Which Writers Will We Remember? | Hacker News Reader

Which Writers Will We Remember?

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34 pointsbenbreen45 comments

> Despite all this evidence, I’m actually not sure that Saul Bellow is a writer who is still going to be talked about 40, 50, 100 years from now

I'm not sure what it means to ask which writers will be remembered. There isn't a monoculture anymore, and the prominence of the literary novel is a lot less than it was in 1973 anyway. So what does it mean to be remembered? What counts as being remembered?

Setting that aside, none of the authors in that article will be remembered by everyone, but everyone he lists will be remembered by a small, passionate, connected community in 100 years, I can do everything short of guaranteeing that.

I hope that the A.E. Stallings translation of Hesoid's "Work And Days" lasts for centuries.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36355637-works-and-days

It would show the future some portion of us as English speakers knowledge of ancient Greek and Latin. And since it is in heroic couplets it will offer a window into our pronunciation, syllabic emphasis, and vocabulary.

I read very little fiction by living authors. There’s an enormous volume, but a good filter is if the author is dead yet their books are still in print.

Sure, I’ll miss some good books but it is impossible not to in the sheer torrent of volumes being published every day. But my filter increases the likelihood I’ll pick up something I’ll be glad to have read.

That's probably the best heuristic for finding quality stories nowadays. The publishers and their readership are stuck in a taste-affirming feedback loop and it seems most of the big literary awards are administered by people who have chosen representation activism as their primary reason for existing.

I would suggest reading reviews and literary critiques, written by authors you appreciate and respect. I rarely regret pursuing a book recommendation from someone whose own writing has engrossed me.

These estimates seem weighted toward the reality that books are simply not read, and it is a meta-rationale, like the book's relevance to some theme that is perpetually bandied about in our political discourse, that is a more reliable vehicle for relevance. If books do end up being read again, and if therefore the individual merits predominate our perception, appreciation, and institution of these works, then the list would not be appropriately calibrated. As of now, it might be more right than wrong. It's not sad. It's not not sad. It's just the way it is.

> relevance to some theme that is perpetually bandied about in our political discourse, that is a more reliable vehicle for relevance.

This is why Sir Mix-a-Lot's opus magnum will be played forever.

Every so often I stumble across the Wikipedia page of an author from the 19th or 20th century who was _hugely_ successful in their time, writing many bestselling books, and yet is almost totally forgotten now. They must have justifiably believed they had attained some kind of artistic immortality, yet it turned out not to be so (at least, probably not to the degree they expected — they do at least merit a Wikipedia entry, which is more than most of us will ever get).

I remain astonished that Dickens has endured while Wilkie Collins has faded. The two were contemporaries, but Collins was much more famous and successful (and the inventor of the detective novel!).

Yet hardly anyone reads even The Moonstone any more, while much of Dickens’ work is not only read but has become cultural touchstones (Scrooge, Oliver Twist, etc).

i am not at all astonished, at a uk grammar school in the 60s we were forced to read "the moonstone" for our eng.lit. o-level, at the same time as "great expectations" - guess which we liked more.

How bad is "The Moonstone" for you to like "Great Expectations" better?

"Great Expectations" bored me to tears. "Tale of Two Cities" is an OK book with a terrible book taking up 2/3 of pages inserted in the middle.

If Dickens hadn't written "A Christmas Carol," I don't think anybody would know who he is.

in my opinion GE is the great british novel. it takes a child through to an adult (very scarily at the start) in a really believable sequence, beautifully (and often very funnily) written. and both endings (there are two) make me cry.

moonstone is a sub sherlock holmes detective story

> moonstone is a sub sherlock holmes detective story

Moonstone was the original. And personally I always thought Holmes’ leaps to be implausible, even as a kid.

But I did enjoy your comment in one way: one of my step kids watched Blade Runner and said, “Just the usual grimy-future cop story with robots.” We all have that perspective sometimes.

but of course dickens did publish a detective novel, or at least one featuring a detective in a major role (Bleak House) prior to The Moonstone. of course the two writers were friends, and undoubtedly influenced each other.

There was a Collins revival around the turn of the millennium, when editions of popular classics took on The Moonstone. That book thus appeared on shelves all over the world, including in the meagre English selection of Eastern European bookshops.

  “No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.”

― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

LLMs could be great tools for measuring the impact of an author on the culture. They have the data to recognize when new concepts and motifs are introduced by a piece of literature and disperse forward in time through the culture. They can somewhat measure the breadth of the influence. You could build an index of the cultural impact of a source from zero to one, and rank them. It's a more direct and general measure of influence than citation count.

It would be interesting to list the sources with the most impact but the least recognition. Does the dark matter of literature have a large pull?

Surprised he doesn't mention that No Country For Old Men won the Oscar for Best Picture, and is generally considered a masterpiece. That alone seems like it would boost Cormac McCarthy's legacy considerably.

As someone coming of age around the time of that movie, that was my first exposure to his work.

I wrestle a bit with how relevant books will continue to be in the future at all.

I way this not as someone who wants to see the demise of books, but more the opposite. It's difficult to read articles about the financial reality of book sales and distribution and not wonder what the future holds in general.

Sometimes to me it seems as if modern celebrity in certain areas is due to fickle fate and social dynamics, popular attribution and cults of personality and so forth. I'm not saying there isnt real talent in there, but why some attain recognition and others not is often lost on me.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a book I've read twice. I think the clean, tight simplicity of the story might make it live on, like O'Henry stories. But who TF knows?

I have read some Nabokov, but I'd never even heard of Transparent Things, FWIW.

