The idea of a canon mostly makes sense when later works are written with the assumption that readers are familiar with earlier works. Like the assumption that you can drop references to the Bible, or Greek mythology and your readers will of course know what you mean.

You don't really need to know what Heinlein or Azimov wrote in order to understand Scalzi's or Jemsin's books.

I guess a canon can provide a shared language, but SF folks seem to understand the shared language of space ships and aliens just fine without needing to reference specific earlier writers.

You have to know my earlier jokes to make sense of my new ones.

2:

Maybe Unfogged is old enough for people to start having interminable arguments over which Unfogged posts/threads should be considered canonical.

1 is a really good point

SF is still a fairly young field. It may be true that conversations about the canon are shaped by the fact that established people in the field (like Scalzi) came up when many of the canonical works were fairly recent history.

It makes it easier to say, "of course some of much of this will be forgotten" without feeling like there's a risk of people forgetting the history of the field (tangentially relevant XKCD cartoon).

But I think it's a fairly good attitude to have towards other historical disputes -- that having one's contributions reassessed is actually part of the _privilege_ of being a historical figure.

3: Periodic arguments about the blogroll?

I want to sympathize, and concur, but I think (1) SF's craving for respect, deference (cf. the complaints that Margaret Atwood and P.D. James "stole" from SF's persecuted classics for shut up nerds I don't care) and canonicity is tiresome; it is amusing that those urges have now turned on them; and (2) JS, while a very nice man, is such a careerist weathervane that he makes Gizmodo and Vox look like Sid Vicious.

I am not a crackpot.

(2) JS, while a very nice man, is such a careerist weathervane that he makes Gizmodo and Vox look like Sid Vicious.

Say more. I very much enjoy his blog, and think he's good at coming up with well-written statements on difficult or emotionally charged subjects, but have less of a sense of the things he's choosing to not write about (because I don't actually follow SF these days).

7.2: Goals are good.

8: I shouldn't pretend to check in with him oftener than once or twice a year, or that I mean to criticize him for anything other than being a little too agreeable while I, probably generationally, prefer an artist who now and then bites the hand that feeds/reviews/distributes fellowships and honoraria.

The linked XKCD cartoon in 5 is great. I read a time travel novel once that was set in the summer Garfield was shot, so I read the gray text and I had a little "I know, right?" moment of agreement, but, um, I agree with the overall sentiment.

In teaching science a lot of people put a lot of stock in teaching the history: "if the students don't know how we got here they can't put the knowledge in context." But "teaching the history" has always seemed to me very heavily weighted toward what was new and exciting when the textbook writer was young. So the canon moves up by a generation with each generation of textbook writers. I may be more cynical about than is warranted (the genetics text provides us with Mendel's actual data, so that's a counterexample). But I don't know how you decide what the canon is. Like the XKCD cartoon says, history is so big.

But "teaching the history" has always seemed to me very heavily weighted toward what was new and exciting when the textbook writer was young.

I bet if I don't bother to link, I can pwn all you people locating the xkcd about the 1950s christmas hits becoming eternal.

Speaking as somehow who actually writes SF, there's a professional pressure here. Whatever cool idea I come up with there's a strong chance some prior SF writer has already come up with it and used it for a story. I was once chatting with a (UK, mainstream, good) novelist at a literary festival and he said to me: "so you write SF? I was reading in the New Scientist that interstellar distances are so enormous that it would take a spaceship many generations to reach even nearby stars: that's a really good idea for a novel, don't you think! People being born living and dying on a spaceship? Such potential!" When I said "yes, a number of SF writers have ..." he cut me off: "look I really don't have time to get into all that. It would cramp my style to get into the long grass of the SF backlist. I think I just need to write my novel."

But for the regular reader, and assuming there are critics to call-out folk claiming prodigious originality when they're atually plagiarising some long-forgotten SF tale, then it shouldn't be more than a narrowly professional concern, I think.

Cousin marriage is in the other thread.

11.2 reminds me of graduate school so much.

13: Right, that's I think something that's behind kind of a fundamental change in the genre from all the 'canonical' stuff I read when I was growing up in the eighties.

A lot of SF was kind of badly written, and got its entertainment value from one or more really neat, interesting ideas that were new to the reader. And there's a finite supply of those -- unless you've read everything, you come up with ideas that have already been thoroughly explored and that there's not much interesting to do with. And even if you have read everything, coming up with new neat ideas is much harder than it used to be.

At which point SF, to be entertaining, has to do something different, and pay more attention to characters and the same kind of stylistic things that drive mainstream fiction. It's inevitably going to be a different genre than it was in the 40s through the 80s.

