There's a place for the "classics", value to be had in many, but if you want young people to get into sff/horror, don't say they HAVE to read books 50-100 yrs old. Way to kill interest. Classics for us (60s, 70s) are books of the 90s and 00s for them.) Give them modern classics!
Give them Thomas Harris, give them Pratchett and Abercrombie, NK Jemisin and Garth Nix, Susanna Clarke and Lisa Tuttle, China Mieville and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. These are classics now! And then give them the best of now to read. Build interest in what's hot now, not old yarns.
Give them Straub and King, Barker and Ramsey Campbell, Tom Piccirilli and Brian Keene, Beukes and Mandel, Richard K Morgan and Andy Weir, Alan Baxter (😉) and James S A Corey. Give them good new stuff. They'll find the old classics on their own.
And if they never read LotR or Dune, or Verne or Bradbury or Le Guin or whatever, so fucking what? They don't need to. Everything now came from then. Everything new can come from now. Give them new wonder, not old dust.
All those names above, btw, are just the first that spun out of my head. There are sooooo many more. As my son (now 7) gets older, I can't wait for him to read the books I'm loving NOW. Of course, I'll point out Earthsea and Dune and whatever once he already loves the genre.
He'll find his own classics too. Some might be even from the 1930s, but I bet most will be post-1990. For the same reason that my classics are more 60s and 70s than 30s and 40s.
This thread brought to you by STOP INSISTING YOUNG PEOPLE READ A LOAD OF DEAD OLD WHITE GUYS! Literature is so much more vibrant now than it's ever been.
This thread seems to be bringing a lot of angst to certain people. (Guess the demographic, folks!) Even to the point of subsequently deleting all their nonsense. Read it carefully before you go off at me, dudes.
You know what? Continuing this, apart from the fact that old fantasy, horror, etc. can be hella dated in language and style, the underlying themes can be actually damaging. So much blatant racism and sexism. We're better than that now and we owe young people a better read.
We read to escape, to be entertained, but also to see ourselves and our world reflected back at us. Young people won't relate to the horrible sexism of golden age SF, or the blatant racism in "classic" fantasy. It'll put them off in a flash.
Give them modern sffh with all its incredible diversity of characters and worlds from an ever more diverse pool of authors. And the white dudes like me can up our game and write just as well, or move aside. That's our choice. I'm up for it. Genre is healthy as hell right now.
You can follow @AlanBaxter.
Tip: mention @twtextapp on a Twitter thread with the keyword “unroll” to get a link to it.

Latest Threads Unrolled: