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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

I think it is because the novel has entered the subconscious of spy fiction and so many things have been inspired by it intentionally or not that it doesn't seem as fresh as it once did. But at the time, the notion that intelligence work is a dirty game and that everybody follows basically the same rulebook was pretty novel and even shocking. These days this is just generally accepted as true -- even the recent James Bond movies have this cynical view.

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I'm really curious if there's a name for this phenomenon - being unimpressed by something that was a transformative work at the time because of how much it transformed the genre or medium in its image. I often think of The Matrix being a good example of this, both in how it defined the sort of "the world is a computer" trope, but also just action movies for a while. It's still good, but some of the impressiveness of it is lost in how much, if you grew up in the culture after it, it just seems normal now. To keep in the Cyberpunk zone, both Neuromancer and Snowcrash are books I almost have a hard time re-reading without reminding myself that everything that feels like trashy cliche now was invented in them.

There's something of a sweet spot for some of this as well. Too old and it's well appreciated as a progenitor of a trope - Checkov, Shakespeare, Beowulf. There's a chunk of things in the last century that haven't quite reached canonical status in that way, but almost definitely will in the next 50-100 years, so people don't quite realize how influential they are yet.

This isn't a name per se, but I think the effect you're describing is a result of having a really good, original idea without the supporting artistry to create something that is enduringly great. To use your example, consider The Matrix. As a film, it is cheesy. But the quality of the original idea more than made up for the cheesiness at the time of its release. Now that the idea has aged and its originality has worn off, the bad qualities of the movie are more evident. I still love The Matrix, but I understand why people don't. In order to be great for long periods of time, you need the beautiful, original idea, but you also need the master craftsmanship that creates a work that can stand on its own.

Perhaps, but I also think there's elements of the film making of The Matrix that also impacted the way that action movies were shot and planned. There's a lot of scenes that seem less cool when you probably saw the Simpsons or Community parody of them before you ever saw The Matrix. That's stuff that was visionary craft at the time, but is now just so much a part of the fabric of the culture that it doesn't elicit the same impression.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunn...

I read good omens recently, and it seemed full of cliches. I wondered after finishing it, if that's because it came up with a lot of Angel and Demon tropes used in later supernatural stories.

A lot of Pratchett’s writing is tongue-in-cheek parody of genres, of conventions, of cliché’s. Collaborating with Gaiman might have amplified that playfulness for them.

I always refer to Peckinpah as a breaker for this. Someone younger can watch his movies and invariably they say “oh, so is this is where that trope comes from?”

I think it's the fact that this is so ubiquitous and normal that no-one has bothered with a name for it yet, except maybe “history”. For my parent's generation, Elvis Presley and The Beatles were something new and revolutionary while for me they represent boring establishment. This is just how things go. “Transformative” only ever holds for a specific moment in history. And human history is nothing but those transformations becoming the new normal.

I asked my son, who's a keen gamer, if he had ever played RtCW, Doom or Quake. They are 'old and boring' apparently, and far too crude. He's not at all curious about trying out the 'originals'. I guess he's too young to have any nostalgia for them. I understand it though — I didn't have much interest in history at that age either.

There are some young ones curious about the past games. Albeit a small subset. The nephews at least play a few with me when they're in town: Red Alert, Doom, old Quake mods, etc.

I've noticed that I myself cannot stand games significantly older than my own coming-of-age era. So anything less than VGA is hard for me to appreciate, despite an interest in learning about such things. Let's Plays and video reviews by more patient and tolerant players is how I appreciate them now.

That's an interesting point of comparison. Games have that element of interaction that makes it different from a movie or a book in terms of how well it ages. For all sorts of technical reasons, even though Doom invented a lot of the genre, it doesn't really hold up the same way as, say, watching Rear Window or reading le Carre does for movies or fiction.

Lord of The Rings cames to mind.

It almost invented the Fantasy genre as we know it today.

It is still very much appreciated, but I've found that some people think it is boring.

McLuhan, Shirky, Postman, or someone(s) like that, wrote about how original ideas catch on and get endlessly repeated, transmuting the sublime into the banal. It's inevitable. (Just like all accusations of "selling out".)

Examples given were the Mona Lisa painting and the yin-yang symbol.

IIRC, I read a bunch of this media criticism (alarmism) stuff during dial-up era (post PC, pre Web). Their warning was that digital reproduction would accelerate the process, up-end our notions of intellectual property, swap all the gatekeepers for a new set of goons, etc.

I'm ambivalent. The more things change, the samer they get.

For my part, I sort of adapted, adopting a pseudo Beginner's Mind viewpoint, to accept and sometimes embrace a creative work both for what is and what it was.

One example.

I try to remain ignorant before viewing art and then back filling the context afterwards. I was totally unimpressed by Rothko. Then got into a (friendly) debate that revealed my puerile closed-mindedness. Then binged on his ideas and works. Now I think he was and remains brilliant.

Also, I don't think the replication banality apocalypse actually happened. Just the opposite. Contemporary music (for one) has never been more exciting to me. Today's artists are creating works my generation only fantasized about.

Sure, Sturgeon's Law is timeless. But today's best works are just as good or better than ever. And we somehow both lowered the barriers to entry and raised the ceiling. (There's probably a bigger lesson in there somewhere.... Hmmm.)

Any way. Thanks for reading this far.

TLDR: Arguments about culture are unending. Just roll with it.

I'm not even thinking about it as a matter of arguments over if the book is good or such, just the interesting phenomenon of different sorts of art. I find some works to be singular in ways where even if they're emulated, the original still has distinct power. Rothko's chapel in Houston is a good example of one where there's a specificity to the original that would be hard to emulate. Same with many great works of architecture.

What I'm thinking of is more like records in athletics. It's hard to appreciate how good a sprinter was in 1950 when their world record time wouldn't even qualify for a college track meet these days. Even if you mentally understand how good they were, and how what got them to that level set the groundwork for what's making people so much faster now, it still looks like someone running fairly slowly.

In some ways, it's a sort of artistic Eternal September.

It was also seen as a more realistic, grown-up alternative to the James Bond novels that were hugely popular at the time.

Thanks for that insight. I read the book for the first time in 2015, well after it had already established itself. I can see the appeal if it had a revelatory view on spycraft at the time.

Yea, I had the good fortune of reading it in a class in school where we went through a number of spy thriller books as a genre exercise. Reading it alongside something like the original Casino Royale by Ian Fleming is a really interesting pairing. In some ways, it's similar to other splits in genre - Neuromancer vs. Snow Crash, Agatha Christie vs. Conan Doyle. Neither is objectively better, but they both set the tone of the genre for the next century.

Both Fleming and Le Carre had experienced real-world spycraft, and so their competing visions of fiction both had the pedigree of realism, but applied in different ways and with different worldviews.

Yeah, Fleming knew more the schmoozing at fancy parties like Bond in part because he was working in the US in 1940-1941 trying (and failing) to convince American politicians to enter the war (before it had to in late 1941).

Cornwall (Le Carre) said that the tradecraft was deliberately fictitious as he created the consequences of revealing secrets from his time in MI6. Amusingly, real spies then adopted his terminology.

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