Ellie Naudzius: "Dear Bridget Smith: Screw the Classics"

Dear Bridget Smith: Screw the Classics

By Eleanor Naudzius

            At IMSA, you can answer nearly every question with “42,” and classmates will laugh at your joke. Even those who have not read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy know of its classic SF humor and absurd plot. However, the universal love for Adam’s work comes from the merit of story itself, not from its classic status. I could bash 2001: A Space Odyssey, War of the Worlds, or Blood Music any day, but certainly not Do Androids Read of Electric Sheep or A Wizard of Earthsea. The true value of an SFF novel comes from its themes, plot, and characters, not from its originality or “classic” status.

            While reading through a blog looking for interesting space operas to match Ender’s Game and Dune, I encountered Blood Music by Greg Bear. An unstable scientist, Vergil Ulam, works for a computational biology company. In a stroke of genius, he designs intelligent germs that think with protein signaling (described in over 20 pages of hard SF). In a stroke of idiocy, he injects the superbug into himself and spreads it across America. The bug turns infected humans into giant cells, trying to make humanity into one large prokaryote. At this point, I stopped reading. Bear expanded on the science of the superbug, but he could not expand on any of the characters he quickly killed. The reader only saw Vergil (the main character) as that arrogant but genius jerk we all know, nothing more. In an effort to write message fiction (which I usually enjoy), Bear suggested “Maybe that’s what your machine calls infection…Chatter. Tastes of other individuals. Peers. Superiors. Subordinates.” He wanted to suggest that humanity is one organism, but he deluded his message through awful writing and strange pronoun confusion. The book had a slow plot, underdeveloped characters, and an obvious theme. Although the blog hailed Blood Music as a classic and original SF novel, I cannot pay it a shred of respect.

             Meanwhile, the classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep provides an interesting premise, plot, and characters for any audience. After a nuclear war, Rick Deckard hunts renegade androids on desolate Earth. While trying to retire six Nexus-6 androids, Rick and Dick explore the relationships between humanity, AI, and the non-human. Dick’s story has some character development, an understandable plot, coherent science, and well-placed pronoun confusion. While we might dislike Rick and certainly hate Phil Resch, Rachael Rosen gives us a new view of the non-human. At its core, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep explores human nature and decay, from the widely expounded “kipple” to humanity’s “empathy box.” Like Bear, Dick provides an interesting message and premise behind the story. However, his ideas go deeper than Bear’s human-organism hypothesis: Dick looks at what makes us human. His message allows the book to stand alone and independent of its classic status.

            In the view of a young SSF reader, the value of a novel comes from the plot, premise, characters, and messages of a story, not its “classic” status. While the classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep develops our understanding of human nature, the classic space opera Blood Music is utter crap. Just because people liked a book thirty years ago does not mean we will like it now. This being said, I do acknowledge the importance of classics in SF culture. Although War of the Worlds is a funky book with wooden horse-drawn carts and gelatinous aliens, it formed the backbone of genre fiction. Thus, I am still inclined to read it (though not necessarily enjoy it). At the end of the day, I prefer books with an interesting story: how does it make me feel? Where does it take me? How does it keep my attention? In all honesty, I have as much loyalty to a book published yesterday as I do to a classic.