My college roommate wrote a Campbell biography recently, so it's been weird watching all this take off since his book tends to pop up a lot in these discussions. It is quite critical about some aspects Campbell's life and played some role in spreading the knowledge of Campbell's problems more widely, but at the same time the book very much centers the old white male SF canon. So this is all very weird for me to see this story blow up the way it has. At any rate, to keep things on topic for this thread, did he show up to college with a 40-volume western canon? Of course he did!

16 makes a good point, but one could add that the stuff that filled the 'golden age' pulps was distinctly less imaginative and less well written than the work of Verne or Wells or even Bulwer Lytton which preceded them by a generation. As Sturgeon's Law reminds us, 90% of everything is crap, and that applies to the output of Asimov and the pages of Astounding as much if not more than anything else.

So why is so much of that dross regarded as canonical? I suppose in part because it reinforced the prejudices of its juvenile readership who grew up to use it as reference points for their own more sophisticated endeavours, whether bad guys like Heinlein or goodish guys like Sladek. But it's completely irrelevant today. The only point in subjecting oneself to it is to gain a historical insight into a specific subculture which hasn't really existed since 1970.

I always associate Joseph Campbell with paying way too much attention to the deeper meaning of Star Wars.

I troll my son by telling him the only Star Wars that's actually canonical is the first two-and-a-half movies and the Christmas special.

The 70s were a different time.

Canonicity is also a way of making communities. I was - still am - upset by the way my son grew up with a canon of rock music: all the stuff that had been new and strange and interesting to me was history to be revered for him, 25 years later. Of course that particular canon didn't last. But it played a really important social role while it did.

It's kind of a big claim that SF, in as much as SF isa literature of ideas, is dead because there are no more good ideas left that haven't been used. For a start, _science_ is moving on. Technology is moving on. That's potentially a constant new supply of big ideas, no?

And contra 18, I dont know what relevant means but Asimov is still fun and appealling. I spent the last week reading the Robot stories to a couple of kids as bedtime stories, at their request.

I feel like I'm not deep enough in US fan culture to understand the context of what this is really about, but anyway, here's the time-travelling rebuttal from Iain M Banks
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/may/13/iain-banks-science-fiction-genre

25. It's about cultural appropriation. SF writers have a culture, and non-SF writers take bits of it and write stupid stuff with the bits. Kind of like putting ketchup in your pad thai recipe.

I like NW's point about defining communities.

My SLAC starts everyone on a literary-historical canon but also the history of arguments about what goes in a canon, and the effects of the canon, and arguments about what should be in a canon now. I'm not sure, but from the alumni mag it looks as though current students are actively arguing out what the canon should be for the next students. Works for me, though it's also an enormous amount of work and does lead to rancor (me, I would be agitating for Euclid to be on the canon, and not just reading it, everyone has to at least get across the donkey's bridge. Would be happy with geometrical text from any culture, we read in translation.)

I think the SF argument about canon and old jerks is partly because we confuse our heroes with our saints -- something medieval Europe had sorted out, to good multicultural effect, why can't we? There were lists of Nine Worthies in various categories, very often subdivided into three from different continents (insofar as they knew about them) or different religions or, I think, at least once good/bad/pagan where the Bad were Christian rivals and the Pagan were, apparently, not innately blamed for being pagan. But they had Saints as a separate category, so they had less trouble remembering someone for being amazing and admitting that they were partly amazingly dreadful.

I think the Banks piece in 25 is about something a little different - established literary authors using their prominence to write SF-ish stuff that has little to no relevance to the broader SF conversation or culture, because it hasn't been listening. Whereas this discussion springs more from people firmly within that culture questioning how much due the traditional "canon" should be given in it.

the summer Garfield was shot

See, this is what you end up with when everything gets a gritty reboot...

24. Yes, 10% of Asimov is not crap. He was a poor writer but he had a great imagination.

I think Jeannette Ng is a nut, based on an article she wrote about how Legend of Korra promotes white supremacy, because Republic City looks like New York City. I never read or heard her anti-Campbell acceptance speech that touched off the Great Campbell Purge of 2019/2020. I admire the chutzpah to receive the Campbell Award and use the opportunity to call Campbell a fascist, because fuck Campbell.

I've found every single aspect of the anti-Campbell wave infuriating. It's easy to make the case that Campbell should have his name taken off the award (I've done it myself). But the whole thing has just empowered the people whose hobby is moral preening. I never knew I could hate people I agree with so much. George R.R. Martin used his Hugo awards speech to say nice things about Campbell, which is weird, but People. Just. Lost. Their. Shit. It was a theatrical performance to the cheap seats on Twitter. Martin is a liberal who was one of the leaders of the anti-Sad-Puppy movement, so if he's against inclusion in science-fiction, he hides it well. (The Sad Puppy movement was an attempt to hijack the Hugos to make them more white and male. Martin was high profile in campaigning against them.)

