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The Sunday Times on science fiction. We = the British.
quote:The big problem with being sniffy about SF is that it’s just too important to ignore. After all, what kind of fool would refuse to be seen reading Borges’s Labyrinths, Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco, Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World or Wells’s War of the Worlds just because they were SF? These are just good books, irrespective of genre. But they are also books that embody the big ideas of the time – both Wells and Lem were obsessed with human insignificance in the face of the immense otherness of the universe, Huxley with technology as a seductive destroyer and Orwell with our capacity for authoritarian evil. Borges, like Lem, suspects we know nothing of ourselves. Interested in these things? Of course you are. Read SF.
For this is where it excels. It is the most vivid and direct chronicler of our anxieties about the world and ourselves, what Mary Shelley called “the mysterious fears of our nature”. It was Shelley’s Frankenstein that was, Aldiss argues in his superb history of the genre, Billion Year Spree, the first true SF novel. Her big idea – and it is the big idea that haunts all SF – was that our imperious ingenuity would backfire horribly. Frankenstein’s monster runs amok, the Skynet computer in the Terminator films decides to destroy humanity, Philip K Dick’s robots think they are human, and his humans fear they might be robots. And when the scientists in Fredric Brown’s one-page story Answer ask their new super-computer if there is a god, it replies, “Yes, NOWthere is...”
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I read it too. I thought it was an okay article, but it focused heavily on nihilistic science fiction.
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It definitely did. And this is one of the few instances I've run across where the comments appended to a newspaper article posting were worth reading (for the most part).
It's a rather tepid defense. It also ignores that "literary" fiction has increasingly borrowed science fiction tropes.
The other thing I thought weird was this line:
quote:Aldiss says that was SF’s one golden age, when Oxford dons were happy to be seen indulging the genre. Now they wouldn’t be seen dead with a Philip K Dick, a James Blish or a Robert Sheckley.
That's possibly true of Oxford. But from what I have seen in the U.S., it's okay to be caught with a Philip K Dick, but anything else is right out.
Or in other words, the attitude seems to be that there are a few authors (throw Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler in with Dick) that are acceptable, that rise to some level of literary value but all the rest is rubbish.
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One factor that I think heavily biases literature professors against science fiction is they tend to dislike science itself, and see it as deathly boring, sort of the way I (wrongly) feel about accounting. So the ideas of science, the astonishing scope and potential of the human species, the way we can transform ourselves again and again with no endpoint, and just the sheer wonder of it all, doesn't seem to strike them.
Science fiction is the literature of ideas, of imagination, possibilities, and for some reason literature professors don't connect with all that. It's like they can't see miracles until they hold them in their hands, and then once they can hold them in their hands (like a cell phone) they become commonplace to them, so they STILL can't see the miracle there.
I wish I had the power to show people the wonder of science. Instant by instant we look around in pure astonishment at an amazing reality.
But people are limited. I may never live to learn what's cool about Mozart or accounting.
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quote:Originally posted by Tatiana: One factor that I think heavily biases literature professors against science fiction is they tend to dislike science itself, and see it as deathly boring, sort of the way I (wrongly) feel about accounting. So the ideas of science, the astonishing scope and potential of the human species, the way we can transform ourselves again and again with no endpoint, and just the sheer wonder of it all, doesn't seem to strike them.
Science fiction is the literature of ideas, of imagination, possibilities, and for some reason literature professors don't connect with all that. It's like they can't see miracles until they hold them in their hands, and then once they can hold them in their hands (like a cell phone) they become commonplace to them, so they STILL can't see the miracle there.
I wish I had the power to show people the wonder of science. Instant by instant we look around in pure astonishment at an amazing reality.
But people are limited. I may never live to learn what's cool about Mozart or accounting.
This is a sentiment that Kurt Vonnegut wrote about in one of his short story collections. He complained that his work was relegated to "scifi" without a thought. Of course, he didn't really like scifi authors, and preferred the company of "real" writers, which was his specific complaint (they won't let me into the club!).
quote:It's a rather tepid defense. It also ignores that "literary" fiction has increasingly borrowed science fiction tropes.
Yep. Oddly enough, I was just reading an excerpt from Ursula K. LeGuin's review of Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods, in which LeGuin addresses this very point, last night:
quote:It's odd to find characters in a science-fiction novel repeatedly announcing that they hate science fiction. I can only suppose that Jeanette Winterson is trying to keep her credits as a "literary" writer even as she openly commits genre. Surely she's noticed that everybody is writing science fiction now? Formerly deep-dyed realists are producing novels so full of the tropes and fixtures and plotlines of science fiction that only the snarling tricephalic dogs who guard the Canon of Literature can tell the difference. I certainly can't. Why bother? I am bothered, though, by the curious ingratitude of authors who exploit a common fund of imagery while pretending to have nothing to do with the fellow-authors who created it and left it open to all who want to use it. A little return generosity would hardly come amiss.( Guardian, 22 September)
And of course, there's also this, which I posted last summer, but which is also relevant to the conversation at hand. In response to a review of Michael Chabon's latest on Slate, in which the reviewer, Ruth Franklin, said "Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it", LeGuin wrote the hilarious rejoinder found at the bottom of this issue of The Ansible. If you missed this last summer, it's worth following the link and doing the necessary scrolling to get to it.
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And here is a brief interview with Michael Chabon in which he touches on this general subject.
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