I see we are once again having the fight between "if you don't read exactly the books I have personally decided are the SF/F canon, you're not a real fan" and "fuck all your dead old white guys." Must be August.

There is no one "canon." You do not need to have read every single author who was publishing prior to 1970 to understand SF, any more than those authors needed to be reading back to 1920 to understand SF. Stories change.

Not every old dead white guy is the same old dead white guy. I'm sure you could come up with something problematic about every single author in our genre, so I'm not going to start naming "the good ones," but "hey can we stop praising Lovecraft" is not "BURN BRADBURY."

I grew up in the American welfare system, in Northern California. Both these things are important. I was a voracious reader who couldn't afford new books or library fines, in a place where the climate was good for preserving old paper.

Most of my reading came from CASES and CASES of ancient pulps and genre magazines, brought home from yard sales. I own every issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction published up to 1996. ALL OF THEM.

Some are so old that they crumble when touched, but I still have them, and I've read them all. I grew up on Bradbury, Wyndham, Turtledove, Niven, and their contemporaries.

And for all of that, for all that it sounds like I'm an endorsement for wallowing in "the canon," I never read Heinlein. He was one of the forbidden authors, because Mom had heard he was dirty.

I tried sneaking one of his books, because I was curious, and it was full of sex and politics, and I was eight, I didn't care, so I mentally filed him as "boring" and never tried again.

Other authors I never read, despite my classical science fiction education: Tolkien. Because he may have done it first, but since him, a lot of other people have done it objectively better.

By the time I tried for Tolkien, I had read WATERSHIP DOWN and THE STAND, both of which are arguably pastiches of the Fellowship. I had read Brooks and Weiss and Williams, all of whom were building on his foundations.

And they knew women existed, and didn't expect me to be culturally steeped in WW2 and didn't make me take a vocabulary quiz to understand their grand adventure. He never stood a chance.

The greatest condemnation of "the canon" is also a natural outgrowth of linear time. Humans are magpies. We steal and we mix and we remix and we remake the stories surrounding us. So a base story will spread, like ink in water, to color everything around it.

Linear time makes the originals look derivative if they're not the first things you read. And when you're eleven, why the hell would you start with something so old that unless you're a little white boy, it doesn't even want you to exist?

We hear a lot about representation in fiction these days. People are hungry to see themselves in stories. But most of us are also resigned to the idea that it's never going to happen, that our complex identities would be "a checklist" if they were written into fiction.

Kids, though...kids are even hungrier. Kids are STARVING. Kids will flock to any hint of representation, because their bellies are a void. And kids are still people, kids are complicated, but they're also forming. Their checklists are easier to get into the text.

As a little girl whose choices were "read this box" or "read nothing," I read the box. And I HATED many of those men, because I never appeared in their stories. I fell in white-hot, unbreakable love with Tiptree because of "The Only Really Neat Thing To Do."

I'm pretty sure Stephen King became my favorite author because of Charlie. FIRESTARTER was the salve to my invisible little girl's heart. I could exist inside these stories! I could exist, and set you on fire with my rage! SIGN ME UP.

So yes, it's good to read older fiction. It's good to know where we came from.

But no one gets to make you eat things that make you sick. And I'm pretty decent proof that no one book is required. You'll get the concepts from the books around it.