I did learn when I first searched Reddit about Martin's speech (I had just heard that it was controversial) that the sub for the Witcher books/games/show is very alt-right friendly, which is... not surprising, really.

27 is great. Heroes versus saints is an excellent distinction.

Most of the science fiction I read these days are Hugo award nominees -- I sign up for vote for the Hugos every year and read the stuff in the packet. Maybe they are atypical, but honestly they're competently written, but boring. I am never going to have a thought I haven't already had reading any of the nominees I've read. (To be fair, I didn't manage to read the N. K. Jemisin books, because I had trouble getting ahold of the first book.) The Golden Age had lots of crappy qualities, but it never had that problem. Asimov was a mediocre writer, but still ideas from his writing pop into my head from time to time. When I read the second Robot novel, where they are on the planet where people are so physically isolated from each other that they found it weird to see another human being, I thought it was wildly implausible, and now I'm actually living through it. Asimov also has a story where someone invents a device that allows you to remotely see the past, anywhere in the world. The inventor is a historian, but the device is immediately used to spy on people's immediate pasts and privacy is destroyed. The Internet era reminds me of that one somewhat frequently.

The one exception was Cixin Liu's Three Body trilogy, which was the most provocative science fiction I've read in years. Since he's largely an outsider to the whole institution of science fiction that Worldcon embodies, it makes me wonder if written science fiction has crawled up its own asshole and died. I mean, Scalzi has recently won a Hugo for a Star Trek parody, and Stross has gotten nominations for "H. P. Lovecraft, but funny." And oh my god there are so many space operas. (There was also "Space Opera", which wasn't a space opera. That was appealingly weird.)

32. Maybe they are atypical, but honestly they're competently written, but boring. I am never going to have a thought I haven't already had reading any of the nominees I've read.

I haven't read any of this year's Hugo or Nebula winners. In fact, looking back, Jemison's The Stone Sky in 2017 is the last one I've read.

Three Body was interesting because of the different perspective he brought to the table. There have been plenty of SF books and stories about Earth dealing with aliens (more detail would be spoilery), but he made the idea new. Jemison's Broken Earth didn't really show us anything we hadn't seen a hundred times before, but it was well-written with interesting characters. Stross's Laundry books are not exactly "funny," though they have light moments. They are mostly about what a Lovecraftian Horror invasion would be like. His whole shtick (not just Laundry) has been "You think you know how SF-trope-X would work out for real? Fool!" Ada Palmer wasn't mentioned but she seems to be plowing new ground; deep thought about how societies are organized and fall part, which is more or less what you would expect from a historian. Still, highly weird in a lot of ways, and well-plotted. Looking forward to the final(?) book. I think if GRR Martin would finish his damn series, fewer people would dunk on him, excluding the "woke" as he is a perfect target to get your tweet retweeted and thereby have a microsecond of fame.

There's an interesting discussion on this topic going on over at Camestros Felapton's blog.

See here:

https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2020/08/08/canon-and-campbell/

And here:

https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2020/08/09/types-of-canon-key-texts/

34: The discussion of influence in the second link makes me think of the old line about the Velvet Underground (that not many people bought the album but everyone who did formed a band).

For that matter William Gibson has said, "[Music and television have] Probably [influenced Gibson] more than fiction. The trouble with "influence" questions is that they're usually framed to encourage you to talk about your writing as if you grew up in a world circumscribed by books. I've been influenced by Lou Reed, for instance, as much as I've been by any "fiction" writer. I was going to use a quote from an old Velvet Underground song- "Watch out for worlds behind you" (from "Sunday Morning")- as an epigraph for Neuromancer."

I thought Scalzi made an interesting (and obviously correct) point that many younger SF fans & writers were probably first introduced to the genre by television or video games rather than books (and that's okay).

re: 13

I read and enjoyed your New Model Army a while ago, and had either no recollection or no idea of your connection to this place.

The idea of a canon mostly makes sense when later works are written with the assumption that readers are familiar with earlier works. Like the assumption that you can drop references to the Bible, or Greek mythology and your readers will of course know what you mean.

I think that's as good a definition as any. When I think about music -- which is where my real obsession lies -- you could definitely identify a "canon" in lots of genres where that would be true. They might not be the best stuff, and even those who'd advocate their place in the canon would accept that, but they'd be the stuff that everyone kind of assumes you know.

Thanks to this thread, I learned that Joseph Campbell and John Campbell aren't the same person. That's interesting.

