We are, after all, creatures for whom a mere hundred years is a long time, never mind a thousand, or ten thousand – and that is not inherently a bad thing. It is simply who we are. And once we can shrink things down to historical time scales, we can start engaging with ideas properly. More specifically, that strange little grab for immortality known as writing.

Human beings have been expressing ideas for much, much longer than writing has been around. Oral traditions are powerful things. But such is the nature of writing that it enables us to access minds long dead, often in a manner far more direct and unmediated than “mere” word of mouth. Yes, we’ve got the oral stuff that was written down, preserved for the ages. We’ve got the fragments of Gilgamesh. We’ve got the Illiad, and Beowulf, and the Icelandic Sagas, and we sorely need to thank Snorri Sturluson. But we’ve also got stuff that wasn’t oral tradition in the proper sense (even if the works were compiled posthumously). We can access the thoughts of Confucius, Plato, and Aristotle, further removed in chronology from, say, the medieval era than the medieval era is from our own time. These intellectual bedrock figures continue to have such importance, precisely because their work is preserved via the medium of writing. And, more to the point, these ancient written works will continue to be read long after you and I, dear reader, are forgotten.

I think every writer secretly dreams that some aspect of our work will live on after we die. That the work we’ve bequeathed to the world will still entertain and engage future generations – hell, we’ve certainly got a better shot at cultural immortality than those who don’t write, right? Well, yes. And so long as some copy of your work still sits, gathering dust, in a library basement or on the uppermost shelf of a second-hand bookshop, the ghost of a writer’s ideas will never quite vanish from this earth. But… and here is the sobering reality… will anyone actually read us in the years to come? For every giant of the literary canon, there are many tens of thousands whose work will not be remembered. Or, even if they are remembered, are never actually read – poor Bulwer-Lytton, a figure our great-great-grandparents might have read unironically, is now only associated with the “worst opening line in English literature” (it isn’t, but I digress).

To take the fantasy genre, a century ago – and a century is not actually a long time, when one really thinks about it – we had the likes of William Morris, Lord Dunsany, Abraham Merritt, William Hope Hodgson, and E.R. Eddison. Obscure figures now, but at least remembered by fantasy buffs, and still accessible if you do a bit of library hunting, or muck around with Project Gutenberg. These, dear reader, were the lucky ones. If, in a hundred years, any writer producing stuff today still has people picking up their work, they’ve made it, at least for now. A hundred years ain’t a long time, after all – give it another three hundred, and then check back on progress.

And what of the leading genre figures today? Never mind a century – let’s settle for the much more manageable figure of fifty years hence. What will people be reading then? I’d suggest Tolkien – he’s been dead for nearly half a century already, and he’s still a perennial read (though even here fashions change. Walter Scott used to be a Big Name in literature, before dropping off the radar a bit). J.K. Rowling might survive too, perhaps because the tradition of bedtime reading helps the longevity of children’s works – parents remember what was read to them as a child, and so on. But after that? Who knows? It’s entirely possible that fifty years from now, George R.R. Martin is better remembered for producing one of the finest vampire novels of the twentieth century than for A Song of Ice and Fire – and, before you scoff, I’d point out that Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells did not exactly go to plan in the magnum opus department either. History has a very strange sense of humour sometimes.

All this is very deflating to us writers, of course. But what of readers? Are there any lessons to be taken from the transience of human existence? In one sense, no. To be honest, I think there is still a perfectly valid case for just reading what you like, without regard to what survives long term. So what if Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey disappears down the memory plughole in the years to come? If you enjoy those books, go ahead and read them, and if you don’t, don’t judge others for reading them. Different tastes, and all that, and who knows what will end up having the last laugh anyway. The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Goethe, was arguably the eighteenth century Twilight (its reception even anticipated the eccentricities of modern fandom), and it still gets made required reading in some places.

On the other hand – and I have pondered this during my recent binge on the classics – if you extend the time-frame out from fifty years hence to five hundred, what will people be reading then? Who knows… but if I was a betting man, I’d place money on dear old Confucius, Plato, and Aristotle, even above Shakespeare, Dante, and Chaucer. What’s another five centuries when you have already lasted two and a half millennia? Maybe in order to truly engage with the far-future – to anticipate what they will be reading, and thinking about – you have to, at least on some level, engage with the distant past. Just a thought anyway.

