Why the hatred for Science Fiction?

Cafe Society
1

I’m thinking more of sci-fi books than movies but they count as well. This is something I’ve wondered for a while, sci-fi seems to be looked down upon and openly mocked as a genre and I’ve never understood why. I’ll read most things of most genres but science fiction has provided me with some of the most enjoyable, memorable and thought-provoking reading/watching that I’ve experienced.

So basically…I don’t understand the ire it provokes and I’m tired of seeing it treated as not somehow entirely respectable and I wonder where this attitude comes from?

2

I hear you, Buran. It seems like most genre fiction is looked down on, though, not just SF. I’ve heard an interesting theory that I think helps explain it. When people read fiction, they’re looking for either a mirror or a window–something that reflects and validates their own experiences or something that gives them a look at a completely different world. Currently, the “mirror” stuff is what’s critically acclaimed. Frankly, most of that isn’t my cup of tea. I’d much rather read about spaceships, 16th century Venice, or New Crobuzon than boring old real 21st century life. But that’s out of fashion with the literati at the moment.

3

It comes from the pulp magazines of the 1930s. The pulps were lurid, mostly subliterary, and aimed at the great unwashed. Writers ground out stories like sausages, with even the best writers earning possibly two cents a word and most of them a half-cent a word. To make the minimal living wage you pumped out tens of thousands of words of week. Lester Dent did a 60,000 word novel every week for years. Guess how literary they were.

The pulps were printed on the cheapest pulp paper and had the loudest and most eye-catching melodramatic covers, often of scantily-clad women having evil things to them by fiends. And those were just the westerns! [rimshot]

For decades, when anyone read sf they read it in the pulps. Amazing Stories started the modern separate genre of sf in 1926, followed by many other titles, most notably Astounding Stories of Super-Science in January 1930. How could anyone possibly respect fiction being published in Astounding Stories of Super-Science? Yes, the title was later shortened to Astounding Science Fiction and John W. Campbell took over as editor in 1936 and he published the early work of Asimov, Heinlein, Del Rey, and L. Ron Hubbard. But those stories had next to none of the literary value of even the average story in the Saturday Evening Post, let alone the American literary renaissance that happened simultaneously in the 1920s with the rise of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and so many more.

Every time sf tried to demand some literary respectability something would happen. Digest-sized magazines like F&SF and *Galaxy * appeared in 1949 and 1950 and their editors demanded better written product than the bilge that Campbell often printed but that coincided with the advent of sf on television - kiddie shows like Tom Corbett, Space Cadet - and the 50s horror/monster tales that were Z-grade movies.

SF tried to become respectable again in the 1960s but then Star Wars and the Star Trek movies diverted the audience to gosh-wow adventures and even the print market became half tie-ins to media sources.

Go into any chain store today and look at the f&sf racks. Fantasy books have a person in a medieval uniform holding a sword. Science fiction books have a person in a futuristic uniform holding a blaster. If you can judge a book by its cover - and with these books you can - you know exactly what you’re getting and its not literature.

In the UK, by comparison, the pulps were never as dominant and sf was never so closely identified with the pulps. Writing sf in the UK has always been far more respectable than writing sf in the US. And its still looked down upon as second rate.

We would have killed to be thought of as merely second rate, but in fact the field started out as tenth-rate and had to claw its way up a few rungs of the ladder to whatever precarious position it holds today.

I long ago gave up any hope of sf becoming respectable, even though you can open any issue of the New York Times Book Review and find a novel that sounds suspiciously like something from the field. It’s not marketed as f&sf, though. That’s the kiss of death.

SF is looked down upon as something less than literature because of things that happened before you were born. It never overcame that taint and the most popular writing in the field today doesn’t even attempt to. So why should anything change?

4

Good science fiction and fantasy requires the reader to think. It thrusts the reader into a new world or society, in which some or all of the reader’s assumptions are challenged. It also requires the reader to pick up on subtle clues about the society, and assumes SOME basic knowledge of SF/fantasy themes…for instance, generation ships, the craftsmanship of dwarves, contagious magic, and FTL travel.

In the early days of SF, the writing was quite frequently dreadful, but the ideas contained in the stories were awesome, that is, they filled the reader with awe. The literary crowd got used to having SF as an easy target. I believe, though, that since the New Wave that SF is just as literary as mundane literature…that is, you have the highbrow stuff, and then you have stuff for Joe or Jane Sixpack.

Good mysteries require the reader to puzzle over every innocuous statement, wondering if it’s the vital clue. The best mysteries hide the clues in plain sight.

I don’t know about other genres, but SF/fantasy and mysteries require some work on the part of the reader, and most people just don’t want to think that hard.

5

But where in that “woe is me” diatribe is the fact that almost all of “science fiction” is not written to be literary? And the stuff that is isn’t considered sci-fi because the public long ago decided that sci-fi can only be sci-fi if there’s robots and aliens and spaceships and blasters?

And why bemoan Star Wars and Star Trek? Without those franchises, science fiction would probably be in even worse shape.