You know who else is really horrible, both as a writer and as a person? Hugo Gernsback, the guy the awards are named after to begin with. As a person, he might not be too much more racist than the average for his time, but he definitely wasn't too much less racist, and he had a lot of shady business practices according to Wikipedia just now. As a writer, he makes me wish my first language wasn't English. Ralph 24C 41+ is probably the worst book I was assigned in all my years of schooling. And this guy has a whole set of literary awards named after him! No wonder the genre has a bad reputation.

So, I just learned that now.

Wasn't Gernsback famous as an editor, not a writer? He was Galaxy, maybe? So being a terrible writer himself isn't really here or there. Terrible person is still an issue, of course.

39 to both parts of 38.

Not Galaxy, after googling. Amazing Stories. But no one ever thought he was an important writer, I'm pretty sure.

John Campbell wrote some, but most of his storied reputation and influence on the canon is from being an editor. So being an editor doesn't put you out of scope, istm.

To be fair to me, I didn't read very carefully.

Right, I was arguing with Cyrus in 38 that Gernsback's lousy writing doesn't establish that it's weird to name an award after him.

I'm inclined to say that being a good writer is an important part of being a good editor, or at least, that's the usual path to advancement. Or that regardless of Gernsback's skill, his own writing reveals something about his tastes, and an editor with such shitty taste would surely have had a bad influence on the genre.

I don't know. I didn't have much of a logical argument in mind when I wrote 38, and I was sober at the time, sorry. If I have a point at all, I'd say it's one of the following.

1. Any attempts to defend the sanctity of the SF canon seem farcical to me if someone like Gernsback had so much influence on that canon. Not that anyone here is defending its sanctity, but people elsewhere are doing so, and here's yet another reason they're wrong.

2. I still resent being made to read that stupid Ralph book.

John Campbell wrote some

Who goes there?

6: A table of periodic arguments? (Probably better than a periodic table of contents. Or indeed the contents of periodic tables.)

You know who else is really horrible, both as a writer and as a person?

Cixin Liu is an OK writer but as a person he is horrible. Yes, Campbell and Gernsback and Lovecraft were all pretty unpleasantly racist even by the standards of their day, but Liu is, either sincerely or because he can make more money that way, a vocal supporter of an actual in-progress genocide. I don't think Campbell wrote an editorial in Amazing in 1945 or so in praise of Auschwitz.

I mean, Scalzi has recently won a Hugo for a Star Trek parody

Being a parody isn't a barrier to being a classic. "Alice in Wonderland" and "Cold Comfort Farm" spring to mind.

Also "Redshirts" isn't really a parody, in the way that CCF is. "Redshirts" is more in the same genre as "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" - so, metafiction?

I think this is probably a concern of Scalzi's in particular because he writes a lot of canon-dependent SF. I don't mean that it's better or worse than, if you like, independent SF, but there's very definitely a sense in which you get more out of "Old Man's War" if you've already read "Starship Troopers" and "The Forever War" and "Armor", and of course you get more out of "Redshirts" if you're familiar with "Star Trek".
Stross is the same - he deliberately wrote the early Laundry books as "Weird Len Deighton", "Weird Ian Fleming", "Weird Anthony Price", "Weird Modesty Blaize" and so on. And so is Terry Pratchett - he's satirising the world as a whole, but also the cliches of various genres of fiction.

But you could come to the Ekumen books or the Culture series, to pick two examples, completely cold and not miss anything. You don't have to have read Ringworld to appreciate a story set on a Culture Orbital.

Beaming my comment from Scalzi's blog over to here:

A canon can serve as a shared well of references that readers will be familiar with and can draw from. This may be less important for works that can serve as introductions to the genre, works that are, say, written so that one's mother-in-law* -- who is an avid reader but not necessarily someone whose first choice of what to read is SFF -- can enjoy them. (On the other hand, these just draw on a canon that is old enough to have passed into the culture at large. I'd bet that Karel Čapek's mother-in-law did not think of a robot in the same way that he did, nor that Gene Roddenberry's mother-in-law had much of an idea of what warp drive was before Star Trek. That one's readerly but not fannish mother-in-law would now have an idea of both of these shows a canon that has become background illumination.) But a canon of some sort is necessary for works that depend on some familiarity with the genre. Redshirts, for example, depends on canonical elements of science fiction, drawn from canonical works that readers can be expected to be familiar with.

