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Writers Who Will Stand the Test of Time?
Embedded Geek asks: "Every year, the online version of Locus (a trade magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy) asks the question: "Name the 5 deceased 20th century SF & fantasy writers you think will still be read 50 years from now." The results favored some of the bigger names (Heinlein, Asimov, Tolkein) as well as a few lesser known figures (Simak, Bester). I would like to ask a broader question: What authors (in any genre, fiction or nonfiction) alive today will still be read (hard copy or online) in 2051?" If I had to answer off of the top of my head, I know William Gibson, Charles Sheffield, and Orson Scott Card would be in my list, but that's not all of them. A few authors who I thought would be classics have since vanished (whatever did happen to Daniel Keys Moran, anyways?) aand of course there are a few iffy ones which I could be convinced on (C.J. Cherryh, anyone). What authors do you feel will stand the test of time? Yeah, these are sci-fi authors, but that's about what I read these days.
Will stand the test of time as "the classic 'missed it completely' book".
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Great show. People will definetly be watching it in 50 years.
Every highly moderated post so far has been some sci-fi or fantasy author. Yes, some of these authors probably will be read in fifty years, but not nearly as much as the "great" writers of the 20th century. A good corollary is music. Sure, people will still be listening to Black Sabbath and King Crimson in fifty years, but not nearly as many as will be listening to The Beatles and Bob Dylan. Why? Because that's the way music criticism has been running for the last thirty years, and it is showing no signs of changing directions. In order to understand why authors are still read fifty years after, you have to look at the critical direction. This shapes what is talked about, which shapes what is read, which shapes what is known in the future.
So I would say that in fifty years the most widely read authors of the 20th century will be:
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Vladimir Nabokov
T.S. Eliot
James Joyce
And probably a few others I've missed. This is the way modern criticism is shaping up, and, personally, I like it this way. Then again, a few of these could be dropped and a few added in the coming years. F. Scott Fitzgerald was not overly popular in his own time, and only became well respected when he was rediscovered in the late forties. Likewise, Shelley was practically worshipped as the greatest romantic poet for much of the 19th century, but his standing dropped dramatically with the "new criticism" of the early 20th century. This has already happened to a degree with Hemingway as he is now regarded as a bit sexist.
So yeah, some S/F is worthwhile and will be read in the future (I'd point to Dune and and LotR)...but the above authors will almost unquestionably be read.
Checkout taccom my worl war II simulator
Hmmm... kids these days... try reading Stanislaw Lem, specifically "The Cyberiad"... You'll recognize the "flavor" that you might have thought as uniquely Douglas Adams... Lem did it better, smarter and first.
Love and Tensor Algebra
from "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Bools or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product o four scalars is defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
Would someone in 50 years time be willing to wade through the dross for the good stuff?
Sure they would - they do it with plenty of writers. Dickens, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Asimov all wrote a whole heap of pants, too. But when they were good...
and the same it is with anyone