Your Humble Blogger spotted Slan on the New Books shelf of the local library, and thought Hunh, I’ve never read that, picked it up, and read it. So, score one for Tor and the reissue. I don’t think we get to score one for Your Humble Blogger, though.
You know all the things about Golden Age specfic that people hate? This has them. Terrible characterizations, clunky writing, stilted and portentous dialogue, blinkered ethnocentrism, painful sexism, implied but clear racism. There are lots of bits of the book that are of historical interest, and the central idea of the slan is pretty important, I suppose, in the development of specfic and of fandom. Still.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
I assume you know the old joke:
Q: When’s the Golden Age of science fiction?
A: Oh, about twelve or thirteen.
When I read Slan, probably at age 10 or so, I was approximately the target audience. I remember hardly anything about it other than the name “Jommy Cross” and the general idea of the story. But, like so much sf (especially from that period), it does hit the right notes for bright misfit kids who want something to belong to….
(Which I think you were acknowledging in your entry; I’m not arguing with you, just commenting on my experience with the book.)
But I imagine if I were to read it now I would have much the same reaction that you did.
When I was a kid, a lot of the stuff I read had certain themes of Golden Age (and later, Golden-Age-wannabe) (yes, Gentle Readers, I am old enough to have read retro-SF in my youth) (no, the word wannabe did not exist in my youth, so that’s a bracket, there) stories that I didn’t really isolate at the time, and now I find creepy. I should write an actual essay about them. The bright misfit kid is proved objectively superior than the circumjacent yahoos theme is one of them, and it often comes with a vicious misanthropy that exults in the violent destruction of mundanes. Sometimes (as with Slan and much of Heinlein) this is explicitly connected with eugenics, but sometimes the Homo Superior is a sport, and the parents are part of the howling mob. Of course, often the parents are not the parents, and sometimes the eugenics comes in with monarchism, as the young fellow is revealed to be a changeling king’s son (or K’Thar Princeling).
Anyway, the point of the essay that I won’t get around to writing is that somehow all of us who grew up on this stuff failed to become horrible monarchist eugenicists. Well, most of us, anyway. The experience of re-reading those stories, or reading stories like them, creeps me out and makes me want to hide them from children, despite the utter lack of pernicious effects. Or, and this is the really creepy part, do I have, buried in my psyche all unbeknownst like, certain negative associations that I picked up in my Golden Age Science Fiction?
Thanks,
-V.
My theory is that it was all planting secret signals in our brains, to be activated at such time as the Master Race is ready to rise up & take their rightful place as rulers of the universe.
Despite not having grown up to be a horrible monarchist eugenicist, I think that those stories did stick me with a fair amount of baggage that I would be better off without, I credit my parents with training me with enough empathy that I never bought the misanthropy, but I certainly swallowed whole the notion of a special role in life just waiting for me because, hey, bright, check, misfit, check, story featuring a lone protagonist and not an ensemble cast, check. Every single fantasy novel I loved as a child had this problem, which makes it hard for me to go back to that genre in long form as an adult.