You May Indulge Yourselves

I used to joke that Bill Gates was a better person than Steve Jobs because although Bill wanted all our money Steve wanted our souls too. I was very wrong about Bill.
If Revenge of the Nerds dystopian style. Gates, Bezos and Zuckerberg

“It’s been the convention for decades now to depict the 1950’s as picket fence noir. Audiences would be surprised if harmonious suburban communities (compulsory aside: which never existed) didn’t have dark forebodings.”
One of the oddities of the “culturally sensitive“ crowd is their strange inability (or perhaps “outright refusal” might be closer to the mark) to display any sensitivity at all to the culture of their own parents and grandparents.

They didn’t read any books that weren’t mass market fantasy/SF, or watch any movies or shows that weren’t at least adjacent to their particular niche. As a result, their standards for quality were badly miscalibrated.
That is a very good insight. Thank you! (That might explain how A E Van Vogt’s popularity declined so precipitously after the sixties: when fans began to encounter better-written stories they finally lost interest in him and other poor stylists.)
We might be able to make a long thread on this topic, pondering other factors. For instance, I have met fans who love the Starship Troopers movie as a straight adventure of entirely admirable people: they cannot see the Nazi elements that Paul Verhoeven inserted into it, and I find it astonishing that this could be the case. They might be lying, but I have encountered this blindness in other circumstances too. I have postulated that they tend to be geeks who are capable of deep perception only of engineering/scientific matters but this remains merely speculation.

I find it astonishing that this could be the case
“Fans are Slans” analogizes SF fans to secret mutants that were intended to be a metaphor for pre-WWII Jewry. Because being mocked for reading SF is totally like being a Jew in Nazi Germany.
Self-awareness is not fandom’s strong suit.
Up to a certain point in the 20th century, F/SF authors were generally people who had done other things in their lives, and had turned to F/SF either as a way to pay the bills or a side gig or a retirement hobby. Robert E. Howard mostly wrote cowboy and boxing novels, for instance. Leaving aside quality for a moment, this meant that authors were bringing real-world experiences into the stories they wrote.
Around the early 80’s, we saw the first crop of F/SF writers who went straight from college into writing, and whose only life experiences were college and reading other F/SF lit. The result is a genre that’s been steadily shrinking in on itself and getting increasingly unmoored from any real-world relevance. Most of the best-selling fantasy book series and at least three TV shows of the last twenty years have been novelizations of the author’s college D&D campaign. I don’t think there’s an author out there any more who could write even a Hammer’s Slammers or a Chronicles of Amber, much less Dune or Lord of the Rings.
Three chapters in and I’m not very impressed
Heinlein was an atheist and a conservative libertarian, which meant neither the left nor the right liked him very much. It’s also been noted – fairly – that Heinlein doesn’t write characters; every character is just Heinlein, spouting Heinlein’s sociopolitical opinions in Heinlein’s voice. The extent to which you like Heinlein tends to depend on how much you agree with him.
It just seemed like a campy/silly romp of a military-ish movie
When I saw it in high school none of us had read the original and we all just chalked it up to SF films being cheesy, low-budget and badly written. The TV series Space: Above and Beyond is basically Starship Troopers without the political subversion, which is to say a campy/silly romp of a military-ish show.

