How long until classic?

I think Neuromancer is a seminal text as evidenced by its legacy. The definition of classic is mich more slippery and subjective.

When non science fiction fans know about it and its been a film more then 2 times

I would imagine a publisher would declare any decades older book that keeps getting new additions due to continued demand as "classic". Clarke's Glide Path probably not, while Rama is.

Onyx said:

I would imagine a publisher would declare any decades older book that keeps getting new additions due to continued demand as "classic". Clarke's Glide Path probably not, while Rama is.

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A publisher will declare anything classic ( or any other hype) if they think it might help shift units.

hitmouse said:

A publisher will declare anything classic ( or any other hype) if they think it might help shift units.

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Sure, but I was getting at the idea that some books have pretty continuous sales from first release. Has Dune ever been out of print? It is easy to call something a classic when everyone seems to like it and keeps buying it. Think of all the books and stories that were never published after their initial release - it is harder to call those "classics".

Classic means different things.

You've got classics which are classic for being a huge influence in their own time or in another time; you've got classics which are just old; classics which are the "first" (first often being most popular first rather than always be the actual first). Some will be books that have never left print, others might well leave print and return every so often and classic might well be one marketing tool used to try and help push sales.

In general I suspect most things a generation or two old become "classic" in some form. Even just 20 years and you've already got multiple new generations considering things to be classic of earlier eras.


And, of course, you've then got the classic classics which seem t obe defined by being very old and published never-unendingly by Puffin

Extollager said:

Related to this "good reading" criterion is this: Classic works are indispensable. Each may give us something we can't get elsewhere. If you haven't read and digested Hamlet, you cannot get that flavor somewhere else, except perhaps incidentally or mixed with other flavors. If Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience disappeared, nothing else would make the loss bearable. The same, I suppose, would be true of other classic works. Conversely, I don't suppose that popular thrillers are indispensable. You can get pretty much the same thing from Book X as from Book Y.

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I don't know that I'd agree with this part. I think of an author like Hammett or Chandler... both wrote classics of their genres. Their work has had appeal for multiple generations and spawned legions of imitators, providing the noir template for decades of authors and filmmakers. But I wouldn't consider them indispensable, nor would I say the same about Doyle or Agatha Christie. Detective novels with similar flair would still exist... without Doyle and Hammett, we'd still have Christie and Chandler. Without any of the 4, we'd still have Collins/Poe and Westlake/MacDonald. And regardless of any ONE author, we'd still have inspiration for modern detective authors.

This becomes even more troubling the further back we go. Do we KNOW we couldn't get the flavor of Shakespeare elsewhere, or is it simply that he's the one that got written down and republished most at a time when print was at a premium? For that matter, we're not even sure he WROTE all of his plays or if some of the plays credited to him might have actually been written by some of his peers.

I think, particularly with "classics" from before the time of mass market cheap publishing, some books earn classic status through dumb luck. Being the one text a monk managed to grab from a burning village. The playwright whose rich benefactor was eccentric enough to invest in copying his works. The Norse legend that still got told because all the other tribes were slaughtered by the people telling it. And yes, some got preserved BECAUSE they merited it.

Now we're in a new era where preserving EVERYTHING seems possible and, as some have pointed out, classic becomes a tactic to drive sales of repackaged things nobody cared to reprint for 50 years (Library of America series, some of the SF Masterworks, some of the noir authors I mentioned above) but that are now being sought nostalgically.

Then again, sometimes this is because devotees see gold the masses missed... I think of the old joke that only 500 people bought the Velvet Underground's first album, but every single one of them started a band.

Classics aren't indispensable (or original to use the music snob version of the same concept), so much as they're the best example we have of what they do. We would still have great mysteries without Dashiell Hammett and great romantic poetry without Blake, but because multiple generations of the people that love mystery stories, or plays, or poems all tend to agree that Hammett, Shakespeare and Blake did those things as well as just about anybody despite 50-500 years of people trying to outdo them, we call their works classic.

soulsinging said:

I don't know that I'd agree with this part. I think of an author like Hammett or Chandler... both wrote classics of their genres. Their work has had appeal for multiple generations and spawned legions of imitators, providing the noir template for decades of authors and filmmakers. But I wouldn't consider them indispensable, nor would I say the same about Doyle or Agatha Christie. Detective novels with similar flair would still exist... without Doyle and Hammett, we'd still have Christie and Chandler. Without any of the 4, we'd still have Collins/Poe and Westlake/MacDonald. And regardless of any ONE author, we'd still have inspiration for modern detective authors.

