When Popular Fiction Isn’t Popular: Genre, Literary, and the Myths of Popularity
electricliterature.com
electricliterature.com
"An ex-neighbour of ours recalled (in an otherwise entirely kind and welcome comment) me telling him, years ago, that my SF novels effectively subsidised the mainstream works. I think he’s just misremembered, as this has never been the case. Until the last few years or so, when the SF novels started to achieve something approaching parity in sales, the mainstream always out-sold the SF – on average, if my memory isn’t letting me down, by a ratio of about three or four to one. I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff I had to churn out in order to keep a roof over my head while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels. Never been the case, and I can’t imagine that I’d have lied about this sort of thing, least of all as some sort of joke. The SF novels have always mattered deeply to me – the Culture series in particular – and while it might not be what people want to hear (academics especially), the mainstream subsidised the SF, not the other way round. And… rant over."
Mitchell may always have written genre but he wasn't marketed that way. Likewise e.g. Margaret Atwood writes science fiction but feels the need to pretend it isn't. I'm partway through The Chimes, which was nominated for the Booker prize - and again it's science fiction in literary drag (not even literary-influenced; it's straight up classic SF). But I doubt it would have got the nomination if it had worn its genre affiliation openly. If authors who have the choice overwhelmingly prefer to position their works as "literary" rather than "genre" when they could fit into either category, doesn't that say there's something asymmetric about how we treat the two?
Honestly the Hugos were never about popularity. But they were a celebration of something deeply unliterary, and I'd like them to continue to represent that tradition, whether or not that means nominating books with higher or lower sales figures.
Foundation's Edge is possibly the least literary book I've ever read; I don't think Asimov wrote a deeply-characterized human in his life. The same applies to most Heinlein, a lot of Dick, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and IME most Clarke (though it seems I haven't read either of his Hugo-winning works); it's true of David Brin and Kim Stanley Robinson and Vernor Vinge. I've heard Neuromancer described as an "obvious first novel", and while there's something distinct about the Ender series, I certainly wouldn't call it literary.
Regardless of what we label it as, would you agree that some recent winners (specifically I'll say Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, The City & the City, Ancillary Justice, and The Three-Body Problem) are in some sense alike, that they form a different cluster from the list of older winners in my previous comment? That these newer winners are more similar to e.g. older Booker Prize winners (so that we don't get caught up trying to objectively define literary) than the older Hugo winners were? That there are qualities that the older Hugo winners have that the newer ones lack?
The characters in his short stories - which I certainly recommend reading - wouldn't be out of place on an old SF TV show like The Outer Limits, but they're certainly not badly written. He's a very deft, economic writer.
What he doesn't write are the staple chracters of traditional litfic - intellectual/academic, neurotic, possibly violent or latently so, more or less obvious sexually frustrated, middle class people. Or maybe middle class people looking at working class people.
Like a small mammal, a lot of modern litfic has an unexpectedly limited emotional range. It may be cute, but it's not often clever.
Well, as the article says, "literary fiction is one of the larger chunks of the popular adult fiction pie." "Literary" fiction can reach a larger audience. Anecdotally, it's pretty common for me to hear an SF novel recommendation given with the proviso, "it's not like other science fiction." There's a larger audience for "fiction in general" than for speculative fiction, so it makes sense that authors would reach for that larger piece of the pie.