If you go through life long enough you’ll find that a lot of things that you like don’t age too well. I grew up in the 70s so it was the dawn of a new age of science fiction with Star Wars and a new realm of excitement with fantasy thanks to Dungeons & Dragons, which spawned a lot of new books and worlds. But I also had a wealth of books from decades past thanks to my father and that meant going back from the 30s onward to read a whole host of things. This let me get in with reading the “founding writers” of both fields in a really good way and they created some of the most memorable works that became the blueprint for both fields for decades to come.
Sadly, a lot of it hasn’t aged well for various reasons. Asimov barely had any women in his stories and they weren’t the best characterized when he did work with them. So much of what gained prominence was straightforward simple American white male views of things without a lot of nuance either, though some things did slip through. So many women had to write under male names to get published. Hell, I’m still a fan of the Mission: Earth books, but absolutely none of that has aged well.
While I’ll point to a favorite like Orson Scott Card for the Ender’s Game series as a writer that has not aged well, the one the frustrates me the most is Robert A. Heinlein as I loved the wonder and space-opera-ishness of so many of his works and the character of Lazarus Long. Books I’ll never recommend to people but are defining works for me (that I grew past in obvious ways).
Who are your favorite writers that haven’t aged well in their craft?
