Generation Gaps and Generation Chasms
Oct. 18th, 2006 08:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
megwritesI am so tired of novels that have really good first lines and then decrease in quality exponentially as the paragraph goes along. Or novels that start out strong for a few pages and then go to Sucksville.
Seriously.
What if someone wrote a novel like every line was as important as the first line? That'd be frickin' cool.
But that's not what I came here to talk about.
I came to talk about generation and escapism. I was reading along and I came across something written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and she was discussing her dissatisfaction with today's science fiction (I've lost the link to this and if anyone could find it, it'd be most appreciated)
But what I do remember quite clearly is that she said (paraphrasing): "I'm part of the Star Wars generation."
As though it was very, very necessary for us to know her age and generation to understand why she was dissatisfied. As though if she were a twenty-year-old or a sixty-year-old, things would be massively different.
This struck me as really rather odd.
I don't think of myself as reading, writing, or thinking through a generational lens. I like to think I come unbiased to every book and every story.
Of course, I don't. But I also like to believe that these biases are pebbles, not boulders. I can stumble over them, but keep walking. Whereas a boulder sort of just puts an end to everything.
She also made a point of saying that her reason for loving science fiction was escapism.
Thing is? Escapism is always inherently self-defeating and deconstructive. No, really. Escapism is always a statement about the thing you're looking to escape. The more you try to escape, the more thoroughly you want that escape to me, the more carefully you have to look at what you want to get away from.
Which got me thinking that maybe there was something valid to the generational statement. Not because age matters, but because what someone was trying to escape from in the 1970's is radically different from what we're escaping from *now* in 2006.
Take spaceships, for instance.
Spaceships don't really get my goat. I don't speak for everyone born in the 1980's or thereafter, but I just don't think books with spaceships on the covers excite and titillate us the way they did our predecessors.
And I don't think that's anything stupid on our part, it's just our place in history.
Off the top of my head, the two biggest events in NASA history during my lifetime have been:
a) the Challenger disaster
b) NASA forgot to covert between metric and standard, thus losing millions of dollars
So you can see where the younger generation, the people who's parents don't really even remember the moon landing can be less than sanguine about books with space travel.
We've seen space. It's big, blank, and boring. There's a moon (*yawn*).
And even technology really doesn't excite us. Sure, we love our iPods and our Macs and our illegal downloading, and our cameraphones - but we know full well that in ten years, it'll all be so old and outdated and useless.
My generation is not a generation trying to escape a place or a thing.
We're a generation trying to escape a feeling, a state of mind, a state of being. We don't escape to spaceships and other planets (well, we do, but it's a whole different thing).
We escape back to the 70's and 80's and just last week when things seemed better. We escape back to old TV shows and retro clothes.
Which, incidentally, is why Star Wars is so long lasting and still relevant. Whereas people in the 70's were fairly dazzled by the adventure, my generation is dazzled by the ideas.
Like the idea that good and evil do exist and they're easy to pick out and that people can fight wars (against people!) that can actually be won
As opposed to our society which has no idea what's good and bad, and the bad guys look just like the good guys (because the weird guy in the car is statistically less likely to hurt you than your parents, your teachers, and your soccer coach), and we fight poorly planned wars against big nebulous ideas like Drugs and Terror that drag on and on and on and never get won.
This is the world where the things they put in your food to help you will inevitably be proven to cause cancer. This is the world where a congressman is hitting on a 16-year-old boy and people are shocked to the sum of *zero*, because frankly, we pretty much expect that they're all doing that.
We're the generation that trusts the government in that we trust the government to be incompetent, corrupt, and unfair.
We're the generation where the Liberty atop our quarters got replaced with United States of America.
Because apparently that liberty thing is *so* last century.
So yeah, today's escapism might not suit those who are still escaping circa 1970. 'cause hey, the world's changed.
This is not to invalidate anyone, though. This is not to say that those who aren't satisfied with what's coming out in the SF/F world are completely wrong. Frankly, I'm not that satisfied with it. There's a lot wrong with what's going on, I think (but that is *so* another post).
But I also think it's a bit foolish to expect that escapism will remain stagnant, that we'll all be getting on the same spaceship when we leave this world.
Because we won't.
The world changes, and the world we create to escape changes with it. But the great thing about the world?
It's round. Things come back.
So what's the point of pointing this out?
Maybe that admitting I've been seeing through a generational lens is the first step to getting rid of it.
That maybe there's a spaceship for everyone out there somewhere, and perhaps it seems like they all look the same, but if you delve a little deeper instead of giving up, you might find the Millenium Falcon you were looking for.
Seriously.
What if someone wrote a novel like every line was as important as the first line? That'd be frickin' cool.
But that's not what I came here to talk about.
I came to talk about generation and escapism. I was reading along and I came across something written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and she was discussing her dissatisfaction with today's science fiction (I've lost the link to this and if anyone could find it, it'd be most appreciated)
But what I do remember quite clearly is that she said (paraphrasing): "I'm part of the Star Wars generation."
