And it's not that these books are necessarily bad, or even all bad! Even skimming through Pegasus, I could tell the pacing was good, the main plot compelling, the characterisation mostly great: there was a reason my uncritical younger self enjoyed it! BUT:
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If we, as a community, don't ever take the time to look over old books with fresh eyes - or if we dismiss those efforts and their critical lens as cancel culture, or hating, or some other nonsense - we're ignoring not just our own progress as people, but as a genre.
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So when my copy of Damia arrives and I write a thread detailing its issues, it's not because I want to tarnish McCaffrey's memory specifically. It's because I want to illustrate the necessity of thinking critically about even our favourite old books before recommending them NOW.
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There's a lot to love in the worlds McCaffrey, and others like her, created. But if we can't admit to the biases and bigotries that were allowed to proliferate in those works, we won't understand the significance of so much that has come afterwards - that is being written *now*.
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Especially for white and otherwise privileged SFF fans, I do think it's important to reckon with how much racism (and homophobia, and sexism, and other bigotries) was casually and not-so-casually simmering in many of our foundational stories, and how that might've shaped us.
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Does that mean we have to wholesale disavow our affection or nostalgia for those stories? Of course not! But there's a difference between saying "this book was important to me despite its problems" and "because this book was important to me, it can have no problems."
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ANYWAY. I really need to go to bed, but I'm going to keep chewing on these thoughts because I think it really matters. FIN
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Replying to @fozmeadows
your thread reminded me of a both frustrating and baffling experience i had when i worked at a library. this poor girl, probably 12 at most, came in with her parents who had strong opinions about not just what was appropriate but about what she liked. we seriously sat there for
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Replying to @_nabreus @fozmeadows
maybe 20-30 minutes suggesting a HUGE variety of kidlit and ya, all of which were vetoed for a variety of reasons. one of these was the hunger games, which was “inappropriate”
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Replying to @_nabreus @fozmeadows
then the dad, after thinking a moment was like “what about piers anthony”. i never read any of his books but i had heard enough about their contents to be pretty sure he only vaguely remembered them out of nostalgia this happened probably 6 years ago but it just stayed with me
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god yeah, that sounds frustrating as hell, poor kid
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Replying to @fozmeadows
this was after they berated her nearly to the point of tears because she wanted to check out a book she’d already read it was pretty depressing but it was also just wild that a ya series was “inappropriate” but an adult sff series SHELVED IN THE ADULT SECTION wouldn’t be
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