ambyr posted recently about culls and memory that got me to thinking about the complexities of reread, memory, nostalgia, and so forth.

For example, when I read Peter S. beagle's Folk of the Air it was the right time for that story. I've kept it ever since, but never reread it--his later work didn't click with me, making me hesitant to revisit that one lest the same thing happen.

As I keep culling, I've discovered books that seemed really progressive at the time--books I really enjoyed, or that got me through a difficult period--that time has caught up with and bypassed in significant ways. Patrick Dennis comes to mind. His book about divorce, The Joyous Season, got me past the emotional whirlpool of my parents' marriage breaking up when I was a teen. There were other aspects that I really liked, but there are now attitudes and language that makes me wince now. And yet I can't cull that book.

But others I can place in the donation box with a mental salute to find memory, and hopes it finds its readership somewhere else. This ambivalence can go for problematical authors, too. But these things I think have to be decided for oneself. So many aspects to balance.

"Old-timey" seems to be an emerging term for stuff either set or written before the 21st Century. Here we get an amusing confusion: Old-Timey regency romances, I noted when scanning reviews by what appears to be younger-than-me readers, refers to the regency romances written in the sixties-eighties, even the nineties.

I used to collect these in my late teens, once I'd gone through everything the library had. They were sold by the bunch in used book stores, fifty cents for ten, which suited my babysitting budget--I could read one a night once the kids were asleep.

I did a cull of these beat-up, yellowing volumes with godawful covers 25-30 years ago, donating the real stinkers* and keeping a slew of others because my teenage daughter had by then discovered them.

But she left them all behind--she stopped reading fiction altogether around 2000--and I always meant to do a more severe cull, perhaps dump the entirety. But thought I oughht to at least check them out first, yet kept putting it off until recently. While I was recovering from that nasty dose of flu seemed the perfect time.

I finished last night.

Of course most of them are heavily influenced by Georgette Heyer, or at least in conversation with. Some were written when Heyer was still going strong. Authors from UK, USA, Australia, etc. For the most part you could tell the UK ones not only because the language was closer to early nineteenth century--these writers surely had grown up reading old books, as had Heyer--but their depictions of small towns in GB were way more authentic than those written by writers who'd never seen the islands.

But there were common threads. Good things, as one reviewer trumpeted: they wrote in complete sentences! They knew the difference between "lie" and "lay"! In the best of them, characters had actual conversations. Even witty ones! (There's an entire chapter in Austen's Emma, when we meet Mrs. Elton, which demonstrates what was and what wasn't "good conversation." I can imagine readers back then chuckling all the way through at Mrs. Elton's egregious vigor in bad conversational manners.)

But those are the superficials. What about the plots? Here were common tropes shared with contemporary romances of sixties and seventies. A bunch of these tropes have long since worn out their welcome. I didn't know why I hadn't culled some of the books containing the most egregious examples--maybe they were just so common that they were invisible, and there was some other aspect of a given book that had made me chuckle fifty years ago.

Dunno. But in this cull, as soon as I hit the evil aging mistress who will do anything to hang onto the (total jerk) hero, including setting the young and pure heroine up for rape and ruin (which she always j-u-s-t escapes), out it went, the rest of the novel unread: the plot-armored heroine will get her HEA. my sympathy lies with the mistress, whose grim situation veers closer to historical accuracy. Ditto I dumped unfinished the ones where the hero, who can't seem to control his raging hormones (or you know, talk like an adult) mistakes the pure and innocent heroine for a lightskirt and corners her at every opportunity for "can't-say-no" making out, while she castigates herself afterward, moaning, "Whatever is wrong with me?" Basically, while these heroines (and their readers) did not want to be raped, they did want to be ravished. And they weren't guilty of being bad girls if they were overpowered, right?

That was a VERY common trope in the early contemporary romances, the ones read by my mom by the literal sackful, and traded with other women at the local shop. In the seventies, Mom and her buddies organized themselves. None had the budgets to read everything coming out, so one woman would buy the new books from the Dell line, and another the Kensington line, and so on, then they'd trade them back and forth. Mom saved a sackful for my visits--she thought they were something we had in common, and I never disabused her of this, though I was fast getting sick of the "virginity" plotline. I read them all, noting patterns.

I could say a lot about why I think Mom and her buddies couldn't get enough of that plotline, but I'm trying to get through these regencies. In which the authors did understand the social cost of straying. But the heroine gets her reward at the (abrupt, usually) end, a ring from the guy who'd been cornering her for bruising kisses two chapters ago, and wedding bells in the distance. As I got older, I wondered if those marriages would make it much past the wedding trip. As a teen, I read uncritically for the Cinderella story--as I recollect all the weirdness about the heroines and their main commodity, their virginity (and their beauty) whizzed right over my head.

That said. Every so often you'd get a storyline that was a real comedy of manners, and while the research/worldbuilding was never as period-consistent as Heyer's secondary universe, they'd be fun stories. Like Joan Smith's Endure My Heart, which I'd remembered fondly for the battle of wits between hero and heroine--she the secret leader of a smuggling ring, and he the inspector sent to nab whoever was running that successful venture. Now, on rereading it, there were plenty of warts, but I remember the fun of the early read--and the only two attempted rape scenes were done by a villain, not the hero.