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14 minutes ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

(Originally a blog post I thought I'd share)

I think everyone has these thoughts occasionally. You know, pondering what the world will be like long after you’re gone. Matters of great importance, or even the entire human race, reduced to eventual insignificance by the tyranny of chronology… it’s an underlying staple of a certain pessimistic branch of science-fiction. H.P. Lovecraft had something to say about this, but he was not the first, not by a long chalk. Olaf Stapledon engages with the idea even more directly, first through exploring the next few billion years of human evolution (The Last and First Men), and then having a work on such a scale, that he resorts to characterising sentient stars (Star Maker).

There is, I think, a certain awe-inspiring terror to truly Deep Time… but as Lovecraft implies, the human mind cannot properly comprehend it. We are, after all, creatures for whom a mere hundred years is a long time, never mind a thousand, or ten thousand – and that is not inherently a bad thing. It is simply who we are. And once we can shrink things down to historical time scales, we can start engaging with ideas properly. More specifically, that strange little grab for immortality known as writing.

Human beings have been expressing ideas for much, much longer than writing has been around. Oral traditions are powerful things. But such is the nature of writing that it enables us to access minds long dead, often in a manner far more direct and unmediated than “mere” word of mouth. Yes, we’ve got the oral stuff that was written down, preserved for the ages. We’ve got the fragments of Gilgamesh. We’ve got the Illiad, and Beowulf, and the Icelandic Sagas, and we sorely need to thank Snorri Sturluson. But we’ve also got stuff that wasn’t oral tradition in the proper sense (even if the works were compiled posthumously). We can access the thoughts of Confucius, Plato, and Aristotle, further removed in chronology from, say, the medieval era than the medieval era is from our own time. These intellectual bedrock figures continue to have such importance, precisely because their work is preserved via the medium of writing. And, more to the point, these ancient written works will continue to be read long after you and I, dear reader, are forgotten.

I think every writer secretly dreams that some aspect of our work will live on after we die. That the work we’ve bequeathed to the world will still entertain and engage future generations – hell, we’ve certainly got a better shot at cultural immortality than those who don’t write, right? Well, yes. And so long as some copy of your work still sits, gathering dust, in a library basement or on the uppermost shelf of a second-hand bookshop, the ghost of a writer’s ideas will never quite vanish from this earth. But… and here is the sobering reality… will anyone actually read us in the years to come? For every giant of the literary canon, there are many tens of thousands whose work will not be remembered. Or, even if they are remembered, are never actually read – poor Bulwer-Lytton, a figure our great-great-grandparents might have read unironically, is now only associated with the “worst opening line in English literature” (it isn’t, but I digress).

To take the fantasy genre, a century ago – and a century is not actually a long time, when one really thinks about it – we had the likes of William Morris, Lord Dunsany, Abraham Merritt, William Hope Hodgson, and E.R. Eddison. Obscure figures now, but at least remembered by fantasy buffs, and still accessible if you do a bit of library hunting, or muck around with Project Gutenberg. These, dear reader, were the lucky ones. If, in a hundred years, any writer producing stuff today still has people picking up their work, they’ve made it, at least for now. A hundred years ain’t a long time, after all – give it another three hundred, and then check back on progress.

And what of the leading genre figures today? Never mind a century – let’s settle for the much more manageable figure of fifty years hence. What will people be reading then? I’d suggest Tolkien – he’s been dead for nearly half a century already, and he’s still a perennial read (though even here fashions change. Walter Scott used to be a Big Name in literature, before dropping off the radar a bit). J.K. Rowling might survive too, perhaps because the tradition of bedtime reading helps the longevity of children’s works – parents remember what was read to them as a child, and so on. But after that? Who knows? It’s entirely possible that fifty years from now, George R.R. Martin is better remembered for producing one of the finest vampire novels of the twentieth century than for A Song of Ice and Fire – and, before you scoff, I’d point out that Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells did not exactly go to plan in the magnum opus department either. History has a very strange sense of humour sometimes.

