We're currently rereading a lot of Le Guin atm (by pure coincidence) and it really does bear repeating that her most famous works are 50+ years old and it *shows*. Have your context head on when you read her. https://twitter.com/NoraReed/status/1307977187300200450

In many ways, her SF is terrifyingly better than what her (mostly male) contemporaries were producing at the time, but they're still books written in the 60s, and there have been, like, three massive societal shifts since then.

They're clunky and weird in unexpected ways. They deal in assumptions that are quite alien (no pun intended) to the modern reader. They're artefacts of a revolutionary era.

Certain terminology, certain fixations on behaviours or technologies that seem really odd now (Lathe of Heaven, for example, seems pretty sure hypnotism was the next big medical breakthrough). https://twitter.com/sc3d/status/1307984310482415616?s=19

A lot of it's stylistic, tbh. Like the way Star Trek TOS is shot and edited: there's nothing *wrong* with how they put it together, it just looks old-fashioned now.

You can't consume any media more than a few decades old without considering its sociocultural context tbh. Anything made pre-2001 is carrying different baggage, and we can't watch anything satirical from pre-2016.

Whether it's Austen or Dickens or Shakespeare, absolutely *nothing* is wholly timeless. SF doesn't get a pass, though people often think because it's set in an imaginary time and place, it does.

When we were at uni, we once dashed off an essay that cited, as its only critical source, an article from the 1950s. While the points we made weren't without merit, our tutor rightly pointed out that using a source that predated the sexual revolution and women's lib was sketchy.

(The essay didn't even cover those topics, but their point was that it's pretty tricky to cite something from what is basically a different era in human history.)

For context, this thread is what we're talking about: https://twitter.com/NoraReed/status/1307965855335153665?s=19