Before Coode Street goes on hiatus for a few weeks when each of us travel to various exotic realms, we address a question which Jonathan raised about new editions of work by Clifford Simak and Tom Reamy—namely, what happens to the work of older writers in a world in which the midlist has all but disappeared? How do writers “read back†in the genre—or do they need to at all? How do writers as diverse as Joe Abercrombie and Neil Gaiman come across the work of Fritz Leiber, for example, or how do writers like Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Kij Johnson encounter Lovecraft? And for readers and writers who came of age in the 1990s or later, does “reading back†mean the same thing it did for earlier generations?
Then we chat a bit about our plans for Coode Street at MidAmericon in August, what we’re reading now, and what we’re looking forward to reading on the break. As always, we hope you enjoy the episode, and hope you don’t miss the podcast too much! See you in late July!
Re: Your conversation about the way writers and readers learn the history of the field. Let’s not forget the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Someone gave me a copy of the print version back in the 1990s. I spent all winter reading it, especially the author entries. What an education! The experience reminded me, after years spent away from the field studying Literature in grad school that Kingsley Amis had it right when he said that science fiction was, after all, “the right sort of stuff. ”
By the way, Penguin has published a new anthology of short fiction by Charles Beaumont. Looking that book up on Amazon, I find that Penguin has also published collections by Thomas Ligotti, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and Clark Ashton Smith. How mainstream can you get?