I've seen that episode! And the Bujinkan is the school I study under!

I joke about being a ninja all the time, but secretly in the open, I'm in training. (That I can call the style budo taijutsu helps.)

Although I think you have a point, I'm not sure where I fit into it. In some ways I am part of the previous generation (I certainly do read stories by Rusch and Benford and Bear, maybe not so much with the Silverberg) but I think I'm part of the same literary generation as you and jaylake (and I certainly do read stories by you guys). Maybe it's just because I'm older than the other members of my cadre? I was 40 when I published my first story.

Hmmmmmm.

(pass the martini, pls, kthx)

I prefer pirates to ninjas.

i read everything i can get my hands on. i wonder what generation i am.

This is somehow related to my discovery, last week, that the first column by the new book reviewer for F&SF assessed...Asimov, Brackett, and a takeoff on van Vogt.

?

The following is an opinion . . . some of it verifiable . . . some of it strictly navel contemplation:

It’s just a guess, but I’d bet that production requires an increase in motivation the more laps one takes around the track. When you’ve done it all, and possess the trophies on the wall to prove it, wanting to do something probably becomes more important then having to do something. Starting out, a writer will more then likely have more stories bouncing around in their cranium then they can possibly translate to the written word. The craving to put it all into a readable/sharable format will be almost overwhelming. Once the author has a decent size bibliography, some of that hunger will have been satiated -- probably not completely but enough so that selectivity and motivation come into play when choosing to write any particular story. Add that to the age of the storyteller, inertia increasing with each turn of the calendar page, and I can see how someone like SilverBob can be very selective in which projects he chooses to attempt. Still, I’d be willing to bet the farm that these folk write and write every day -- a delightful habit that I’m trying to acquire.

I wonder how much publications could answer some of this conundrum. It would be interesting to have a study, complete with demographics, on the reading habits of fen. Is there a generational difference in where they read their fiction choices? To wit: what percentage of each age group read shorts from just anthologies, printed magazines, e-zines, or other formats? Those that mix and match formats: how much of each is read per age group? Then correlate it to the generation of the authors in each format. If Haldeman, Resnick, and Rusch sell primarily to the “in-print” publications, who are the people reading that format? Compare that to Jay Lake, Eugie Foster, and Nick Mamatas. The likelihood that there is an appreciable difference will probably be closer to one then zero.

Fortunately, SF/F is fast approaching the “who cares?” limit for gender differences. There is still some bias but I believe it is diminishing. As a for instance, check out the genders of the leading editors: mostly female. How about the top award winner (per the LOCUS list): numero uno -- Ursula K. LeGuin (followed closely by Connie Willis). If asked to choose a top ten list of authors, how many lists would be all female or all male? Probably very few. Check out the past presidents of SFWA for the last decade or so -- and that doesn’t include all the female writers who contribute so much to that organization. Females are here to stay, and often lead the way, in all aspects of SF/F -- including the dreaded hard-science fiction.

because climbing outdoors is awesome

Fixed that minor typo for you. *grin*

As a Millennial (I think; certainly I'm a bit too young for GenX), I think I mostly enjoy reading GenX stuff (well, and possibly fellow-Millennial stuff, though I'm not sure I can reliably tell it apart). I read older stuff, too. Some of it I really like, a lot, and some of it makes go wonder what the fuss is all about.

Of course, I'd probably wonder what the fuss was all about, about everything -- except that I don't get as much of a sense that I 'should' like the GenX and later things. I don't feel as though it's someone's Classics. It's good or bad on its own merits. When it's bad, I don't think, "Good grief, why is that the golden age of anything?" because nobody has tried to convince me that I am obliged like it if I am to be an SF fan.

Mileage, obviously, varies.

I don't know what generation I'm in, though I'm your age. I've read Benford but I'm not a fan.

I hadn't read anything by Kristine Katherine Rusch before I read her Hugo-nominated novella, but I really liked it--in fact, I voted for it. I had no idea what generation she was, I just thought it was a moving story.

On the other hand, I don't know what generation Michael Swanwick is in (Wikipedia says he's four years younger than my father, though), but I remember you commenting that he was a big name to be up against for the Hugo. I liked his story just fine, but to be honest, it did the least for me of the short story nominees. "Tideline" was far and away my favorite. (Please don't think I'm sucking up; I'm being completely honest here.)

The thing is, again, "Tideline" was the most moving story of the bunch for me (though I also found "Distant Replay" sweet, and I guess Resnick would count as the older generation). So regardless of the generation, I don't care about this or that theme or trope, what I'm looking for is a story that moves me.

