Dey took er tropes!

Now, I've never read any of Iain M. Banks SF books, but I saw this article on his thoughts about up and coming  SF writers, and funny enough, it echoed what I had said not too long ago over at Worlds Unimangined. Granted, I didn't say it ever-so eloquently, but I tend to believe in relaying the message via blunt force trauma.   

From Bank's article:

Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke . . . and so on. It's just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.

 And to add to this excellent point: it's just not science fiction, but also fantasy as well, where people rehash tropes in a clumsy style, not realizing it's been done before. If you want to write SFF you have to, have to, have to read it. Sorry, but it's not like contemporary fiction where all you have to do is live life (or observe other people living life) and then write about it. Don't unwittingly repeat the mistakes of past SFF authors - learn from them instead! We're suppose to be moving the SFF genre forward, not backwards, but it can never grow (nor can we as writers grow and improve) if we don't acknowledge the past. It's not history that repeats itself (or in the case: tropes), it's humans who repeat history...err, tropes!