Some canonical works loom so large that they effectively corner an aspect of the genre for a long time. Anyone who re-does "Nightfall" better have a good twist. Our Gracious Host** has in the past opined that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was an extinction event for science fiction comedy. It's a canonical work, anyone trying to bring the funny in science fiction has to reckon with it in some way, and many have broken their lances tilting against that improbability-driven windmill. Terry Pratchett didn't eradicate funny fantasy quite as thoroughly as Douglas Adams, but Discworld is canonical; it neither can nor should be avoided in fantasy humor. And some of the humor in Discoworld depends on knowledge of other canonical work in heroic fantasy -- why does Cohen the Barbarian have that name, and why is his Silver Horde funny?

Canonical works are the shared references that make it possible for the field to be in conversation with itself. Without The Moon is a Harsh Mistress there's no Growing Up Weightless by John M. Ford and no Luna trilogy by Ian McDonald, to name just two. A story that begins "The sky was the color of..." is situating itself in a particular way in relation to science fiction and its history.

So yes, Virginia, there is a canon. It isn't fixed (seriously, is there a more embarrassing Hugo than the 1966 award for best series of all time?) and it isn't the same for all readers; it's more like the probabilistic model of an atomic nucleus than a set of planets around which moons orbit; but like quantum nuclei it builds our shared universe.

+++

* Scalzi has said on numerous occasions that he aims to write SF that his m-i-l could also enjoy. For example:

Scalzi keeps his mother-in-law in mind when he writes his science-fiction novels. "She reads Nora Roberts and Julie Garwood, romance stuff. And so when I"m writing about these new concepts, I think to myself, "Can my mother-in-law follow this stuff?" If she can follow it and yet I can still take these cool ideas and express them in a relatively engaging way, then anybody can."

** Scalzi, obvsly

Re: Redshirts and Star Trek. This gets back to the end of comment 35: you don't need to have read anything in particular to be familiar with the tropes of Star Trek. I'd guess even the few people who have never seen any of the TV shows or movies are familiar with many of them.

When writing comment 1 I tried to think of an SF book where a reference to a main character would work the same way that a reference to Cassandra or Jonah would be presumed to work, and the Best I could come up with was Frankenstein. But then I realized that understanding what someone means when they call something "a Frankenstein's monster" in no way requires having read Mary Shelly's book.

So there are definitely ideas out there in the culture that current SF is riffing off of and commenting on, but that's not quite the same thing as having a written canon.

But a canon is about more than just knowing a few character names. The canon provides concepts that you're supposed to be familiar with as well. "Romeo and Juliet" is in the canon not just because we talk about people as "Romeos" but because of the whole structure of doomed-lovers-from-warring-factions, and if you want to write that sort of a story you are expected to be familiar with its most famous example, because it's in the canon.

As for other examples:
HAL comes to mind. And I'm not sure why you limit it to books and written canon, but if you must:
Susan Calvin.
Guy Montag.
Dr Moreau.
Professor Challenger.
Edward Griffin (the Invisible Man).
Katniss Everdeen.
Superman, Batman, and all the comic-book pantheon.

you don't need to have read anything in particular to be familiar with the tropes of Star Trek. I'd guess even the few people who have never seen any of the TV shows or movies are familiar with many of them.

It me!

The canon provides concepts that you're supposed to be familiar with as well.

Right. That's what I meant with the "Frankenstein's monster" example. People hear it and immediately think "creation that got out of the control of its creator", in the same way that Romeo = lover.

I was focused on written works because that seems to be what the original "is there an SF canon?" discussion seemed to be about.

56: but it works both ways. If I read "Frankenstein's monster" then I think "creation that got out of control". But also if I write a story about a creation that gets out of the control of its creator, like "2001" or "I Made You" or "Terminator" or "Jurassic Park" or whatever, I'm supposed to do so knowing about the story of "Frankenstein". Hence Iain M. Banks' point about the idiotic literary author who decides to write a whodunnit set in an isolated country house in which the butler did it (an example which falls slightly flat because he didn't know that, although those are all cliches of detective fiction, there is in fact only one even remotely famous detective story in which the butler actually does do it. The woman who wrote it, Mary Roberts Rinehart, was later almost murdered by her own butler.) If I write a story about someone who builds an artificial life form that turns on its creator, I am going to be ridiculed if I do it as though it were a completely novel literary act.

I would distinguish between "canon" and "genre". Sci-fi writers write for an audience that has already read stuff in the genre, and some of the tropes of the genre start from famous works, but there's no science fiction work that it canonical, even for the readers of science fiction, the way that Shakespeare is. For fantasy, I suppose there's Tolkien, but I think D&D is at least as big of an influence.

It's weird that the influence Hitchhikers was so destructive. I heard people complaining that Valente's "Space Opera" was derivative of Hitchhikers. I mean, you could see the family resemblance, but it was more different from Hitchhikers than any two real space operas are like each other.