-o-

On the topic of gender-bending, this is a topic of great interest to me, because I don't feel like I fit into the traditional gender role assigned to me. I'm a nurturer, I like to cook, I do most of the housework, I love kids. I'm sensitive and artistic and affectionate and gentle. I've always rejected the notion that traditional gender roles are the natural order of things, though that notion seems to be regaining currency in the culture at large. There are all these scientific studies showing that boys are just this way and girls are just that way, and to me the flaws in the studies seem glaringly obvious--you just can't have a control group when you're studying people. As a father who's tried to insulate his daughters from traditional gender typing, I have been pained to discover how ineffectual I've been, because unless I go live in a cave, I can't keep pop culture from inculcating its messages in them. My girls hardly ever watch TV, but someone else will give them Barbies, or they'll go to school and internalize the idea that boys build and girls cook. So studying kids proves nothing because regardless of the intentions of the parents, the culture will teach them some lessons with such subtlety that we don't always even realize it's happening.

So anyway, long story short. I'm not a very mannish man, and I think we should send the message that that's okay. Even if we could prove that traditional roles are the natural order of things, my response would be, "So what?" It may be normal, but there will always be the exceptions, and there's no reason why we should stigmatize outliers. It should be okay for kids to grow into the people they're going to be.

So I'm interested in the idea of fiction that subverts those traditional roles/stereotypes. I stumbled across this list of gender-bending sci-fi (http://www.glbtfantasy.com/?section=lists&sub=sfgender), and, to tell you the truth, I was a bit disappointed. I see gender-bending stories about aliens with multiple sexes, but very few about humans. Those that are about humans are homosexual. That's great, but if we imply that the only exceptions to gender roles are homosexuals, aren't we in a way reinforcing the normalcy of those roles? If all gay men are effeminate and all lesbian women are butch, doesn't that reinforce this sense of duality? What about the manly gay men, or the unmanly straight ones, or the straight women who don't follow traditional women's roles?

Aw, crap, now I've rambled and ranted all over your blog, and to what end? I don't know. I know I'd like to write fiction that subverts those stereotypes. I'd like to read fiction that subverts them. If generation is not about your age but about when you get published, then I guess I might not be in your generation, but I do share in that fascination with gender roles. (Ironically, the YA novel I'm peddling around right now doesn't touch on that at all, but I guess you can't hit all the themes that interest you with every work.)

For the Millennials? Gender roles are so 1999, baby. Get over it.

*looks at at least one of her WiPs* *coughs*

I may resemble that remark.

As a Millenial myself, I smiled at that last sentence.

'Cause yeah. That's what I'm seeing in people around me. (I have an educated friend, a few years my senior, who honestly thought that full gender equality was written into the Constitution.) Girls do boy things, boys do girl things, and my generation seems less concerned about calling things "boy" and "girl" at all.

Which does lead me to wonder what our arguments will be.

I realized after Terry Bisson and I started SF in SF that most of our guests were of an earlier generation (understandable, because most of them were Terry's friends), and that even though we first held the readings in a college, we didn't get very many people in their twenties (or even thirties), which surprised me. I'm not very particular as to who I read beyond whether I think it will be a good story, but when I check with what my friends are reading I've noticed a definite gap based on their age.

I think you are on to something there. At least you explain my SF/Fantasy reading behavior pretty well (it's completely different with Horror, but that's got a lot to do with the state that genre is in).
Sure, when I was younger (I'm 31 now) I read Silverberg and Benford, too, but when you're mostly reading library books, you'll read anything of vague interest you get your hands on.
I feel there is a palpable difference in sensibilities between writers of different generations - someone like Benford doesn't have much to say to me.

"the Warren Ellis exclusion"

Oh, *I* see how it is.

Just for that, I'm going to have a drink.

I'm not sure what my reading trajectory means, if anything: as in, I started reading sff over 30 years ago, when Le Guin and Delany were pretty much the new thing, read around the field a lot - though initially I was pretty much dependent upon public libraries I discovered the import booksellers relatively early on - and found out what I did and didn't like. There was a good period (or so it looks in retrospect - I may be remembering the good stuff and not the dry spells) during the 80s and maybe up to the early 90s of The Kind of Thing That oursin Likes - and Reclusive Cult Author and I swapping books back and forth and making discoveries. And then there was a period which I will politely describe as fallow, in which RCA and I would stand in the basement of New Worlds going 'Whadda load of crap' except for new stuff coming along by authors we'd already established as We Like This. And then there started up to be new and exciting work coming along again (though I still observe a lot of stuff on the new books shelf in Forbidden Planet that has me yawning or going WTF). But this is all mediated through my personal filters and other people would surely see very different periodisation and heights and depths.

