In the past couple of months I have started rereading books I read last in the 1990s and liked a lot then. The surprise and excitement of discovering a new world is less, of course, for I am already familiar with the worlds in those books. What surprised me the most, is that some books still hold up while others have become boring, bland, or otherwise uninteresting.
For example, I was unable to even get into Williams’ Otherland series. And I devoured Feist’s Magician almost like I did when I was in my teens.
How do you experience rereads from your youth? What writing characteristics makes a book eternally fresh or almost immediately dated?
Pern is one of those series that didn’t age well. The concept itself is still solid in that you COULD write it for a modern audience, but the way McCaffrey handles various subjects is no longer adequate for the modern perspective, in my opinion.
As a society (despite the horrific last few years) we’ve had a lot of success moving forward with discussions about gender, gender roles, sexuality–and the things that were “better than nothing” to those groups and which drew people to Pern in the past are now jarringly wrong-headed.
Why didn’t Menolly become Masterharper? Why did Lessa devolve into a shrew? (And Aramina?) Why did Brekke the queen rider have to be torn down and her dragon killed before the second-best-man after F’lar (F’nor) could have her? (Why is that trope repeated in the Talent series, with Damia needing to be diminished by an evil alien killing her brother off before she could mellow enough to accept Afra as her partner?)
I still love the books, mostly for the characters and ideas. But they very much don’t work in the modern day.
Pern didn’t age well at all, it was definitely written to pander to the audience back then.