Verhoeven, who seems doomed to forever make films that he thinks viciously lampoon his political opposites
I’m still reeling from the revelation that Robocop was intended as a Christ allegory.
I haven’t had much contact with the SF/F fan communities
There are two groups of fans – the ones that just read and enjoy F/SF works as a favoured genre of literature, and the ones that self-identify as fans, and make up clever names for themselves and go to cons and so on. That second group has become increasingly more visibly disturbing over time as the genres have been mainstreamed. It’s truly unfortunate that Harlan Ellison refused to allow Xenogenesis to be reprinted because its depiction of the more disturbed fan-type-2 might, if promulgated more widely, have led to some self-reflection on the part of the community.
And then there’s the recent revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley and other older lions of the field.
I’ve used the phrase “creative human centipede”
I’ve used the phrase “like an ourobouros consuming its own tail, getting smaller and smaller all the time” but I’m stealing yours because it’s more punchy.
TVTropes has a lot to answer for. Being curated almost entirely by millennials who think they’re media-savvy but have no knowledge of anything prior to 1995 or so, it’s full of these kind of “I can tell this is a trope but I don’t know where it comes from or why it exists” entries. The other thing I see is that as F/SF goes mainstream, its primary media has become film, TV and video games. Many, possibly even most people who call themselves F/SF fans now have never read a F/SF book. And the writing for film/TV/video games is by necessity simpler and of poorer quality than a full-sized novel, and relies heavily on communicating via tropes.

Daniel Ream: “Fans are Slans” analogizes SF fans to secret mutants that were intended to be a metaphor for pre-WWII Jewry.
And A. E. Van Vogt’s novel Slan was published in the late 40’s so it seems likely that he had that in mind at least to some extent.
Self-awareness is not fandom’s strong suit.
Sadly true.
Around the early 80’s, we saw the first crop of F/SF writers who went straight from college into writing, and whose only life experiences were college and reading other F/SF lit. The result is a genre that’s been steadily shrinking in on itself…
Does that explain Delany’s later fiction? 🙂
Let’s see: Gregory Benford is a physicist, Gene Wolfe was an engineer, Joe Haldeman was a combat engineer, Asimov was a phd Chemist at Boston, Pratchett was a newspaper man, Pournelle was many things, but I seem to be talking only about old guys like myself which supports your point. 🙁
I don’t think there’s an author out there any more who could write even a Hammer’s Slammers
By David Drake, Vietnam War veteran.
How about Michael Z. Williamson who is a more recent veteran and who maintains parallel careers in making/repairing firearms and edged weapons and in related consulting for Hollywood? I’ve only read one of his novels so far, so I am not in a position to say one way or the other.

Daniel Ream: There are two groups of fans – the ones that just read and enjoy F/SF works as a favoured genre of literature, and the ones that self-identify as fans, and make up clever names for themselves and go to cons and so on.
There are some who fall in between: They are primarily readers. They occasionally go to cons but do not wear costumes, give themselves clever names, or speak Klingon. 🙂 I occasionally have gone to cons, when the announced program had numerous items that seemed worth attending–one can see highly knowledgable people discussing interesting things, and ask questions. But slowly the internet replaced that as a more convenient source, and the chief reason to attend was to meet old friends: I have had many wonderful lunches and dinners (at which sf was rarely discussed) with one highly respected writer who was one of the most intelligent and humane people I have known.
Many, possibly even most people who call themselves F/SF fans now have never read a F/SF book.
As exemplified, perhaps, by the fact that those media-oriented Comic Cons get tens of thousands of guests while the typical old style con gets hundreds. I have tried to interest media fans in related written fiction but with very limited success. In part it seems as if some people just stop reading.

In part it seems as if some people just stop reading.
People nowadays “consume” media.
Teaching does not take place in schools, “programming” does.
The mind has been decoupled from the activity. You need to be able to think to learn concepts, to read books.
I love finding some pulpy old paperback of speculative SF from the 50s or thereabouts in a used bookstore, for a couple bucks. It’s amazing what they thought the future held. Interplanetary travel, no, but other tech, and social changes – they were surprisingly prescient.

I’ve been re-reading Andre Norton’s juveniles, starting with Sargasso of Space
I have a couple Andre Norton paperbacks in my collection, but I don’t know if they were juveniles or not.
I’ve always been a fan of a good adventure story, whether space-based or fantasy-based. I can tolerate some social commentary in my fictional escapes, as long as it isn’t too preachy and beat me about the head. I think that is why I tend to prefer the older stuff – either there was less preachiness, or it was just much better-disguised in a rollicking good tale.