All this is very deflating to us writers, of course. But what of readers? Are there any lessons to be taken from the transience of human existence? In one sense, no. To be honest, I think there is still a perfectly valid case for just reading what you like, without regard to what survives long term. So what if Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey disappears down the memory plughole in the years to come? If you enjoy those books, go ahead and read them, and if you don’t, don’t judge others for reading them. Different tastes, and all that, and who knows what will end up having the last laugh anyway. The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Goethe, was arguably the eighteenth century Twilight (its reception even anticipated the eccentricities of modern fandom), and it still gets made required reading in some places.

On the other hand – and I have pondered this during my recent binge on the classics – if you extend the time-frame out from fifty years hence to five hundred, what will people be reading then? Who knows… but if I was a betting man, I’d place money on dear old Confucius, Plato, and Aristotle, even above Shakespeare, Dante, and Chaucer. What’s another five centuries when you have already lasted two and a half millennia? Maybe in order to truly engage with the far-future – to anticipate what they will be reading, and thinking about – you have to, at least on some level, engage with the distant past. Just a thought anyway.

Imagine if five hundred years from now, Dan Brown, Harold Robbins, and Terry Goodkind are remembered as the literary giants of our era.

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Nassim Taleb has that "law" that the longer something has been around the more likely it is to stay around. So, yes, put your money on Shakespeare before Dickens, on Dante before Shakespeare and on Plato, Homer, the Bible and the Vedic writings and similar stuff before all of them.

As you hint at, some things survive in strange guises. I mostly unironically read "The last days of Pompeii" as a young teenager (in German and probably abridged) and even in primary school I had encountered animated cartoons of Don Quixote, Pinocchio and Gulliver's Travels (especially the latter had almost nothing to do with Swift, besides a few names and that there were small people).

And yes, Werther was still required reading in my 11th grade German class in 1988-89. And even more funny, as quaint as Werther might be, to me the book we also had to read seemed to have aged more in less than 20 years than Werther had in more than 200.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_neuen_Leiden_des_jungen_W.

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As an insatiable reader I have dipped into Project Gutenberg and what an experience that is for reputations. Conan Doyle always wanted to be remembered for his historical novels, not Sherlock Holmes. I saw a few of them on Project Gutenberg snd read them. They were awful. The only one that I liked was The White Company. 

Not only that but who is the extremely prolific GA Henty and why is he not even a footnote in literature?

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19 hours ago, maarsen said:

As an insatiable reader I have dipped into Project Gutenberg and what an experience that is for reputations. Conan Doyle always wanted to be remembered for his historical novels, not Sherlock Holmes. I saw a few of them on Project Gutenberg snd read them. They were awful. The only one that I liked was The White Company. 

Not only that but who is the extremely prolific GA Henty and why is he not even a footnote in literature?

I checked Wikipedia, and apparently Henty was a writer of nineteenth century adventure novels... that were disturbingly racist and imperialist by nineteenth century standards. Which is some achievement. And he's been resurrected by US conservatives for homeschooling their children. 

Generally speaking, Project Gutenberg is supremely awesome though.

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1 hour ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

I checked Wikipedia, and apparently Henty was a writer of nineteenth century adventure novels... that were disturbingly racist and imperialist by nineteenth century standards. Which is some achievement. And he's been resurrected by US conservatives for homeschooling their children. 

Generally speaking, Project Gutenberg is supremely awesome though.

I go through the listing for historical reading and Henty's name is everywhere but I had never heard of him. 

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12 minutes ago, maarsen said:

I go through the listing for historical reading and Henty's name is everywhere but I had never heard of him. 

I'd never heard of him either. Can you post a link of the list?

(I do wonder if Henty's following among the modern American Right has boosted his traffic, causing his books to show up more often...).

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curious.  difficult to infer a writer's beliefs simply from the evidence of some of his fictional characters' statements. it may well be that homeschoolers like henty because of the racist characters, though it may well be that he's an old white imperialist that universities don't teach and therefore maintains a certain politcal purity for them.  