Perfect explanation why i will never sell any fiction. I am like five generations behind at this point and sinking fast.

Alas.

Two points.. At about the time you were born, approx Dangerous Visions, it was possible for one person to have read all of SF. Or at least to have read one book by all the novelists. Now? Forget it.

There was no fantasy back then, per se, for example. And what there was was almost all by the English, except for Peter S. Beagle.

No there is no possible way to read all the next stuff and go back and read all the classics. And i think that most of the gensters (ha!) don't read actual books. They get their SF from DVD's. At least that's what i get from reading i09.com

Second point. As everybody, not just the SF community gets more self referential and (insert polite way of saying "Insulated from the Nitty gritty of street life" here) the the arts the produce become more esoteric and abstract. This is not a bad thing, don't flame me, please.

But things happen to me, in my tri-racial neighborhood everyday, that are real and funny and really interesting, but which i could never have published in any forum in America, no matter how open they think they are.

I can't even give you examples with out being called a racist. Which bores me.

So that's my take.

Gender roles, schmender roles. I got people here stealing the plums of of neighbor's trees to have something to to eat. I could go on, but i have probably pissed a bunch of people off already, sorry.

Huh. That's the first time I actually did track along with the rest of the boomers, whose veriest tail I am. Data point. At this rate, I might fully understand my brain by the time I'm 80. *g*

An extremely interesting discussion, which reflects a lot of what I've been observing at the cons I go to over the past, oh, ten years.

For what it's worth, I think what you're describing is, like most generalizations about generational tendencies, accurate in the macro but arguable in the micro. That is, yes, generation solidarity happens, but as soon as you say so, you'll have honest and intelligent individuals crawling out of the woodwork to point out that they aren't like that. And so they're not. But you're still right, because this kind of trend isn't about one individual's experience, but the average of all individual experiences. (Which is not as clear on paper as it was in my head, but is the best I can do before breakfast.)

Since this seems to be turning into a kind of informal poll, here's my individual experience. The more I write, the less time I have to read. I spend some of what I do have on "comfort reading" (mostly books I've read before, many of them non-genre, plus unapologetic trash). Some goes on research (history, folk lore, novels I wouldn't read if I didn't have to), and the rest on new books I'm curious about. Some of these are by old favorites (Diana Wynne Jones, Ursula K. LeGuin, Patricia McKillip), but most are by young writers because I have found them very much to my taste. I like best those that play with conventions: genres, sexualities, language, and yes, gender roles. Most of them are by women, but I read men, too,if they're doing stuff I like (I just finished Jeffrey Ford's Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, and am in the middle of Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union).

For purposes of demographic comparison, I am a middle Boomer who has been writing professionally for (heaven help us) 27 years.

At this year's Kirk Poland Bad Prose competition at Readercon, I identified one of the submissions as not being period-SF (pre-1950's, incidentally) because of the gender roles.

1) Two men and a woman on the spaceship take turns nursing a baby (by bottle, one assumes).

2) A woman suggests the way out of Our Heroes' predicament, and there is insufficient fanfare or backpattery.

However, IIRC, the fake passage was written by two Boomers (Doyle and Macdonald). I don't know what that says about your theory. Item #2 fits, but item #1 doesn't, unless they're just ahead of their time.

I'm pretty sure I count as a Gen Xer, but I side with the Millenials: Who cares about all this gender role stuff? I don't see the fascination with it. :)

I reread this several times and I keep getting derailed at putting Kristine Kathryn Rusch in the same generation as Silverberg or Benford. The men are from the Silent Generation and Kristine is somewhere between late boomer and early Gen X. I remember when she was the GOH at WisCon and thought she was young but looking her up I see she is in her 40s.
You are probably right in that they don't read you and you don't read them but I need a better definition of you and them than generational.

I've been reading SF since i was 12 and it was hard to find in a small town in the early 50's. So my early reading was Asimov, Heinlein, Van Vogt and Zenna Henderson. If my school and village library had it, I read it. I have tried to keep up with what is current and find a lot that I like. There is a lot I don't read. I have given up on long serial novels except for any Bujold writes.

FWIW the generation difference I experience is I am primarily a reader of SF and many of the younger generation are viewers. I discovered that when my children and I go to the same con it is a totally different experience as we chose very different activities to participate in. They are much more into film, anime and graphic novels.

How did I so (totally) miss this awesome post and discussion?

Where was my brain on Jul 26th?

??