The earth is just another planet in space. Tosca is a space opera.

58.2: I'll quote myself again:

In her "Liner Notes" to Space Opera, Catherynne Valente thanks, "however obliquely ... Douglas Adams, or at least his ghost, who looms somewhat benevolently over all science fiction comedy." ... A couple of sentences later, Valente adds, "Good lord, without Hitchhiker's Guide, I would disappear in a puff of logic." As someone who still has basically all six hours of the original radio show lodged in his brain, I can relate. I could no more write about Space Opera without picking up some of Adams' style than I could say "Oolon Colluphid" without adding "trilogy of philosophical blockbusters."

John Scalzi has often said that Hitchhiker's was an extinction-level event for humorous science fiction. "It was so clearly, obviously, blindingly popular that it just obliterated everything else in the field." It's worse than that, in a way, because even Douglas Adams was really Douglas Adams only about half the time.

So Valente is going full-tilt at a windmill that has bested many a lance in the forty-odd (some very odd) years since Hitchhiker's was published. Why does it work in Space Opera? Three reasons, I think. First, over-the-top is one of her natural idioms. The long and funny and occasionally random list; the apparent non sequitur that comes to a sharp point; the piling on of absurdist detail and action -- all of these are apparent throughout the Fairyland books, for example. When Valente moves this approach to space, it doesn't mean that she's doing Douglas Adams. It means that she's doing Valente in space, which happens to read a lot like Douglas Adams.

Second, much of what she is up to in Space Opera is the obverse of what Adams was about in Hitchhiker's. The first sequence in Hitchhiker's is about blowing up the earth. (One of the threads that became Hitchhiker's was the concept of a radio series, with each episode about a different way that the world came to an end.) All of Space Opera is about avoiding that very outcome. Adams' British everyman has no trouble with that aspect of his role, it's coming to terms with everything else that he can't quite get the hang of. Valente's everymen struggle hard both to attain and to get away from the remarkable unremarkability that was Arthur Dent's very stock in trade. By flipping key elements, Valente gives herself more space to sing in the same key as Adams without simply doing a cover version.

Finally, the two authors are telling different kinds of stories, and the difference is right there in the title. One is an opera, the other is a guide. Adams' picaresques famously went on to become a trilogy in five parts. The open-endedness of the Hitchhiker's stories and universe meant that the only real limits were Adams' ability to get the ideas onto a page. The Guide could always be revised. In extremis, new roving reporters could probably have been conjured to cast a slightly hungover eye on the galaxy's foibles. By contrast, Space Opera is complete in itself. This is no Ring cycle. Once the skinny guy has sung, the curtain comes down and the audience streams out to the after-parties. Taking the opposite approach from Adams' strengthens Valente's work, especially in the inevitable comparisons.

++++++

Although Space Opera is won't be a standalone forever. Valente has a contract for a sequel, to be called Space Oddity.

Using Frankenstein as an example of 'canon as shorthand' is arguably problematic because it raises the question of which Frankenstein you take as canonical, Shelley's or Hollywood. Hollywood's Frankenstein is 'creation that turns on its creator', whereas Shelley's is much more 'creation that is rejected by its creator.' Now, agreed, if you say Frankenstein to the woman on the Clapham omnibus, you will call to mind the Hollywood version. But it is Shelley's novel that people ascribe to the canon, even though that isn't the reference they actually mean to elicit.

Hollywood's Frankenstein is 'creation that turns on its creator', whereas Shelley's is much more 'creation that is rejected by its creator.'

Oh, hey, hang on a bit, Shelley's monster definitely turns on its creator. And in the 1931 Hollywood Frankenstein - which is the definitive film, surely, bolts through the neck, hunchbacked assistant and all - the monster is initially innocent but rejected by Frankenstein after he mistakenly thinks it's threatening. I think the common cultural meaning of "Frankenstein" is made up of elements common to both.

What's unique to the Hollywood version - and these are important parts of the common image of "Frankenstein" - is that the monster is made up of parts of stolen corpses, is brought to life by lightning, and is hideous in appearance.
None are true of Shelley's Frankenstein. Frankenstein haunts graveyards only to obtain study materials; he makes the monster out of legitimately obtained human and animal parts ("The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials"). He brings the monster to life "on a dreary night of November... the rain pattered dismally against the panes". And the monster is, at least until it opens its eyes, pleasant in appearance ("His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful.")

You need to start with good parts.

Of course, unless the local slaughterhouse was very unsafe, that makes the monster a chimera. Which I didn't know.

