As my children grow older and I continue to consider what books, movies, and TV shows to recommend, I’m increasingly coming to the realization that a great deal of what made up the “classics”—stuff from the 1930s through the 1970s—actually aren’t classics. They spoke to the generation they were written for, and a little bit after that, but they don’t speak to the universal human condition. It only felt universal at the time because it was the dominant lens through which everything was viewed.

Take classic Science Fiction: it’s not all garbage, but a shockingly large amount of it actually was. It’s not its fault, precisely; the problem is that it reflected the societal chaos of the inter-war and post-ww2 periods. Unmoored from any sense of human nature, it expresses nothing of any value to people who haven’t grown up in a similar cultural maelstrom.

Even a lot of Englightenment and post-Enlightenment era classics suffer from a similar sort of limitation. Take one of the great romantic-era poems, The Tyger, by William Blake. That’s the one that begins:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

It’s a very well constructed poem, but when we come to one of its best verses:

When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

The problem is: the answer is yes. Any well-educated child knows that. God looked on all he made and saw that it was very good.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good poem. But it loses a lot of its power when you’ve received an even mildly decent education.

A lot of classic science fiction boils down to, “maybe we can fornicate a lot on other worlds.” Maybe you can, but it will still be wrong. It will still be lying to yourself about what you’re actually doing. On a lonely planet with no sun, warmed only by volcanic activity where every man who visits automatically gets twenty concubines with ten breasts each, fornication will still just pretending that one can have the happiness of having children without any of the work of having them. (At its best; at its worst, it will still just be drug addiction to endogenously produced drugs.) A story in which unhappy people pretend that they’re happy and then that’s it, that’s the end, the author is pretending the guy is happy too—that isn’t a good story even if you set it on Mars.

All of this stuff was new and exciting when desperately unhappy people who still had the optimism of youth thought that perhaps technology offered a way to escape and then told each other fantasies of that working out. That’s really what a shockingly large amount of classic science fiction really was.

Movies, oddly, tended to be better, in that they tended to be morality plays. They were mostly variations on men whose reach exceeded their grasp trying to take the power of gods and then being smashed by the natural consequences of their inability to control the power they put their hands on. In some ways the greatest of these, or at least the most explicit, is Forbidden Planet.

I don’t have any grand conclusions to this. There is good stuff among these “classics.” It’s just so much fewer and farther between than I had realized when I was a kid, and I’m realizing this is quite a surprise to me.