In part because people like me wandered in, realized that this was going to be one of those conversations in Alabama about what football team is playing this weekend, and trying to slip in a comment about the baseball season was going to going to get ignored or even seem hostile, and left without posting.
The way to make Cafe Society less about sci-fi and fantasy is to post more about things that aren’t sci-fi or fantasy. That’s pretty much up to you folks who don’t like sci-fi and fantasy to do. Expecting those of us who DO like sci-fi and fantasy to stop posting so much about it in order to balance things is not the most efficient way to achieve parity.
And I don’t want to be argumentative or anything, but the throwaway lines about how you “gave up” fantasy or science fiction when you got into your 20s or 30s (i.e., “matured”) is slightly insulting in its implications.
While I’m more likely to like science fiction than fantasy, it won’t happen very often, and it only seems to in the case of literature. I’ve read Tolkien, some Philip K. Dick, some Arthur C. Clarke, CS Lewis’s space trilogy, Philip Pullman…but that’s about it. Then there are authors who don’t usually belong to genre fiction, like Orwell, Michael Chabon, and Cormac McCarthy.
Meanwhile, movies are difficult for me to get into if they belong to either genre. I always hated Star Wars, even as a kid, and since that seems to be the gateway drug for introducing people to SF, my detestation of it kept me sober, as it were. As for TV, I haven’t yet found a show I’ve liked that’s SF or fantasy. Even Futurama didn’t do it for me.
Part of my opposition to fantasy, such as it is, is that the people who came up with the conventions of the genre picked the least interesting part of human history to tweak. Medieval anything bores the hell out of me and it boggles my mind as to why anyone would want to devote entire sections of bookstores to series of novels about supernatural events in alternate universes permanently trapped in the year A.D. 800.
I’m not opposed to genre fiction in general, since I like a good detective novel as much as anyone else (Raymond Chandler is one of my favorite writers), and, really, I hate the policy of segregation that bookstores and libraries came up with to keep the riff-raff away from their literary fiction. Why can Michael Chabon - to continue an example made upthread - write a detective novel set in alternate universe Alaska and stay in the main section of the bookstore, while anyone who starts out in science fiction or mystery stays there forever?
I couldn’t agree more; that was one of the reasons I enjoyed the Computer RPG Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura so much, because it took the whole “Sword & Sorcery” thing and plonked it down in the 1890s- and then made a big play of the conflict between Ye Olde Schoole and the “Technologists”. And it was brilliant.
The only other “Fantasy” computer games I’ve really liked were Oblivion and the Heroes of Might & Magic series, FWIW.
I spent my childhood/early teens neck-deep in fantasy role playing. My waking hours were basically consumed by the genre, in designing campaigns, reading books, learning gaming systems etc (school didn’t require much any effort).
Now I find studying reality much more enticing and rewarding than fantasy. There are tons of historical, ethnographic and archeological material out there waiting to be checked. Compared to the realities of human history, I couldn’t care less about what some author/screenwriter/gamer has made up.
Your description reminded me of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, and, sure enough, Wikipedia’s page on steampunk works listed it as qualifying. I may have to further investigate this steampunk business. Thanks for mentioning it.
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For the other people here who dislike science fiction and fantasy on “realistic” grounds, how do you feel about other works of fiction that incorporate some elements of SF/F while not going so far as to deserve being classified as such? How do you feel about magical realism, for instance?
(This is not intended to serve as a recommendation for anyone to read Against the Day, which is okay, but underwhelming, in the exact way an 1100 page novel should not be. Parts of it were interesting enough to make me remember it more fondly than it actually deserves.)
Im not interested in science fiction or fantasy.
I don’t like sci-fi or fantasy, and before I clicked on this thread, I had a suspicion that half the posts were going to be from sci-fi fans telling us why we should like it. Looks like I was right.
Also, steampunk is just plain silly.
I just read all three of Mary Doria Russell’s novels not long ago. I bet imaginary characters everywhere are cringing in horror at the thought that she might make them the subject of her next book.