Something I've been idly wondering if whenever a book or story exists in many forms, it's always the very first big Hollywood sound movie version that is the definitive version. Robin Hood stories all owe a great deal to the Errol Flynn version. I saw a video the other day that covered the history of Hunchback of Notre Dame adaptations, and argues that it's the first sound movie version that created how we see the story now. It sounds like Frankenstein fits that.

I guess that's why Legolas looks rotoscoped even in the new version of Lord of the Rings.

"Big" does some work there, though. The Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings was a widely distributed fairly high-budget movie but it's the Peter Jackson version that is now pretty clearly the definitive version people think of.

65: The definitive P&P is the 1994 BBC version not the 1940 one.

The definitive version of Emma stars Alicia Silverstone and just had its 25th anniversary.

Are the two versions of P&P significantly different? (I've only seen the Keira Knightley movie.) For people today, the definitive version of Hunchback is the Disney movie, but the Disney movie is a version of the 1934 movie more than it's a version of the book. Likewise, many elements of the Robin Hood story were standardized by the Errol Flynn movie.

The vampire canon was established mostly in "Dracula Dead and Loving It."

Just as there can't be a definitive Hamlet, I don't think there can be a definitive Pride and Prejudice. The same goes for Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and Dracula.

Aren't there things from the Dracula book that have basically vanished? I know that there were multiple jokes in "Buffy versus Dracula" I had to have explained to me.

Fuck off.

69.1: Amen.

68.2: Differ by 4 hours? The 1994 version is close to the Austen version; Knightley version takes some liberties and overall a more rushed story which IMHO really changes the story. Haven't seen the 1940 version (cannot deal with Olivier so probably won't) but it looks like some minor changes.

The 1994 def gave the definitive Darcy (and the now classic wet shirt scene). I'm not sure if you can have a well known actor (Knighley, although Firth was known) play the definitive version of a character?

re: 69.last

I've seen both and prefer the Keira Knightley version. Of course a lot of people (who are wrong) disagree, and the 90s version lives long in the public imagination in the UK at least. But, personally, while I quite like Colin Firth in some things, I don't especially like him in P&P, and I actively dislike Jennifer Ehle in almost everything she has ever been in.

72:

Quincey Morris is a pretty major character in the book and has been totally forgotten by everyone except Francis Ford Coppola.

One thing that makes Pride and Prejudice different is that I think a fair number of people still read the book, unlike Dracula or Frankenstein.

Lots and lots of people read Twilight.

65: The canonical Maltese Falcon is the second talkie version of the book. The first one is called something stupid (might be Dangerous Female?) and is absolutely terrible.

For fantasy, I suppose there's Tolkien, but I think D&D is at least as big of an influence.

D&D owes more to Tolkein than the rest of its other source material combined.

Other material being an issue of "Heavy Metal" and way too much Jello.

62: I think "Penny Dreadful " has a much more faithful version of Frankenstein's Monster. He's one man, who was brought back to life, looks like the Noel Fielding character in The I.T. Crowd, and divides his time between moping around spying on his former family, and threatening to kill Frankenstein with his super strength.

Am I right that none of the canonical great American novels have definitive movie adaptations?

83: I guess Opinionated Neo-Confederate would vehemently disagree.

83:

I'm pretty sure that Spielberg's version of Jaws will hold up as canonical.

Also, the version of The Godfather.

85: Agreed.

86: Also agree!

Also any version of Moby Dick, because who can read all that.

79: "Satan Met a Lady", with Bette Davis, which is actually the second Hollywood adaptation; there was an even earlier pre-Code version under the original name, which I haven't seen.

90 was me.

89:. That you can't pick one is proof that it's not definitive.

80: I don't think that's true, actually; I'd say that D&D owes comparatively little to Tolkien, beyond snitching elves/dwarves/hobbits/orcs (for wargaming in Middle-Earth) and I guess the idea of an adventuring party rather than a brooding strong-thewed Cimmerian antihero or a stoned albino with a soul-drinking sword who shows up on Hawkwind albums. There's a whole different pulp fantasy line that Gygax nodded to, which Tolkien kind of curb-stomped sales wise. Gygax lists his influences in the famous Appendix N of the original Dungeon Master's Guide. (And note that "Jack of Shadows" there at the end was Zelazny specifically trying to write a Jack Vance pastiche.)

92: It's an alarmingly dull movie for one where everybody drowns.

Titanic at least tossed in a gun fight, some sex, and pwning Bill Pullman.

72
Aren't there things from the Dracula book that have basically vanished? I know that there were multiple jokes in "Buffy versus Dracula" I had to have explained to me.