The regency romance has staying power, but it's evolved over the decades since these "old-timey" regencies for the 21st C reader who wants on-page sex, without real consequences. And only vague vestiges of the manners of the time. Few, or no, conversations or even awareness of the dynamics of salon socializing. Basically modern women in sexy silk gowns, and guys in tight pants and colorful jackets and rakish hats, with all the cool trappings--country houses, carriages, balls, and the elegant fantasy of the haut monde.

In the donation box the old ones go.

*I'll never forget the one that had to have been written in the mid-seventies, which had the pouting heroine stating on the first page that she was bored, bored, bored with Almack's and why did she have to participate in the marriage mart anyway? She wanted, and I quote from memory, "actualize her personhood!" Then there was the one that featured the hero, leader of fashion, sporting a crew cut and a "suit of flowing silk of lime green"--I think the author meant a leisure suit.

Then there was Barbara Cartland. Whether or not she hired a stable of writers to churn these out once a month under her name or not, she boiled the story down to the barest skeleton of tropes, padded out mostly by ellipses. Except for one early one, published in the thirties or early forties that lifted huge chunks of a Heyer, stuffed into a really weird plot...

Actually I've been doing a ton of reading while I shake off the last of this influenza, which is mostly now lingering chest crud and zero stamina.

While nothing has blown me away, and I've abandoned some other "not for me" books, I did make a virtuous start on The Cull. Beginning with C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, first published in 1938.

My copy, the 1965 paperback edition printed in the US, has a cover that actually sort of fits the book, unlike a lot of SF covers of the time depicting generic space skies and cigar rocket ships, with or without a scantily clad lady joined by guys in glass helmets and bulky space suits.

No woman on the cover here, which would have been false advertising as the only woman on stage during the entire novel is a distraught country housewife in the first few pages. (And no, I do not think that this is a sign that Lewis despised women, so much as that he had spent all his childhood and early manhood among males, so his default characters are going to be "he" among "hims". But that's a discussion for another book.)

I've had Lewis's space trilogy since high school (1968). This one I read I think twice, once that year, and then again when the Mythopoeic Society had branches and our West LA discussion group covered the three books.

Teen-me trudged through the first reading looking for story elements that would interest me, and though a line here and there was promising, I found it overall tedious, missing the humor entirely. On that second reading during my college years I saw the humor, and found more to appreciate in Lewis's thematic argument, but that was a lukewarm enough response that I never reread it during the ensuing fifty years.

Now in old age it's time to cull a massive print library that neither of my kids wants to inherit. What to keep and what to donate? I reread this book finally, and found myself largely charmed. The structure is strongly reminiscent of the fin de siecle SF of Wells, Verne, etc--inheritors of the immensely popular "travelogue" of the 1600-1700s--which means it moves rather slowly, full of the description of discovery (and anticipatory terror) as its protagonist, a scholar named Ransom, stumbles into a situation that gets him kidnapped by a figure from his boarding school days, Weston, and Weston's companion, a man named Devine.

As was common in the all-male world of British men of Lewis's social strata, the men all go by last names--I don't think Weston or Devine are ever given a first name, and there are at most two mentions of Ransom's first name, Elwin, which I suspect was only added as a nod to JRRT. Apparently this book owes its origin to a bet made between Lewis and Tolkien, which I think worth mentioning because of the (I think totally wrong) assumptions that Lewis was anti-science. The bet, and the dedication to Lewis's brother, make it plain that they read and enjoyed science fiction--had as boys.

I suppose it's possible to eagerly read SF and still be anti-science, but I don't think that's the case here; accusations that Lewis hates scientific progress seem to go hand-in-hand with scorn for Lewis's Christianity. But I see the scientific knowledge of mid-thirties all over this book. In fact, I don't recollect reading in other contemporary SF (admittedly I haven't read a lot of it) the idea that once you're out of Earth's gravity well, notions of up and down become entirely arbitrary. Though Lewis seems not to understand freefall, he does represent the changes in gravity and in light and heat--it seems to me that the science, though full of errors that are now common knowledge, was as up-to-date as he could make it. That also shows in the meticulous worldbuilding--and to some extent in the fun he had building his Martian language.

What he argues against when the three men are at last brought before the god-like Oyarsa, is a certain attitude toward Progress as understood then, and also up through my entire childhood: that it didn't matter what you did to other beings or to the environment, as long as it was in the name of Progress or Humanity. We get little throwaways right from the start that Lewis's stance clear, such as when Devine and Weston squabble about having a guard dog to protect their secret space ship, but Devine points out that Weston had had one but experimented on it.

Lewis hated vivisection. He knew it was torture for the poor helpless beasts in the hands of the vivisectionists, who believed animals had no feelings, etc etc. He also hated the byproducts of mass industrialization, as he makes plain in vivid images. Lewis also makes reference to splitting the atom and its possible results; I think it worthwhile to note that during the thirties no one knew what the result would be--but there was a lot of rhetoric hammering that we need bigger and better bombs, and splitting the atom would give us that. All in the name of Humanity. Individual lives have no meaning, and can be sacrificed with impunity as long as it's in the name of "saving Humanity."

As his theme develops, it's made very clear that moral dilemmas trouble Ransom--he's aware that humans contain the capability for brilliant innovation and for vast cruelty. He also holds up for scruntiny the idea that the (white) man is the pinnacle of intelligence in the cosmos. The scene when Weston talks excruciating pidgin in his determination to subordinate the Martians and their culture to the level of "tribal witch doctors" is equally hilarious and cringey.

In short, it took over fifty years for me to appreciate this book within the context of its time. I don't feel any impulse to eagerly reread it, but I might some day. At any rate, it stays on the shelf.