As though it was very, very necessary for us to know her age and generation to understand why she was dissatisfied. As though if she were a twenty-year-old or a sixty-year-old, things would be massively different.
This struck me as really rather odd.
I don't think of myself as reading, writing, or thinking through a generational lens. I like to think I come unbiased to every book and every story.
Of course, I don't. But I also like to believe that these biases are pebbles, not boulders. I can stumble over them, but keep walking. Whereas a boulder sort of just puts an end to everything.
She also made a point of saying that her reason for loving science fiction was escapism.
Thing is? Escapism is always inherently self-defeating and deconstructive. No, really. Escapism is always a statement about the thing you're looking to escape. The more you try to escape, the more thoroughly you want that escape to me, the more carefully you have to look at what you want to get away from.
Which got me thinking that maybe there was something valid to the generational statement. Not because age matters, but because what someone was trying to escape from in the 1970's is radically different from what we're escaping from *now* in 2006.
Take spaceships, for instance.
Spaceships don't really get my goat. I don't speak for everyone born in the 1980's or thereafter, but I just don't think books with spaceships on the covers excite and titillate us the way they did our predecessors.
And I don't think that's anything stupid on our part, it's just our place in history.
Off the top of my head, the two biggest events in NASA history during my lifetime have been:
a) the Challenger disaster
b) NASA forgot to covert between metric and standard, thus losing millions of dollars
So you can see where the younger generation, the people who's parents don't really even remember the moon landing can be less than sanguine about books with space travel.
We've seen space. It's big, blank, and boring. There's a moon (*yawn*).
And even technology really doesn't excite us. Sure, we love our iPods and our Macs and our illegal downloading, and our cameraphones - but we know full well that in ten years, it'll all be so old and outdated and useless.
My generation is not a generation trying to escape a place or a thing.
We're a generation trying to escape a feeling, a state of mind, a state of being. We don't escape to spaceships and other planets (well, we do, but it's a whole different thing).
We escape back to the 70's and 80's and just last week when things seemed better. We escape back to old TV shows and retro clothes.
Which, incidentally, is why Star Wars is so long lasting and still relevant. Whereas people in the 70's were fairly dazzled by the adventure, my generation is dazzled by the ideas.
Like the idea that good and evil do exist and they're easy to pick out and that people can fight wars (against people!) that can actually be won
As opposed to our society which has no idea what's good and bad, and the bad guys look just like the good guys (because the weird guy in the car is statistically less likely to hurt you than your parents, your teachers, and your soccer coach), and we fight poorly planned wars against big nebulous ideas like Drugs and Terror that drag on and on and on and never get won.
This is the world where the things they put in your food to help you will inevitably be proven to cause cancer. This is the world where a congressman is hitting on a 16-year-old boy and people are shocked to the sum of *zero*, because frankly, we pretty much expect that they're all doing that.
We're the generation that trusts the government in that we trust the government to be incompetent, corrupt, and unfair.
We're the generation where the Liberty atop our quarters got replaced with United States of America.
Because apparently that liberty thing is *so* last century.
So yeah, today's escapism might not suit those who are still escaping circa 1970. 'cause hey, the world's changed.
This is not to invalidate anyone, though. This is not to say that those who aren't satisfied with what's coming out in the SF/F world are completely wrong. Frankly, I'm not that satisfied with it. There's a lot wrong with what's going on, I think (but that is *so* another post).
But I also think it's a bit foolish to expect that escapism will remain stagnant, that we'll all be getting on the same spaceship when we leave this world.
Because we won't.
The world changes, and the world we create to escape changes with it. But the great thing about the world?
It's round. Things come back.
So what's the point of pointing this out?
Maybe that admitting I've been seeing through a generational lens is the first step to getting rid of it.
That maybe there's a spaceship for everyone out there somewhere, and perhaps it seems like they all look the same, but if you delve a little deeper instead of giving up, you might find the Millenium Falcon you were looking for.
no subject
Date: 2006-10-18 04:53 pm (UTC)My original response to Star Wars does have one real generational difference, though, come to think of it. In the 1970s, Princess Leia was an absolute revelation--I'd never seen a heroic, kick-butt, powerful woman like that in any movie before. (But I still wished she could have been a Jedi!)
no subject
Date: 2006-10-19 12:18 am (UTC)One of the problems with making arguements about anything like this is that there's always exceptions. Generation aside, no two people are ever watching or reading something for the same reason.
I'm sure there's lots of people who watched Star Wars and cared less about the technology or the gosh-wow, but rather were captivated by the ideas and the characters.
I'd never seen a heroic, kick-butt, powerful woman like that in any movie before. (But I still wished she could have been a Jedi!)
I had that exact same reaction. In fact, I sort of fell in love with Leia, and many times, I wished the story could have been about *her*.
I never had a problem with her not being a Jedi, though, because she was already a princess and a warrior and hey...that's enough for anyone.