Yes. There's nothing special about stabbing Dracula through the heart with something made of wood, as opposed to any other material. Dracula has some mind control powers and can shapeshift into a bat, wolf, or cloud, which I assume most people know about but most Buffyverse vampires can't do it, so it stands out there. Also, sunlight doesn't burn or otherwise hurt him at all, just limits his shapeshifting. I think that idea was made up by the movie Nosferatu. It bugs me how the idea of light burning vampires is so widespread. ~8 years ago I tried writing a book for Nanowrimo that would have avoided/subverted/defied that trope. Of course, it would have put me in rare and illustrious company with Twilight...

What is the canonical dragon?

Certainly not Smaug. Never heard of him.

Puff.

99: Yes! My favorite song way back when.

The definitive movie version of Moby Dick is better known as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The Dying Earth is at least as big an influence on D&D as Tolkien. It's where the magic system comes from, for example. The alignment system is from Three Hearts and Three Lions.

97: Albi

100: The dragon or the daddy?

How can I choose?

There's nothing special about stabbing Dracula through the heart with something made of wood, as opposed to any other material.

But this is somewhere that "Dracula" departs from traditional vampire stories; Dracula is killed by being stabbed with a knife, but Balkan tradition specifies various sorts of wood to prevent a corpse becoming a vampire. So "Buffy" didn't invent that trope; rather, "Dracula" ignored it.

you don't need to have read anything in particular to be familiar with the tropes of Star Trek. I'd guess even the few people who have never seen any of the TV shows or movies are familiar with many of them.

But this is true of the literary canon as well. You don't have to have read the Iliad or the Aeneid or the Achilleid to know what a Cassandra or a Trojan horse or an Achilles' heel is.

Just as there can't be a definitive Hamlet, I don't think there can be a definitive Pride and Prejudice. The same goes for Sherlock Holmes

Your mental image of Sherlock Holmes is of Basil Rathbone playing Sherlock Holmes. The deerstalker? The Inverness cape? The calabash pipe? All Rathbone; none of them are mentioned in the books.
There is a statue commemorating Conan Doyle at Baker Street tube station. It isn't of Conan Doyle, or of Holmes, but of Rathbone as Holmes. Same with the one in Picardy Place in Edinburgh.

106: Wasn't that the subject of a rather remarkable series of copyright suits, about exactly which aspects of Holmes' character were now in the public domain (rather than coming from later stories or the plays)?

Virulent hatred of Germans will be the last aspect from the stories to go off copyright.

Just as there can't be a definitive Hamlet, I don't think there can be a definitive Pride and Prejudice. The same goes for Sherlock Holmes

Or Becky from Roseanne.

Your mental image of Sherlock Holmes

Not sure who you are addressing here, ajay, but I would guess that for some younger folks their mental image of Sherlock Holmes is Benedict Cumberbatch.

a brooding strong-thewed Cimmerian antihero or a stoned albino with a soul-drinking sword

The latter being a self-conscious antitype of the former. [Album full of grumbling over power chords.]

109.2: There was only one true Becky! That is a hill I will die on!

106: Similarly, the Addams Family movies got sued by the TV series creator. The movie people argued (ridiculously) that they had based the movie on the original cartoon and not the TV series. The characters didn't even have names before the TV production.

107: I think it was - something about Holmes' attitude to women changing in the later stories?

Yes, here we are - Netflix making a film called "Enola Holmes" and the estate claiming that it depicts a Holmes with "warmer human feelings" as shown only in the later stories, specifically those in the Casebook, which are still in copyright.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/legalentertainment/2020/06/24/enola-holmes-netflix-movie-at-the-center-of-new-copyright-trademark-infringement-lawsuit-by-sir-arthur-conan-doyle-estate/#948c71713047

80/93/et al - the main thing Tolkien added to the fantasy genre as inflected by D&D and various successor computer games was the idea of nonhuman races; the previous pulp fantasy stories (Leiber, Moorcock, Howard, Vance) had humans as the civilized nations with various one-off mutants/demons/monsters. On the plus side, elves and dwarves which led on to all sorts of weirder stuff in the hands of people like Mieville. On the minus side, the idea of entire categories of intelligent life that it was perfectly fine to slaughter.

(I meant to say "aside from creating the mass market for them", which was obviously super important.)

My image of Holmes is Jeremy Brett, who (almost) never wore a deerstalker hat.

Re: D&D, it's true that Gygax never much cared for Tolkien. I used to frequent a message board where one of the people who played in his home games in the 70s when the game was taking shape hung out. He mentioned that Gygax only added Tolkienesque races to the game was because the players wanted them.

The 1940 P & P is my favourite and my daughter's who saw it first age 6. Script by Aldous Huxley(though I gather not a lot of it was kept) and noone did condescension quite like Larry O.