Science Fiction is not hated, but the marketers at the publishing companies realize that they have to take two different approaches to sell sci-fi to the masses and to the sci-fi fans. It’s not looked down upon, it’s just marketed differently.

6

I think it was Shirley Ann Rickert, an actress who was one of the Our Gang/Little Rascals characters, who said she was a big science fiction fan when she was a girl, but that sci-fi was so looked-down-upon that she had to hide her sci-fi novels inside of comic books so that she could read them without people bothering her about it :wink:

7

Right here.

This can be argued, but I know of nobody inside the field who believes it to be true. Before Star Wars many people in the field could make a good living putting out individual works of science fiction. After the trilogy, the field shifted. Star Wars and its aftermath are widely seen as having destroyed print sf as a viable market for the more literary authors.

I agree genre is marketed differently, but I disagree that sf is not hated. David Langford has for years put out a monthly newslettter called [url=“http://news.ansible.co.uk/”]Ansible
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. He has a regular feature called “as others see us,” which is almost always a put-down of the field by outsiders.

Here are some examples:

And on and on and on.

Have you read the reviews for books like Chabon’s and Barry’s? Virtually every single one of them go out of their way to ensure their audiences that the books are good, and therefore are not sf. None of this has changed over the entire history of the field. Kurt Vonnegut deliberately distanced himself from sf to turn himself into a viable literary author who would get reviewed by the national publications who wouldn’t touch sf, or in his words, “since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

Yeah, it’s absolutely marketed differently. It’s marketed as “not literature.” And it’s treated that way by everyone outside the field.

8

Not much to add to exapno’s excellent response.

I’ve always felt irritated that the better SF writers get a raw deal from the literary establishment. They don’t even get their books reviewed in the newspapers, and the best SF novelists are in a different league from some of the blandities cluttering up the bookshelves of Waterstones (Nick Hornby, Tony Parsons etc pass for popular ficiton in the UK at the moment).

On the flipside, a pedestrian SF writer like Margaret Atwood has somehow managed to market her books as mainstream fiction, and inspires much chin-stroking pseudery from critics who have no grasp of the mediocrity of her ideas in SF terms. That riles me bad!

That being said, I think a real criticism of SF and fantasy might be that it’s such a simplistic and limited approach to writing about the fantastic. It invents worlds and realities to write about the amazing, the escapist, the impossible. In reality, all of these things exist in real life, it just takes a good writer to find and capture them. Nothing is more amazing or alien then everyday human interaction.

Joyce said he wrote Ulysees ‘to give the Dubliners one good look at themselves’, and came up with one of the most incredible and mind-stretching works of fiction ever penned. Just by writing about ordinary people going about their everyday business.

9

I agree with you that the movies more or less get a pass. They do such incredible things with SFX these days that they tend spur even non-fans into enthusiasm. I suppose the first Star Wars movie in the 1970s was the beginning of that; for a time everybody was excited about it and it was almost cool. Before that, FX in movies and TV looked fake and stagy, and you pretty much have accept that they are real, in order to enjoy the story, the way you would at a live play.

Moreover, with the exception of ST:TOS there wasn’t a great deal of decent sci-fi out there. “Lost In Space”, as has been observed elsewhere, morphed from a serious concept with a believably dangerous villain in the form of Dr. Smith, to a sort of family drama with Smith transformed into six mincing feet of comic relief. Beyond that–it was monsters. Back then, if you were to go through the weekly TV schedule and list all of the movies that were designated ‘sci-fi’, you would wind up with a list composed almost entirely of monster movies, virtually indistinguishable from the offerings of late-night frightfests often broadcast by local stations in those days. I consider adventure and exploration to be basic human instincts, but those aspects of SF were very much underrepresented in the media in those days.

I suppose that might have contributed to the bad rep. Even though on the fiction side, there was already a lot of good material from the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, most people probably weren’t aware of it. As today, most people probably didn’t a lot of books anyway, but they watched a lot of TV and went to movies.

10

One of the things I’ve noticed is that the very people - at my level of society - who mock and deride Scifi;

1> Often claim they don’t like it, or Fantasy, because it’s “not real”. Ignoring that Tom Clancy isn’t real either.
2> Most often don’t read at all, or if they do, they read very little, and only things of a very specific genre, like ONLY Tom Clancy, or ONLY Gardening books.
3> Sometimes get confused by plot twists. If it relies on science, or science fiction, they’re confused and angry, because it doesn’t make sense to them.

and then there’s

4> The (arguably false) assumption that it’s the realm of geeks and “losers” (the basement dweller meme) and that it is either beneath them or low class.

Heck, my 10 year old nephew is a jock, and he doesn’t read anything but sports magazines and because they were cool, the Harry Potter books. He’s claimed that he doesn’t like science fiction and fantasy, has commented about scifi movies not making sense to him… but he likes Star Wars and Harry Potter. :rolleyes:

Just last week he asked me if Star Wars was science fiction. I laughed.

11

Maybe I’m being obtuse here, but I’m going to have to ask for a cite or something.

Where’s the ire you’re talking about, and who’s treating it as not entirely respectable?

