If someone tells you online or in person that he’s just read a book by a given writer and pronounces it superior, you cannot win an argument about the quality of the writer by declaring that you gave up reading that writer’s works twenty years ago, and especially not if you hated one book that writer wrote from all those years ago.
Some of you think you can, but you cannot.
The writer from twenty years ago is the one you have knowledge of; you have no idea how much he grew in the intervening years, where his muse may have taken him.
And while you have the right to continue your personal boycott, it does not mean that your pre-emptive opinion of the current work has any validity in the current discussion. It’s just you saying that your ignorance is better than someone’s else’s immediate and current knowledge.
This is applicable in more fields than science fiction. If in 1967 you were willing to declare of the Beatles that they were just a one-note band that couldn’t write lyrics more sophisticated than, “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah,” you were an ignoramus. Similarly, 1970 Harlan Ellison was not 1956 Harlan Ellison; the Joe R. Lansdale who wrote PARADISE SKY is not the Lansdale who wrote the unimpressive debut novel ACT OF LOVE; and you’re really an idiot if I tell you that I loved Robert R. McCammon ‘s THE FIVE and you start bitching about hating him forever because of the similarities a couple of his early novels had to Stephen King works, thirty years ago.
Nobody’s saying that you can’t behave like the cat once burned by a stove who stays out of the kitchen from that day on, but that’s not expertise, not when subsequent cats find the kitchen a profitable place to cadge treats when dinner’s being made.
All I’m saying is, “I read X decades ago, and therefore I can contradict you when you say the latest book is good,” is a genuinely asinine thing to say
Comment By: Gideon Marcus
December 18th, 2016 at 10:56 am
Indeed. I mean, I kept reading Randy Garrett even after his execrable Queen Bee (http://galacticjourney.org/astoundingly-bad-11-15-1958/), though he has yet to write something that truly impresses.
But then, it’s still 1961 for me…