I put this off until evening because I’ve been spending way too much time on the Board, especially on this thread, in a debate I got suckered into, even though I said upfront I don’t want any part of it.
Grumble.
And I also got suckered into the use of “literature,” even though that’s a slippery, touchy-feely term. Most of great American literature was not recognized as such when it first came out. Moby Dick added nothing to Melville’s reputation at the time. Huck Finn was reviled by many. (But ** MEBuckner**, how can you say “It almost sounds as if you have “literature” confused with “history” or “sociology”? Huck Finn was contemporary so it didn’t need to give historical context for the culture. But what makes the book so great if it isn’t exactly the peeling off of the respectable exteriors of society to show the true faces underneath? The book is not about a raft trip; it is not an adventure. Huck’s developing understanding of himself in relation to his society is the defining moment in American literature, so wonderful that you can even forgive Clemens for the Tom Sawyerized ending.)
Take Fitzgerald. He was recognized as a major talent from his first novels. But Gatsby got mixed reviews and less than expected sales. It’s not true that all Fitzgerald’s works were out of print when he died, but it was not until Bruccoli edited a major collection in the 1950s that his stature was restored. (And who says that critics never do anything good for writers?) Now Gatsby is recognized as one of the greatest American novels ever. And deservedly so. I reread it not that long ago and I was enthralled once again at the perfection of its prose.
And I need to make the point, forcefully, that mainstream writing is not the same as literature. Mainstream is mainly concerned with style and content; there are dozens or hundreds of books that Bruce Sterling once defined as “slipstream” that take f&sf themes but use them in a mainstream context. Think Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Lessing’s Planet novels or Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children). (Note: Sterling disavows the word today and it’s current use is inverted – referring to genre writers using mainstream styles.) Mainstream contains as many bad books as any other type of writing, but I’m ignoring bad fiction as much as possible. Good mainstream almost universally has good prose styling; it is the best mainstream that is normally elevated into literature.
But I just said that literature is a judgment of time and posterity. So let’s stick with what Lao Tsu wisely called “lit’ry” for what I’m talking about when it comes to sf (an all-inclusive term).
Which means we start with Ursula K. LeGuin. Gene Wolfe. Michael Bishop. John Crowley. Terry Bisson. Peter S. Beagle. Kim Stanley Robinson. James Murrow. Tom Disch. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, who can be considered the Hammett and Chandler of modern sf. Ray Bradbury. Zelazny and Delany and Silverberg. Which means I have to mention Harlan Ellison, even though he is not a novelist. But “lit’ry” sf is strongly discouraged in novel length because it doesn’t sell as well (and often can’t be sold to a publisher in the first place) so its real home in sf is in the short story. And that means adding Kate Wilhelm and R. A. Lafferty, James Tiptree Jr. and Michael Swanwick. Kelly Link, whose collection of short stories is marvelous. So are those of Andy Duncan. Ted Chiang. James Patrick Kelly. Connie Willis. Lucius Shepard. Nancy Kress. Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon blew me away but is it even slipstream, let alone sf? Dan Simmons for Hyperion. I know, I know, the Brits have more of a lit’ry tradition than us Yanks and I should be including bunches of them. Life’s like that. And what to do about older writers like Sturgeon and Leiber and Bester, whom I haven’t really read in years but who wrote wonderfully for the 50s?
I’m getting tired thinking. I’ll let someone else do my work for me. Peter Straub just guest edited an issue of the literary journal Conjunctions. (The real editor titled it “The New Wave Fabulists,” which came as a total surprise to all involved. The person who supplies the best explanation of the title wins a prize of twenty-five cents.) But the contents page reads like a roster of “lit’ry” writers of today: John Crowley, Kelly Link, M. John Harrison, Peter Straub, James Morrow, Nalo Hopkinson, Jonathan Lethem, Joe Haldeman, China Miéville, Andy Duncan, Gene Wolfe, Patrick O’Leary, Jonathan Carroll, John Kessel, Karen Joy Fowler, Paul Park, Elizabeth Hand, Neil Gaiman. The Crowley and Hand pieces are particularly exceptional.
And many, many more. Suggest your own. (Does that cover my ass about those I forgot?)
Not every work by any individual is great or even good, let alone every work by all of them. They have many different styles and strengths. I will not debate whether any particular piece or author is good or not (I mean it this time). I do not know what works or which authors will become literature. As I said, literature is actively discouraged by the sf marketplace. You can still do lit’ry, but it’s hard. Vonnegut got out, got acclaim, and got sales – but did anything he write after Slaughterhouse 5 approach his earlier work? Jonathan Lethem and Lewis Shiner are the latest to try to deliberately escape the field. I expect Kelly Link to be next. There is just little place for what they want to write. LeGuin, however, escaped and then came back. The field is richer for her presence.
The field is richer for all of them.
No more essays.
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