An interesting discussion at LibraryThing on Dune‘s effect on the science-fiction genre:
One of my favourite things about SF is that the sheer amount of stuff that those authors pack into these books is unbelievable.
Case in point: Double Star, by Robert A. Heinlein – in less than 200 pages Heinlein gives us space travel, political intrigue, thrills and chills, and the obvious inspiration for the Kevin Kline movie “Dave.”
Now Dune gives us a lot as well; space travel, economics, guilds, family drama, mysticism, desert people, sand worms, and martial arts. The problem, to do all of this Frank Herbert needed a lot of space, 517 pages of space, and to be fair, with the incredible amount of stuff Herbert put into the book, he needed all of it.
Now Dune went on to win all sorts of awards, and is credited by many SF fans as a personal favourite or even the book that turned them onto SF. My problem is the effect Dune had on SF as a genre. Basically, people looked at it and instead of saying, “Wow – you can have this kind of massive family drama/economic intrigue/war story/mystical journey all in the context of SF”, they said, “Dune must be awesome because it’s really long.”
So after 1965 all SF started to get really, REALLY, BIG. I mean, when I’ve lined up my copy of Dune with three SF books that had been written in the previous decade (Double Star and Starship Troopers by Heinlein, and Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement), all of them award winners, all of them critically acclaimed, and all of them barely adding up to the page count that is DUNE.
The trend of writing bigger SF books never stopped. Have you looked at the page count of recent SF? These things are monsters, often coming in at just under a thousand pages and the worst thing is a lot of it feels like filler, and I am not the only one to notice this.
The discussion is worth following on its own merits and the commenters have some thoughtful explanations for the shift (e.g., novels were no longer being serialized in magazines before coming out in book form).
But what I find really intriguing is the idea of a single book transforming an entire genre. What other books have had such profound effects on their respective genres?
(Via: IO9)
September 5th, 2009 | 8:57 pm
Ask something hard next time, won’t you?
Gosh, I would say Tolkien would be in the running for profoundly effecting the fantasy genre. I can’t think what the genre was like before him. Grimm’s fairy tales. Maybe Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur as fantastical allegory. After Tolkien created his version of English history, complete with elven language, other fantasy writers now are meticulous about creating their own worlds. My current favorites are Robin Hobb and David Weber.
Oh, I’m too mentally lazy to delve any deeper! The topic is wonderful and I hope others can keep it going.
September 5th, 2009 | 9:00 pm
Well, Lord of the Rings either transformed or created the (very long) epic fantasy genre. And that’s another good example of a great work that has been endlessly imitated by vastly inferior talents.
My 14-year-old son just began reading Ray Bradbury; I envy him, in a way. Think about reading someone like that for the first time, rather than encountering SF and fantasy through the bloated offerings filling the racks!
September 5th, 2009 | 9:05 pm
Another thought: Did “Shane” transform the Western in any way? I don’t think it did, even though it’s always held up as an exemplar of its genre–at least, it did not bring about the seismic shifts “Dune” and LOTR did.
September 5th, 2009 | 9:08 pm
Did “Catcher in the Rye” transform the narrative structure of the modern novel?
“Ulysses” was sui generis; I think you could make a case that “Catcher” was actually more influential on its generation of writers.
September 5th, 2009 | 9:08 pm
Tolkien singlehandedly invented the fantasy genre with Lord of the Rings.
September 5th, 2009 | 9:43 pm
The obvious candidate, of course, is The Lord of the Rings, which practically created the modern fantasy genre, or at the very least defined it.
September 5th, 2009 | 11:40 pm
It’s actually due to where novels are sold. They used to be sold in super-markets and had to be thin enough to fit into the racks. Now they are sold primarily in bookstores and are displayed spines out, so need a wider spine. Check across genres and you’ll see that thicker books are not confined to SF or Fantasy.
September 6th, 2009 | 11:30 pm
Well, Tolkien in 1931, but the other co-creator of modern fantasy was Robert E Howard (1906-36). Almost all of those garish dragon covers at your local bookstore are drawn from the two extremes of LOTR and Conan/ Kull in varying degrees.
September 7th, 2009 | 10:33 am
Thinking of Howard makes me also think of Lovecraft. He didn’t exactly define modern horror, but he did divide it: There seems to be the Lovecraftian model of horror (the underlying terror of the vast, Godless cosmos always seeking to “break through” into our world), and then there’s the splatter-fest.
I suppose there might be the in-between as well; Stephen King would probably fit here.
September 7th, 2009 | 6:32 pm
The modern sf trend, at least for new authors, is to split a long book and market one story as a series. On that score, I’d say Tolkien (or more accurately, his publishers) set the tone for that.
Writers want to tell stories, and sf is conducive for good stories. Sometimes good stories take a lot of print.
September 7th, 2009 | 8:26 pm
Anyone else like the first “Amber” series by Roger Zelazny?
September 11th, 2009 | 11:12 pm
Joe Carter’s thesis is intriguing and I’m not sure I disagree. There is another paradox involving DUNE. It was serialized in Analog during that magazines golden age (then owned and published by Conde Nast with some of the most gorgeous, painterly covers in SF history — John Schoenherr being my the greatest contributor). Analog at that time published some extraordinary short stories — imaginative, insightful, probing. John W. Campbell may have been “eccentric,” but he was one hell of an editor. The artist John Schoenherr wrote me some years ago that he believed the magazine began its decline somewhere around 1975. An as noted by Joseph Bottum here previously, Heinlein also contributed to the bloat and the freakishness of latter day science fiction. Schoenherr, by the way, invented the DUNE look, including the fabulous worms and graceful duneworlds. He has moved on to nature paintings and some beautiful children’s picture books (OWN MOON by Jane Yolen being one). My own goal when I sit down to write is fidelity to traditional SF values combined with Hemingway-like economy. See also a conversation on Catholic SF writers at Catholic World Report (Ignatius Press).
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