Y’all, I had a pretty lonely childhood and I salved that by applying any and every book I could get my eyeballs on. I have read the “canon” and, frankly, I have zero interest in pushing even my favorite books from those years of reading on other people.

If absolutely nothing else, that isn’t how you convince someone to love this thing that you love. Hasn’t every teenager in every high school English class taught us this? It isn’t that people have bad taste - it’s that forcing people into a thing fucks all the joy out of it.

There are so many amazing books now - and if a SFF fan has never read anything published before 2006 then more fucking power to them! Their whole basis for understanding the genre is different and that is a good thing! Burn the old gods down, SFF.

Maybe those folks will come to older literature because current literature exists in conversation with it - or maybe they will never have to make excuses for racists and fascists and old white men who feel entitled to women’s bodies.

Maybe they will never have to be a 10-year-old reading Heinlein and going “well okay I guess” when presented with incest as totes normal. Maybe they never actually have to find out Lovecraft’s cat’s name because they don’t know who Lovecraft is.

Your old and influential books will never not belong to you. I will always have Ender’s Game and Dune and every other fucking thing imprinted on the most formative years of my consciousness. It doesn’t matter if anyone else ever reads these books.

I will also always have OSC’s incredibly painful homophobia in my head, a deep and personal betrayal. There’s no reason for me to wish that on anyone else. I don’t have to lionize the man to keep the lessons I learned from his words - lessons people will learn from other books.

The canon, I think, is an effort to stop time. It freezes a moment or a series of moments in amber, preserving not only glory but dinosaurs that can open doors and come inside and eat you. You can play god, force the canon on others. Perhaps you should ask if you should.

I used to joke, as a kid who spent most of my time alone, that I was raised by Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke so I’m MOSTLY 3 Laws Safe. Are you? Are you harming others instead of making SFF a better place for folks who have been so long denied the worlds they helped create?

If you think the marginalized folks you are trying to push out haven’t been involved in SFF forever then you are so sadly mistaken. Your world is so small and narrow. Your writing reflects this. That will be your legacy.

There are many old books that I love, in many genres. I will gladly talk about them if someone asks, if someone wants to know. But I also want to know what you love, what is formative for you. Tell me whatbooks and stories are shaping your experience in SFF, are shaping YOU.

I don’t want to be frozen, to be locked in stasis, unchanging. I am still finding new formative texts because new amazing work is everywhere and that is a luxury 10-year-old me could never have imagined.

Catch up, SFF fans. Catch up or be left behind forever.