Dark Futures: What happens when literary novelists experiment with Sci-Fi
slate.com
slate.com
This is devoutly desired by most authors as being tarnished with the "SF Author" label is a ticket to lower pay and guilt-by-association-with-trash. Margaret Atwood furiously resists the idea that her stuff is Science Fiction because "SF is talking squids in outer space".
What often feels irritating about literary adventures into SF is that they allow themselves to loot the treasury of SF ideas and present them under respectable covers to readers who would never venture into the SF section (I view Atwood as a repeat offender in this department).
This is considerably less irritating than the bulk of the F/SF section, of course, which is 90% extruded paint-by-numbers escape literature. The average page count should be the first clue that 'we're not here for the ideas'. Thank goodness for the "Masterworks" series (and a few other lines) which do the admirable job of keeping something other than the Escape Lit du Jour in print.
This was meant as praise, because "obviously", if it's any good, it can't be called a comic book. (Then, of course, the term "graphic novel" got traction, and immediately got misused so often that it's now completely meaningless.)
Does not mean it must somehow inherently superior, it is more of attempt to sell to people who are aware of how it looks like usually and that they usually dont like it.
It was a little more nuanced than that. Her argument was that The Handmaid's Tale wasn't really science fiction because it was set in a dystopian "now". Recall there wasn't anything particularly advanced about the technology in the story and its timeline forked from ours sometime in the 1970s (the book took place in the 1980s I think). She instead preferred if the story were called "speculative fiction".
While some of that could rightly be attributed to not wanting to be shelved as science fiction, that's also not the full story. Pre-internet, Margaret Atwood's audience was primarily a literary audience. So it makes sense that she'd want this new book to be shelved in the same place her old books were shelved. Otherwise she might lose out on some of her core audience.
Atwood being a repeat offender of looting "the treasury of SF ideas" is baseless hyperbole, and your entire rant falls on a throwaway comment she made 30 years ago. She looted the "treasury of SF ideas" in the same way Delany looted Moby Dick to write Nova or Jo Walton looted Greek myth to write The Just City
It is not a throwaway remark. It is something she strongly believes.
Other than that books arrive in the mail.
As for baseless hyperbole, I object to Atwood on this issue because she is 'borrowing' ideas from a genre that she is then disassociating herself from. Delany and Walton could expect their readers to have read Melville and Greek myth, but Atwood is delivering SF a nice little kicking while borrowing the ideas from the genre and transporting them to a more respectable context.
Apparently The Man in the High Castle is still SF, probably because Dick didn't strain at the oars to get shelved out of SF. Probably because he was a repeat offender with talking squids in outer space and worse - telepathic slime molds from Ganymede, IIRC.
Partly it's also a matter of taste. For someone so 'literary', I'd say that Atwood loves herself some serious schlock. It felt like every third character in the Oryx and Crake trilogy was Torn From the Headlines of whatever outrage articles that Atwood had read in the previous year... I keep dutifully reading each book - there's always something interesting in them - but I've got to say I feel both dirtier (Oryx and Crake trilogy) and stupider (the trilogy + Heart Goes Last) after each one.
" "Well," he says, "if you are going to write what a friend of a friend once called 'Made up space shit', then if it's going to have any ring of truth that means sometimes some of the horrible characters get to live, and for there to be any sense of jeopardy, especially in future novels, the good people have to die. Sometimes."
Banks freely admits that he enjoys writing his SF novels more than his "literary" novels, and the Culture novels more than his other SF. The hedonistic, anarchistic, post-scarcity series is "a hoot. It's my train set. I adore the freedom and the size of the canvas," even though writing them "requires a greater degree of concentration. And there's so much baggage with the Culture now that I have to get each new novel aligned with earlier Culture history. I don't have the same leeway to make things up compared with when I started." "
From his last(?) interview: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/15/iain-banks-the...
Ursula Le Guin wrote a review of Shikasta in 1979:
https://newrepublic.com/article/115631/doris-lessing-shikast...
I found this review really fascinating because I consider Le Guin and Lessing to be writers of equal caliber. Le Guin was pegged as a sci-fi / fantasy author, while Lessing just experimented with the form. (She won the Nobel Prize in 2007.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross
[NB As long as the events in his "Laundry" series don't start happening then we're probably fine]
Just because you personally don't care about some aspect of the book does not mean all who do are dabblers.
I read it for the spaceships, and the computers, and the other whiz-bang technology stuff. I never even noticed the characters. I went on to read a bunch of E E "Doc" Smith and other space opera and was happy.
On a lark, I re-read Starman Jones a few days ago. I'm 56 now. I am astonished at how well Heinlein had drawn his characters, and I could now spot the pivotal moment where the protagonist makes his big change; all stuff I missed when I was a pre-teen, but that is obvious now. If Heinlein hadn't put all that "character stuff" there, I would not have enjoyed the book, but I wasn't conscious enough to appreciate it.
I realized quite a few years ago that most of the SF I read used the whiz-bang stuff as a hook, but that the books I enjoyed the most had the best character development.
I strongly disagree that character is inherently secondary in SF. Or rather, it is just as secondary in crappy SF as it is in the crappy books of just about any genre (mystery, bodice buster, adventure, western, spy novel, etc.). [Apologies for the word "crappy", but I'm feeling rather Ellisonesque this morning]
I'd disagree in that the fundamental point is under those circumstances people would be dying of diseases and such faster than they can die of starvation.
As a concrete example where I live the civil engineers provide wells for water and sewage treatment plants dumping safe waste into the river. Without that engineering, people would die from waterborne illnesses faster than they can eat canned foods.
Reagan was an authoritarian? I've heard endless complaints about him, but not that one.
Literature should not really be it's own genre, since the language used to tell a story isn't related to the contents of that story.
I've read about 300 fiction novels over the course of my life and that book still maintains a hold on me like nothing else ever has. It is easily the best fiction novel I've ever read.
For someone new to Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus gives a good taste about what's in store without so much commitment.
Besides those I also strongly remember these works:
- The Wizard Knight: straight-up fantasy but quite philosophical like sci-fi should be
- Pirate Freedom: an interesting "historic" view of pirate life
For non-SF, I recommend reading Peace. Twice.
It's basically Newbury-level dreck. It reminded me far too much of The Giver - wildly implausible dystopian societies bent on the authors childish ideological sympathies.
That's a...really weird condemnation. I certainly haven't read all of them, but every Newbery Medal nominee I have read has been excellent.
If I wasn't already reading Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum and Tolkien by that point, that kind of horseshit might have turned me off reading altogether at around 11-12.
(ditto for Fahrenheit 451)
Also known as high-concept sf - though probably not in this case, unless Atwood has stopped swearing at people who refer to her work in such terms.
On the other hand, postapocalyptic totalitarian religious dystopia isn't really what you'd call breaking new ground, even in 1985.
But there are counter-examples. Jonathan Lethem is at his best when he toes both worlds, and Iain "M" Banks is equally famous for his literature and his space operas. It's an absolute crime that James Morrow isn't better-known. And pretty much everything the Slate article hits is excellent.
You can also probably toss in Delany, Spinrad, much of Dangerous Visions, and then go on from there.
The movement, if there was one, is best characterised by a shift from puzzle stories to more complex fiction, with some authors crossing the divide, like Silverberg and Zelazny in the US.
However - decades (and probably puberty) sit in between me and my last reading of his work so this is probably an unreliable viewpoint.
I am more of a plot junkie and have very little to justify a good opinion of literature but for whats worth "The Road" is very well written. Highly recommend it.