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What I mean is that when one wants (say) a Chandler story -- with just exactly those qualities -- he's indispensable. A Chandler imitation might be enjoyable, might be a genuine achievement, but I'll bet that for someone who really knows and relishes his/her Chandler, the difference would still be felt.

I write this as someone who's a veteran rereader. It's quite common for me to want some particular flavor -- just those qualities, related to one another in just those ways and proportions, etc. And so I say to myself that I'm in the mood for some well-known non-genre author, or Lewis, or Lovecraft, or Machen, or Tolkien, or Stevenson, or Austen, or Phyllis Paul, etc. These are all classic authors. They do something special and they do it well. When that's what one wants, nothing else will quite do -- though often one is not in so specific a mood.

I really do find this sense of the indispensable grows with me. Now in my sixties, I find, for example, that while I have a relish for (a few stories by) Lovecraft, I can hardly force myself to read any of his imitators, though I was once fairly content to do so. I still love Tolkien but I am actually repelled by the thought of most "Tolkienian fantasy" -- fooh, all that world-building frou-frou, etc. (shudder). And so on. I hope I have made a little clearer my point about the "indispensable," and, if I have, I suspect that there may be some readers who know what I'm trying to get at.

But if not -- then take what I'm saying as an amusing quirk, perhaps?

There is a lot more to something being a classic than this, though.

Galactic Journey said:

A classic has to have been around to shape what comes after. That's how you can get "instant classics!"

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So Star Wars qualified because its success pushed the Star Trek movie from talk to reality.

dannymcg said:

...curious as to how a SFF book or series gets 'classic' status.

Is it..

Or is it when...

Or does a book/series have to..

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Someone does something that has on clear impact.

Others try to copy the recipe of success/impact/attention.

The first and original becomes a classic when original and its folowers form an category, genre orr subgenre of their own and the original one has a clear status as a primus motor of the flow of books/movies/whatever.

When something becomes a core or nucleus of bigger formation that becomes after it and because it, the original one becomes classic.

I don't think there's a hard and fast time required to define a book as a classic, rather it needs to be the sort of story that seeps into the subconscious of the reader (and reading community at large) and remain there. Dune, Foundation, Neuromancer are classics and have been since they were first published. The Expanse is popular drek that won't have any lasting effect on the genre in any way. It's popular now, but no one will be reading it in 10 years.

Vince W said:

The Expanse is popular drek that won't have any lasting effect on the genre in any way. It's popular now, but no one will be reading it in 10 years.

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The Expanse will be more memorable as a mini-series than as a book. I almost threw it across the room when the Vomit Zombies showed up but the series is way better than I was expecting,

psikeyhackr said:

The Expanse will be more memorable as a mini-series than as a book. I almost threw it across the room when the Vomit Zombies showed up but the series is way better than I was expecting,

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That's EXACTLY when I tossed it across the room. Spooky.

Would agree with Vince - 'classic' needs either big ideas or startling good writing. Old Man's War, the Expanse even the excellent Martian or The Void books aren't going to stick like Ringworld, Stars My Destination or Rama, no matter how well crafted they might be.

I would agree with Old Man's War, I would go so far as to say it's overrated. The Expanse, can't see it. But The Marian, I believe could make it to classic status.

When I help sort donated books at Friends of the Library, the question is often floated: "Is this a classic?" Those that are included in the category have a special shelf all their own among the literature. My basic rule of thumb (facetiously) is that if I was required to read it in school, then it's a classic. So Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Stoker and Huxley get included. Most all others just go to the SF and Fantasy shelves. The newer vampire stuff has its own shelf for different reasons.

Hmm -- Clovis-Man, I would guess that prospective buyers of Wells, LotR, and the Narnian books would look first in "fantasy" rather than "classics." No problem with putting M. Shelley and Huxley in "Classics."