Reading classics *if you want to* is fine! Go for it! But it isn't mandatory. And "reinventing the wheel" is far more likely to happen if you're so detached from the present SFF market that, for instance, you missed the 00s vampire craze & think your best comparable is Dracula.
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The thing about the past is that we're always adding to it - but not in their recollection. The past is always singular, with a giant chasm of Nothing between their personal cutoff point and the present, and it's MADDENING.
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The only exception to this is their personal achievements, like they alone get to straddle the Great Nothing between their heyday and the now like living messages in a bottle.
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And what this says to me - the impression I cannot help taking away - is that, to them, the *recent* history of the genre doesn't matter except inasmuch as it represents a continued audience for their exploits. They want to broadcast to modern fandom, not engage with it.
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Which is, I think, desperately ironic, in that part of what they're grasping after is a legacy: a continued sense of relevance. But because they're not engaging with new fans or writers as people and peers, only as potential subjects, they're actively eroding their own relevance.
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If, as a new fan or writer, your formative impression of Silverberg is Dude Who Longwindedly Compares Himself To Jesus While Praising A Fascist At An Awards Ceremony, why the fuck would you bother to look up his writing? What's the appeal, there?
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If Silverberg understood how legacies work, he'd be encouraging new writers and fans, engaging with the modern genre, extending a hand to newcomers at cons and generally using his status for good, not sitting coolly on a pedestal and periodically bemoaning the state of things.
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But ego isn't a legacy; it's just annoying, like trying to insist in the face of all reason and evidence to the contrary that your personal entry points into the genre are The Only True Entry Points and therefore The Perfect Canon Forever, Amen.
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Anyway! It's beautiful day, and I'm going to go spend some (socially distanced) time outside with my offspring instead of ranting on the internet now. FIN
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So here's a weird thing: the 1970s I lived through were an amazing time of new voices in science fiction, in particular women's voices. But to hear certain people talk in the 1980s, nothing of interest happened in the 1970s.
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Which makes me wonder, how do we avoid a repeat of the erasure of the 1970s when the 2030s look back at the 2015-2025?
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