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I never read The White Company but I think my brother read it years ago and liked it well enough. I think the "Professor Challenger" (Lost world etc.) novels and novellas are not worse than the Sherlock Holmes stories (admittedly I only read them once around 20 years ago whereas I have revisited some Holmes once in a while since I read the first ones aour 35 years ago as a kid). A few weeks ago I read all or most of the "A. J. Raffles" stories by Doyle's brother-in-law Hornung and while they are entertaining enough, it seems quite understandable and deserved that they are mostly forgotten, certainly didn't acquire the status of the Holmes stories.

As for Henty, I had not heard of him but what is quoted on wikipedia seems in no way extreme for 19th century views; sure, it's racist, but I am pretty sure one would find similar quotes in better known authors like Rider Haggard. Heck, even Mark Twain who must be considered as on the side of the coloured depicts Jim sympathetically but Jim (an adult) is clearly no way as smart as  13-14? yo Huck Finn. (And then there's that halfbreed Injun Joe who is not stupid but evil.)

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I always thought The White Company was very good (and admirably frank in depicting English atrocities in France).  In fact, it's remarkably explicit for a novel that was published in 1890, in the UK.  Very much, the Game of Thrones of its era.

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8 hours ago, maarsen said:

I go through the listing for historical reading and Henty's name is everywhere but I had never heard of him. 

If he's the "With Clive in India" ("With X in Y", really) guy, that's a strange lapse on your part. Working backwards from context I assume he was "that guy (reporter?) who wrote boys adventure fiction during the Victorian/Edwardian era of places he'd never been where the hero succeeds by pluck".

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12 hours ago, Jo498 said:

As for Henty, I had not heard of him but what is quoted on wikipedia seems in no way extreme for 19th century views; sure, it's racist, but I am pretty sure one would find similar quotes in better known authors like Rider Haggard. Heck, even Mark Twain who must be considered as on the side of the coloured depicts Jim sympathetically but Jim (an adult) is clearly no way as smart as  13-14? yo Huck Finn. (And then there's that halfbreed Injun Joe who is not stupid but evil.)

Rider Haggard does, however, have that bit in King Solomon's Mines, where Quartermain notes that he doesn't like a certain racist word. KSM actually holds up pretty well today (apart from the elephant hunting).

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"She" is really pretty good, it's about the best of that kind of adventure novel I have read, a deserved classic (even apart from Jungian subtexts or whatever). KSM is less ambitious but also good. However, I found "Ayesha" (Return of She) too weird to continue with more HRH. He has plenty of beautiful noble savages, one of the main characters in "She" is so ugly that the natives call him "baboon" as nickname, and he is probably less racist than most contemporaries but note how the hottentot guide in KSM is expendable (he freezes do death on their quest) and "She" is of course white (like Conan's "Queen of the Black Coast") leading a coloured people etc.

As I said, I know nothing about Henty, but that quote describing some natives (or blacks) as "childlike" and in danger of falling "back into barbarism" without the leadership of the white man is a standard trope and rather mild for its time, certainly not worth singling out as a particularly vile bit of racism.

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17 hours ago, illrede said:

If he's the "With Clive in India" ("With X in Y", really) guy, that's a strange lapse on your part. Working backwards from context I assume he was "that guy (reporter?) who wrote boys adventure fiction during the Victorian/Edwardian era of places he'd never been where the hero succeeds by pluck".

I read a lot of boy's adventure fiction while I was a boy but nothing by Henty, unless I have completely forgotten, which is unlikely for me. I still remember details of the Tom Swift and Hardy Boys stuff I read 50 years ago. 

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On 8/9/2019 at 9:52 AM, The Marquis de Leech said:

I'd never heard of him either. Can you post a link of the list?

(I do wonder if Henty's following among the modern American Right has boosted his traffic, causing his books to show up more often...).

I don't have a link. I use the search function in Project Gutenberg and look for historical fiction. You can then scroll through different eras of history and Henty's name keeps coming up. The man was prolific. 

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