You have to read those things with the eyes of someone whose eyes are contemporary to the era. I found Burroughs and Howard as a kid, conducting archaeology in my grandparent’s library. As I was reading through all that, when I look back at it, I was more-or-less doing so as someone whose eyes were fresh to the material, and that had been exposed to what was contemporary (mostly…) to the era. From that standpoint? Both Howard and Burroughs are amazing. Compared to the most of the “state of the art” today? Turgid, archaic, and only interesting as a read-through to see where the original ideas were ripped off from. Everybody seems to think that modern SF and fantasy stuff is something new, but it ain’t. Jirel of Joiry, anyone? C.L. Moore vastly predates any of the various contemporary female SJW writers, and did far better at her work than they can every dream. And, most of them deny that women like her even existed, let alone got published.

You have to look at those works through the eyes of a contemporary–We, who know Tolkien, and have seen the screen interpretations of the tropes in endless B-movies over the years…? We see that stuff as dated and trite, but when it came out? Lord… You have no idea what a huge, mind-expanding thing it was, when all you’d ever seen was endless piles of Hardy Boys and the usual turgid “young adult” fare of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

I haven’t read Howard, but I have read Burroughs; I had to double-check that I was reading the right thing, since it seemed unbelievable that something so famous could be so bad.

If I thought the Conan stories were typical of “good” F&SF, I wouldn’t be reading F&SF. But I’ve read quite a lot of much-better stuff, so now I’m trying to *write* F&SF.

Which is tragic, because before they showed up, the genre was probably the most likely one to have subversive ideas about the things most of the SJW types mouth their pious words in theoretical support of. Hypocrites all, they deny that there were any authors in the genre who were saying the things they claim they believe in, before they arrived to “reform” the genre.

Most of what they call “science fiction and fantasy” is entirely unentertaining and unreadable, these days. That ain’t accidental.

He kind of lost me here.