I grew up on a lot of Mercedes Lackey and Ann McCaffrey as well as also, Mists of Avalon. There was also Jin Yong’s wuxia and all of the Gothic for me.

When I say I want us to be better than our legacies, I mean them as well. https://twitter.com/tashadrinkstea/status/1289882532951912450

I always feel like there’s an unfortunate tendency when trying to reintroduce these books to people that we talk about them wholly in terms of how they are more progressive than their contemporaries (which some are) but judge their worth wholly on those terms.

It’s like we are trying to boil them down to being unproblematic paragons. I understand wanting that.
And they are frequently inspiring, insightful and contain moments of truth.

But, like, if we are ONLY looking for paragons. We are going to be burying a lot of names.

The past of the genres is more diverse than most acknowledge. We have far richer a legacy than just the pale stale male crowd.

But that doesn’t mean those books or the people who wrote them are all 100% unproblematic?

And I struggle to find the language to talk about those “overlooked” books sometimes because so much of the framing is always so starkly oppositional? It always feels like a gotcha when pointed out, yeah, that early-ish sff author also wrote that bad thing or did that bad thing.

Like, will there be ever space to talk about the appropriate aspects of, say, Ursula le Guin’s work? In a way that isn’t taking away from her legacy and isn’t seen as an attack, since she’s a “progressive” icon in sff and not a “traditionalist” one.