When was the Golden Age of Science Fiction? The late 1930s to the 1950s, when science fiction became widely popular and many classic science fiction stories were published. The joke answer is that the Golden age of Science Fiction is 14, the age when many science fiction readers become fans. I know I read my first scifi when I was 13 or 14 so maybe they are right.
Lately scifi fandom, in which I include not just the fans but writers, podcasters and publishers, want to catch the next generation of fans and have been pushing Young Adult Science Fiction, scifi for kids in their teens and maybe early twenties. I’m not immune to this campaign so I’ve been reading some of it myself. First, I got Scott Westerfeld’s
Uglies trilogy. It was light but okay. Then I got
Twilight, the first of Meyer's books about a clumsy girl and the vampire who loves her. The story is pretty simple. Despite that it pulled me right in. A shy girl moves to a small town to live with her father. She figures out that there are vampires going to her high school. She falls for one of them and he falls for her.
My first impression of the book was that it was
BIG. It's a thick book. Once I opened it I realized it was big inside. Big font. Big line spacing. It reminded me that what publishers are basically selling is a paper product. The more paper they sell, the thicker the book, the more they can charge. The actual arrangement of ink on the page is usually the cheapest part of their product.
Twilight is a big book. It might be classified as
Young Adult Speculative Fiction but it was great as
Old People Going Blind Fiction as well. As an old person going blind I found the font and the line spacing made it a lot easier for me to read than the tiny fonts in real books. I didn’t have to put on my special adjustable glasses and put it down a lot because my eyes were freaking. BIG FONTS. It was easy to read.
It was a little slow to start. I didn’t really find the girl, Bella, interesting. She seemed rather ordinary. There’s a vagueness to her that reminds me of superhero comic books. They leave the faces of the superheroes sketchy so the reader can imagine themselves in that role. In the same way Bella is vague so the reader can imagine herself as Bella. It’s not even clear if Bella is particularly pretty (except to Edward) but when the vampires appear, going to high school to give themselves a paper trail and a backstory that will allow them to live among humans, there are pages devoted to their beauty. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful vampires. Beautiful and irresistible so their prey cannot resist them. But this family of vampires is vegetarian. They don’t eat people but Bella’s vampire Edward can barely restrain himself from taking her. The descriptions of the teen vampires are very much how girls, how I, viewed many boys when I was that age. They did seem just as beautiful to me as Edward seems to Bella. I used to sit in class and covertly watch them. Edward’s hard flesh was like the hardness of young male flesh as their hormones turn teenaged boys, almost overnight, into something different, something alien. I hit my teenaged brother a couple of times (he deserved it) and it was like hitting a log. I hurt my hands more than I hurt him. And teenaged boys, beautiful as many are, are often monsters. So the entire metaphor of vampire = teenaged boy = monster = object-of-desire works.
Like Shakespeare has multiple layers and can be read for the plots, for the characterizations, for the sex and violence, for the dirty jokes, for the philosophy, for the language,
Twilight, as simple as it is, has several layers. None of them is language. The language is simple. Meyer doesn’t have, say, Tanith Lee’s genius for the English language but the entire Bella/Edward relationship is a metaphor for the relationship between teenaged girls and boys as they fight their instinct to have sex, sex that might destroy them. Maybe it’s not like that today with birth control and abortion but when I grew up the struggle between guys and girls was to not have sex. The girl was supposed to be in charge of that but the better guys shared the responsibility, fought against their desire to have sex and maybe ruin the life of the girl who gave in. In the same way Edward fights against giving into his instincts and taking Bella, consuming her. As much as he is driven he fights against his desire. He also fights against her desire to become like him, to become a vampire, to lead her into damnation. He believes that he lost his soul when he was transformed and he doesn’t want to be the weapon that deprives Bella of her soul. The whole thing is a metaphor for sex, at least sex as seen by a Mormon housewife, which was what Meyer was 5 years ago.
Meyer has linked various works to each book in the series.
Pride and Prejudice to
Twilight.
Romeo and Juliet to
New Moon.
Wuthering Heights to
Eclipse.
A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream to
Breaking Dawn. This adds another layer to each of the stories. In
Twilight Edward, at first, seems cold and withdrawn, like Mr. Darcy, but that is because, like Mr. Darcy, he is trying to control and conceal his growing desire for an unsuitable girl. I think telling the
Romeo and Juliet elements in
New Moon would be too spoilery. In
Eclipse, there are two guys in love with the same girl, in a relationship very much like Cathy, Heathcliff, and Edgar Linton. And in the final book,
Breaking Dawn, first you have two men magically in love with the same girl then two immortal families struggling over a magical child like in
A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. All of the connections are pretty weak but it adds a nice additional layer to the books and that lets you run the similarities and differences over in your mind.
The Twilight Saga, like Austen’s novels, the Bronte sisters’ works and even
Romeo and Juliet, are pretty much girl books, the text version of chick flicks. Meyer is writing about love and romance at its most melodramatic extreme. I don’t know that a male could tolerate them. Well, unless he got off on the idea of being the superhero protecting an accident-prone, trouble-magnet girlfriend or secretly hanging out in her bedroom, watching her as she sleeps. (Edward takes stalking to a whole other level.) Like Austen’s novels, the
Twilight novels, especially the first one, have a strong Cinderella element. Most of Austen’s heroines are ordinary girls, usually without much money, who get the best, richest, most good-looking guy in the novel. Like Cinderella they get the prince. Just so
Twilight is the story of how Bella, the ordinary girl, gets the superhero vampire.
So there are at least three layers to the
Twilight Saga. It makes it all a little better. Gives you something else to read into it no matter how preposterous the story is.
Of course, I loved the books of the Twilight Saga, though I am kinda disgusted about it. Teenaged love, the vampire and the virgin. God, how ridiculous is that? Yet as soon as I finish one of Meyer's books I start rereading the parts I like best then reread the whole thing. After six days I’m almost through my third reading of
Breaking Dawn. I don’t know why her books ring my bells. They make me feel kinda manipulated but still I find them addictive. I'm kinda mollified by the fact that they have sold over 8 million copies. So I'm not alone.
This summer Meyer also released the scifi book
Host which I recommend. It is pretty straight forward scifi about an alien parasite living in the brain of a human and changed by it. The parasite finds herself loving the people that her host loved and driven to be with them. In a sense it's a rewrite of
I Married a Monster From Outer Space but without the sex. No sex before marriage in books by Mormon housewives! I’ve already read it three times too. I try to blame that on the nice big font!
Well, at least it’s over. It will be a while before Meyer can get another book out and until then I can pretend I have better taste than this. Though I’m not embarrassed about liking
Host. That one was okay.
