Comment by glangdale | Hacker News Reader

Comment by glangdale | Hacker News Reader

I think it's pretty clear what happens when literary novelists experiment with SF, to wit, it is not defined as SF and is shelved with the literature.

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.

> Margaret Atwood furiously resists the idea that her stuff is Science Fiction because "SF is talking squids in outer space".

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

I had the extreme privilege of seeing M. Atwood speak this year, where she made the same argument as quoted in the OP (with a different example than squids, but the point was the same).

It is not a throwaway remark. It is something she strongly believes.

Did she not maintain that her fiction was "speculative" and not "science fiction"? Because everything I've seen has her being very clear in her description of the two.

Yes, of course she did. I'm disputing the end of your remark, not the beginning.

I see what you're saying now.

The whole idea of what gets shelved where is starting to lose definition and importance.

Not really. If you still buy books at stores, you'll want your Atwoods all shelved together, as opposed to her literary work being in "fiction" and her sci-fi work being shelved in "fantasy & science fiction"

I am trying real hard here and I really can not remember when I last bought a book for myself in a store. Last year in Berlin when I bought some Banks novels for a friend, that was an impulse buy because he did not know any of them yet was the last time I bought books in a store in general, but they were not for my own use.

Other than that books arrive in the mail.

I'm mostly an online buyer myself. But when I go to book stores I've noticed the sorting associates the genre with the author and not with the work. This is why authors who want to write in different genres do so under pen names. So if Atwood mostly writes literary fiction, it makes sense that she would want her speculative books shelved in their usual space. This is an old mode of thinking, admittedly, but it makes sense in terms of moving physical volumes.

She has made the remark repeatedly, over the years, in different contexts. It's not a throwaway.

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.

A similar thing happens with comics; The New York Times's review of Art Spiegelman's WWII memoir "Maus" started with the line "Maus is not a comic".

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.)

The word comic comes with expectations about graphics style and content, same as manga has some expectations (through that has more variety of stuff). That is quite practical for people like me who don't like the comic style, but do enjoy differently painted pictures with bubbles.

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.

In the film industry there seems to be a differentiation between things labelled SciFi (spaceships fighting, laser guns, squids in outer space) and Science Fiction (fictional science enabling the plot).

How does IMDb make the distinction?

I don't think it does. For instance I notice The Handmaids Tale - what I'd regard as a science fiction - is currently number 3 in their 'Most Popular Sci-Fi' list between Alien: Covenant at 2 and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 at 4 - both films I'd place firmly in the Sci-Fi category. [http://www.imdb.com/search/title?genres=sci_fi&explore=genre...].

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