I’d just like to clarify that I myself wasn’t saying why people should like SF/fantasy. I was just objecting to the characterization of the gentre in the OP. It’s like a fan of John le Carre feeling that he has to write in when someone says they don’t like spy stories and movies because James Bond isn’t at all realistic, and Austin Powers is just vulgar.
And I just have to add that someone with the username neutron star not liking science fiction seems about as odd as username Pussy Galore not liking James Bond.
Clarification noted. As to my username, well, I read one of those science-made-fun-for-kids type books when I was about six or seven that described what a neutron star was and how much it weighed and the whole thing just blew me away (still does), plus I thought the term sounded really cool. I grew up into an adult who really couldn’t care less about astronomy, but I still like the name. Go figure.
Why don’t you just start some threads on non-speculative fiction? People join in. The Mad Men thread gets traction each week, and I’ve started a few book threads on fairly mainstream novels that people participated in.
The name Pussy Galore suggests its bearer might prefer other carnal delights to James Bond. 
I read a decent amount of F and SF (and mysteries, for that matter), but I’m always reluctant to call myself a fan because I’m not necessarily interested in the genres for their own sake. I like Buffy for some of the same reasons I like, say, The Wire, and neither of those means that I’m necessarily interested in reading Twilight or Law and Order.
This “segregation” exists because patrons prefer it. Many genre fans want to be able to make a beeline for their favorite form of fiction.
In academic libraries (like where I work) the popular fiction collection is usually small and simply alphabetized by author’s last name. At my old job students were always asking things like “Do you have any science-fiction here?” or “Are there any romance novels in the library?” The answer to both questions was “yes”, but unless I had the time/expertise to make a personal recommendation there was no way easy way for students to find genre fiction. They just had to go through the whole popular fiction bookcase and judge the books by their covers. This was clearly disappointing to a lot of patrons.
I’m totally with you. That kind of segregation drives me batshit. My local independent bookstore is particularly crappy about it, too. I looked high and low for Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, only to finally find it under “Gay and Lesbian Fiction.” Huh? Similarly, To Kill a Mockingbird is filed under “Regional Fiction” there–not a place it would have occured to me to look.
Well, yeah, of course it’s not all the same. I find it’s not worth my time to wade through all the crap. I’ve been burned too many times by getting the third chapter of a book before I realized that each one of the handful of women on the moon colony was going to be “tall, dark, and attractive with perky breasts” or “tall, blond and attractive with full breasts” and they all have “a sense of innocence about them, but a steely determination in their eyes” and seem to be treated as a different species all together than the men.
It’s totally inconsistent with me, too. I was in a situation where all I had to read for two years was genre fiction, and I freaking ate up the detective novels, which are probably ten times worse in their portrayals of women. But they also seemed a lot more knowing about how they were doing it. Or maybe it’s just because so many of my friends are geeks and pick up these odd ideas about women. But something about bad portrayals of women in sci fi and fantasy feels especially depersonalizing and makes me not want to read it.
Several posters have gone to great lengths to explain why you can’t paint the genres with a wide brush. Sure, you may say you don’t like sci-fi/fantasy, but you can’t possibly not like all of it because it’s so varied.
That’s a nice sounding argument, but ironically some of the same people would probably tell you they don’t like sports. Really? All sports? That’s a pretty broad brush you’re painting with; let me explain in excruciating detail why some are better than others, and how you can’t possibly know that you don’t like all sports, and let me toss in several names you won’t recognize while I’m at it…
While I totally agree with the main thrust of the OP, I’m actually a pretty big sci-fi/fantasy fan. But I mostly just like to consume it. Conversations about it fill me with an uncontrollable desire to stuff somebody into a locker.
I remember a couple years ago there was a CS thread about the Illusionist, where the OP explained how happy she was that there was finally a “grown-up” movie to look forward to. Somebody in this thread alluded to it, but I’ll come right out and say it: I find fantasy, sci-fi, comic books and cartoons to be childish.
Why?
The chains are bad about this too. One of my pet peeves is when I want to pick up the next book in Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire series that I haven’t read. I have to remember that my local Border files them under Horror (presumably because there are vampires in it) another bookstore has them with the mysteries (which makes more sense to me, particularly since that’s where the rest of her books are) and once I found them in the science fiction section.