-FrL-

12

Or futurized westerns. Gene Roddenberry basically had to pitch Star Trek to NBC as “Wagon Train to the Stars”. NBC didn’t like the original pilot, which was straight science fiction, but they loved the second one thanks in part to Roddenberry including a bare-knuckle fistfight between Kirk and the “bad guy”.

13

As I postulated in This thread, science fiction is often taken as a license to throw reality and logic in the dustbin, so it’s not surprising that a lot of what passes for science fiction is excruciatingly stupid. Imagine the worst pulp western or detective novel ever printed, and then ratchet up the illogic by about X10.

14

Everybody?

I’m being quite serious. I’ve been in the field for 40 years and for every moment of that time, the lack of respect for print science fiction has been a major issue in the field. I’ve delivered papers at the Science Fiction Research Association conferences and the difficulties the academics have had in getting respect for science fiction courses has been a common thread for 30 years.

As noted above, science fiction novels are much less likely to be given review space in any mainstream publication and are usually relegated to a special and occasional section when they are.

Mainstream literary critics despise sf novels and writers, and even the ones who don’t write about them in a condescending manner, despite their almost complete lack of knowledge about the field. John Updike is one of the few exceptions, but he is far more prone to talk about some European sf writer than an American one.

Publishers look down on sf and give it far less marketing support, publicity, promotion, advances, and all the other normal tools of book support than they do even minor mainstream works.

Even Harry Potter, the publishing phenomenon of our times, is regularly stated to be something other than fantasy. Because, you know, if it were fantasy, that would be an admission of something.

The challenge for you is to find any large body of mainstream opinion that is not contemptuous of sf and fantasy. Any. When I say that everybody looks down upon sf as one of the lowest forms of writing on the planet, I mean exactly that. I have 40 years of experience and I’ve read extensively on the 30 previous years of history. Mine may be an opinion, but it is an expert opinion. To me the mocking of sf as a field is as incontrovertible as evolution.

15

I mean… you see science fiction everywhere, science fiction films and television shows make lots and lots of money, the size of the science fiction section of Barnes and Nobles is at least 2/3rds the size of the “literary” section. It’s not that suprising if someone is suprised to hear that every “large body of mainstream opinion” is contemptuous of sf and fantasy.

From the points you bring up in your post, though, I can see what you mean.

I wasn’t aware that people were still having trouble teaching SF in college. I had thought it had become a small-but-within-the-mainstream type of academic pursuit. But my impression was just based on having seen a few courses offered and having seen a couple of peer reviewed journals centered on science fiction as literature. You’ve obviously got more experience than I.

(Though with experience, I lightly suggest, comes baggage… :wink: )

-FrL-

ETA: Come to think of it, several years ago I asked my creative writing instructor whether I could do a science fiction short story, and he said he’d never forbid it but he basically didn’t think science fiction is trying to do what he sees literary short fiction as trying to do. He wasn’t contemptuous, but I wouldn’t be suprised if he and/or his peers express contempt in the backrooms…

16

To give another example to Exapno’s points - look through the reviews that you’ll find about Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. Again and again, even though the whole book is an examination of the idea of time travel, reviewers will talk about it as being somehow other than SF.

Cite #1 - “This is far from a science fiction exploration of the space-time continuum, but a heartfelt love story…”

Cite #2 - “It’s a love story concealed inside a suspense novel wrapped in a thin veneer of science fiction.”

Cite #3 - “This is an extraordinary novel with a unique premise, an exploration of the unknown in this expanding century, where the impossible becomes possible, if not routine.” (Emphasis added)

These are just the first professional or semi-pro reviews that came up with a Google search. The reader reviews at Amazon.com are even more blatant.

I think the book is very readable, with excellent characterization, but when the author tries to give a ‘scientific’ explanation of what’s happening to her title character she drops the ball so badly it threw me out of the story. Because she obviously had no understanding of many of the previous writer’s examinations of the same problems, and the things that would have to be explained to make her explanation work.

17

What Exapno Mapcase is saying is that science fiction is basically the progressive rock of literature :smiley:

18

Thing is, though, as far as I can tell, TTW isn’t science fiction. It’s more like fantasy. (And don’t you know, “fantasy” gets to be respectable when it’s "Magical Realism. :stuck_out_tongue: )

Still, your point is taken, in part, as I note that it’s a little telling that the reviewers even felt the need to distance the book from science fiction.

-FrL-

19

I was being really, really careful to talk only about print science fiction, as I stated explicitly. Media sf is a different world. People on the outside conflate the two, but there is only the slightest real world connection. For the most part, people in Hollywood won’t let print science fiction writers anywhere near the product. (And don’t bring up ST:TOS, anybody. That was a different world and time.) Same thing for superhero movies, from which comic book writers are excluded.

You should hear me make the case the punk killed rock music because it destroyed the credibility of groups trying to make rock more than headbanging and attitude. :stuck_out_tongue:

20

I have a feeling you read the first sentence of my post and skipped the rest. Am I right?

Also in your “challenge” you were not so careful to specifiy that I was only to bring up examples in the world of print fiction.

-FrL-