Another factor to consider is political climate and the character of the ruling class. Political and cultural changes can make some authors suddenly unfashionable.

One possibility are writers whose works are hard for GPT to emulate. IMO examples include Jhumpa Lahiri, Christopher Buehlman, and Walter M. Miller Jr.

I think the better question is: which writers is Amazon killing by favoring popularity over discovery? A thousand rediscovered or newly discovered writers are buried every year by optimization for profit.

If you actually want to broaden your horizons, you'll have to find an indie bookstore, tilt your head to the right, and let chaos take over while you browse.

It's not like publishing and receiving attention for books was easy before Amazon—most writers would never see publication in any format because the gatekeepers wouldn't let them through. Amazon's filter is different in that it's created a world where everyone can publish but few people get attention for it, but it's not obvious to me that their mechanisms are smothering creativity for profit any more than the large publishing houses did in the 20th century.

I'm not talking about getting a book published, I'm talking about the joy of discovery, which can lead to success for authors who otherwise don't have the 'right' commercial approach (or the right skin color or background or gender).

And what do I mean by success? Unique and special and important creative people living a sufficiently middle-class lifestyle to continue providing us with their gift(s).

Amazon's filter has created a world where that is nigh on impossible.

I can scan the spines of thousands of books at Powell's or Strand in an hour, with Mother Chaos guiding my hand, and come away with twenty new discoveries.

> And what do I mean by success? Unique and special and important creative people living a sufficiently middle-class lifestyle to continue providing us with their gift(s).

> Amazon's filter has created a world where that is nigh on impossible.

You haven't really addressed my main point, which is that this kind of outcome was always a rarity—before Amazon the filter was the publishing houses. If you couldn't persuade them you were worth publishing, then you didn't get to share. Period.

Amazon first created a world where literally everyone can publish anything they want. They then had to create filters to help people actually find what they're looking for in that deluge of content. The result might be that it's harder to find new content, but that's not because it's harder to make a living publishing good books.

One counterpoint is that there still are/have been plenty of indie publishing houses who take on books that the Big Five-type publishers won't take, but even then those indie books are printed at a much smaller scale and don't generally make it into big retail bookstores. And so we arrive back at the discoverablity problem :P

"don't generally make it into big retail bookstores"

...which of course use the same algorithmic approach as Amazon to maximizing popularity and volume over quality or creativity. The book marketplace is now the equivalent of H&M or McDonalds.

Your point was completely orthogonal to mine, which is why I didn't address it. It's harder finding new or worthwhile reads because Amazon is incentivized by volume, not quality; it's the same reason high-quality clothing brands also don't sell on AMZN.

> I think the better question is: which writers is Amazon killing by favoring popularity over discovery?

> And what do I mean by success? Unique and special and important creative people living a sufficiently middle-class lifestyle to continue providing us with their gift(s).

> Amazon's filter has created a world where that is nigh on impossible.

These paragraphs are what I was replying to. If you wanted to talk about Amazon's effects on consumer's ability to find things rather than its effects on authors' ability to make a living, don't bring up the latter.

You can't make claims about Amazon's effects on authors and then act like I'm going off topic when I call those claims out as problematic.

I'm sure King Bezos is very grateful to the men of his round table.

I hate to say it ... Stephen King.

Not that sure. Look at the best selling authors of the 1920s, they aren't widely known anymore.

It's possible the film version of The Shining will have better recognition than the name Stephen King, in just a few decades. That's been the fate of a lot of once-ultra-popular early 20th century authors whose works were made into still-well-known films. Might happen to him, too.

Edna Ferber.

The movies Cimarron, Giant and Showboat definitely more well known than her novels on which they were based.

Well hasn’t he been a best selling author for 4 decades now?

You under estimate the lasting power of a good ghost story.

You need a good example? Edgar Allan Poe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_best...

Sinclair Lewis has multiple titles listed - best-selling author of the 1920s - later a Nobel Prize winner in literature.

I'm not familiar with a lot of those books, admittedly. But most books in the top 10 for those years are notable enough, that they have their own Wikipedia article. "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" in particular are highly influential works. They've had movies etc. made and are surely familiar titles to the average American, even if they may not have read them.

i think bellow may well be remembered - i've started reading augie march, and it is great so far - somewhat dickensian. but ayn rand and dorothy parker (who did make me laugh a bit)- definitely heading for time's great dustbin.

You need to be sure to not confuse "I don't like it" with "No one likes it". Atlas Shrugged is still selling a hell of a lot of copies, > 65 years after it was published.

I was just thinking about Micheal Lewis being for tech bros what Joan Didon was for hippies. Most of the time people are remembered for their era and not themselves.

L. Ron Hubbard definitely. Mission Earth is without question the greatest dekology of all time.

He did manage to brainwash tens of thousands into an abusive insane alien cult that takes away their families, money, and sanity. So yeah. I guess they'll carry the torch of abuse forward into time.

Probably just the classics: K&R, Abelson/Sussman, Knuth, Sterling/Shapiro, Geoffrey James, Tanenbaum, Polya, Crockford, Stroustrup, Bentley, Russel/Norvig, Fall/Stevens.

For fiction authors, I feel like I'm not an author kind of person. Tolkien had a big influence on me, same for Poe and Neal Stephenson. I don't really read a lot of the authors that are considered classics/great writers. If someone asked me if I'd rather never have read "The Great Gatsby" or "Silence of the Lamb", I'd readily purge Gatsby from my brain. I suppose the fiction author our generation will remember is xGPT.

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