Why the Suck Fairy exists
Hi! Just a quick note to say my novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster was just named one of 2025’s best SFF novels by Kirkus Reviews. And this fantastical mother-daughter makes a great gift for your mom, or your adult offspring. Also, I’m gonna be at Parentheses Books in Harrisonburg VA on Monday, and then on Wednesday I’ll be at As You Are in Washington D.C., hosted by Little District Books. I probably won’t be back in the DMV any time soon, so please come see me!
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about that scene in I Saw the TV Glow where we revisit the cult TV show The Pink Opaque and it suddenly looks way different:
The video above (you may need to click thru to YouTube to watch, sorry) frames this in terms of child perceptions versus adult perceptions, but I don’t think that’s entirely correct.
Lately I find myself rewatching stuff that I saw twenty years ago, when I was already an adult, and none of it is the way I remember. I wrote a while ago that any television made before 2000 now looks really weird, because the language of TV has changed so much in the past twenty-five years. It’s not that I’m any more mature than I was in 1999 — honestly, I might be less mature at this point. (Living through dystopia has a way of infantilizing us all!) It’s more that I bring my present-day expectations and perceptions to bear when I watch older stuff.
And a lot of things from the past have been visited by what people on the internet now call the Suck Fairy. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, in part because I’d like to fool myself into thinking that I can write books that the Suck Fairy will never touch. (Ha.)
Not long ago, I was stuck in a hotel room on tour and decided to rewatch some episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer season two. The production values still looked fine to me, and I definitely enjoyed aspects of the show — but wow. It was not the show I remembered, in various ways. The tone was way off, the characters felt way less compelling than I remembered, and Xander? The less said about Xander the better.
So the suck fairy isn't just about things being offensive or hurtful in ways we didn't have the vocabulary to talk about before. It's also about cultural shifts in general, in which one mode of storytelling declines and another mode rises to prominence in its turn.
I was on a panel years ago about forgotten women authors of SF and fantasy, and I had to be the jerk who questioned the panel’s premise. Everyone else was arguing that women authors get forgotten while men get celebrated forever. It’s probably true that women are more likely to be forgotten more quickly — but men get forgotten, too, with remarkable speed. I never hear of anyone reading a lot of the popular dude authors of even the 1990s anymore. Most books simply don’t have that much longevity, after all, and most authors are forgotten soon after their deaths, if not sooner. (Does anyone under 40 still read Heinlein?)
(I’m still kind of shocked by how quickly Doris Lessing faded from the public consciousness. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, but by the mid-2010s, I started getting blank looks whenever I mentioned her name. I often say that if I appear to be doing anything ground-breaking or innovative in my writing, it’s purely because people haven’t read Doris Lessing and don’t realize how much I’m ripping her off.)
Anyway, it's truly startling to pick up a book you loved twenty years ago, and to feel as though the actual words on the page have changed. Nothing unspools the way you remember it. If you needed proof that books are software that our brains execute, and that the hardware matters a lot, this is it. Unless gremlins snuck into my house and swapped out my well-thumbed paperbacks for identical duplicates with different words, the only thing that’s changed is my brain.
Still, sometimes things swing back around. I rewatched some of Star Trek: The Original Series recently, and it was actually better than I had remembered. I think my last TOS rewatch was fifteen years ago, and I had come away feeling like the show didn’t hold up as much as I’d hoped. This time around, it surprised me in the opposite way, by outperforming my expectations.
The opposite of the Suck Fairy is the notion of things “standing the test of time,” which is somewhat related to the icky notion of “canon.” (Blergh. Gotta wash my hands after typing that word.) What does it mean to “stand the test of time”? Does it mean that something is wonderful, or has more universal themes?
Here’s the thing: Some of the greatest creative works don't “stand the test of time,” and that's okay. I don’t believe the “test of time” consists of the judgement of a cabal of wise people in fancy robes, whose unerring gaze sweeps across the landscape. It’s a messy process, like anything else. It’s just what people keep stumbling across, or recommending to each other, over a long period. Plus things get forgotten — for decades, sometimes — only to be rediscovered. (There has been a conscious effort to rediscover incredible but forgotten women authors of the past, and oh my god, some wonderful stuff has been resurfaced.)
Standing the test of time simply means that future generations might feel that a particular work meets their needs in that moment. This is no different from the mechanism by which things become popular in the here and now. A book that was published this week might become a bestseller immediately, because it speaks to people’s needs or gives people something they are craving. And if people are still reading that book a hundred years later, it’ll be because… it speaks to their needs and gives them something they’re craving.
There's nothing special about the acclaim of future generations, as compared to the acclaim of present audiences. People like stuff because they like stuff.
(The only difference is that a long-dead author can’t post Instagram reels that make everyone fall in love with them and want to read their work, I guess.)
I get a very different kind of satisfaction from organizing an event like Writers With Drinks or the Trans Nerd Meet Up, which is over the moment it’s finished. And I've been to burlesque shows and art openings that were better than most books or movies. And by better, I mean more nourishing, beautiful, and even memorable. Sometimes the greatest works of art really aren’t meant to last, or recorded for posterity in any way. There’s a freedom in knowing that an event will only live in people’s memories, and nowhere else. In not worrying about what the future will say about what you’re doing now.
In fact, my strong sense that the best works are so often ephemeral and of the moment. You could even make an argument that “standing the test of time” means that a work of art might have spoken with less power to the deep hungers, joys and anxieties of the people at the time it was created — because whatever was great about it is less anchored to that time and place. In any case, I am suspicious of this whole “test of time” nonsense, for the much the same reason that I hate the notion of (gack, ugh) canon. And I definitely don’t think it’s worth worry today about what the people of tomorrow will say about our messy, foolish creations — that’s their problem.
Music I Love Right Now
How do you feel about medleys? Most people I know seem to hate them, for whatever reason. But Prince loved ‘em, and so did artists like Sly Stone and Marvin Gaye. Medleys are fun and goofy, and they certainly do not give every song its due, but that’s kind of why I enjoy them so much. They are just an excuse to throw a ton of musical spaghetti at the wall as joyously as possible, with tons of brio and energy.
Anyway, I’m overjoyed that the Ladies of Soul are back, and once again doing a ton of medleys.
Who are the Ladies of Soul, you ask? They are a group of Dutch women who cover soul hits (and some obscure soul songs as well) in giant stadium concerts. Their members include Candy Dulfer, who was Prince’s go-to sax player for years, but also Glennis Grace, Berget Lewis, Edsilia Rombley, and Trijntje Oosterhuis. Every year from 2014 to 2019, they released a mega concert recording called Ladies of Soul Live at the Ziggodome, in which they ran through like a hundred songs in two and a half hours. It is the best music to write by.
They stopped doing Live at the Ziggodome albums in 2020 for obvious reasons, and haven’t really done much since. But now they’re back with Live at the Ziggodome 2025, and it’s as great as ever. Sadly, there’s no half-hour medley this time, like the ones they did back in the day, but it’s still 150 minutes of non-stop cover versions of random hits performed with extreme gusto. I mean, EXTREME GUSTO.
It’s not high art. You will not win points with your music-snob friends by telling them you’re listening the latest Ziggodome concert. Fuck those friends, though. They are probably no fun at parties. And sometimes fun is all you need. So go get your Ziggodome on.