Stop smacking your head, dude. You’ll feel much better.
There’s some that is, yeah. But it’s overwhelmed by the near-unreadable tripe that English teachers love to bludgeon their students with. Usually what they foist off is the dull, the deliberately obscure and incomprehensible, and the self-consciously “important”. Like at least half of what you’re subjected to in any survey-course anthology. For every Burroughs or Bukowski or McCarthy or O’Connor there’re a half-dozen lame fish like (and I’mdeliberately mixing eras here because to me horrid books are horrid books regardless of their age) DeLillo, Hawthorne, Vollman, Donleavy, Durrell, Hamlin Garland, Edmund Spenser, Gertude Stein and that jerk who wrote The Turn Of The Screw – one of those ubiquitous and egregious Jameses, I can’t recall which . The last-mentioned was passed off to me as being a scary horror story which is also Lit – well it was such a thudding bore it must’ve been Lit, but it was also devoid of any scares – or interest ,for that matter. And it is ballyhooed as Great Literature. If that’s what a classic is, then they can have it!
I haven’t read it; I tried another Chabon novel a couple years back and found it unspeakably dreary, but from what you’ve said maybe this one would be more interesting, I’ll be looking for it next time I go to the library. However, I must confess to being quite suspicious right off the bat of any book or author that wins any of those vaunted Prizes…
That’s another new one on me.
Okay, you got me there – excellent, excellent novel.
You may not have my taste. But there is “enjoyable” literature out there.
(I happen to love reading Lolita - not up everyone’s alley, but I can turn pages on that prose forever.)
But Possession is not romance? Possession is as much romance as 1984 is SF.
Of course 1984 is science fiction. The work is all about what technology makes possible. That’s as close to an unproblematically central case of SF as I can think of.
-FrL-
What science fiction is there in Fahrenheit 451? Are we going to define one of the seminal science fiction masterpieces of the 1950s out of the genre because it lacks enough ray guns and flying saucers?
All right. If you’re going to argue that 1984 is science fiction because he was able to correctly predict a few technological breakthroughs, fine. Where though, is the science in Jennifer Government? Nothing in it is scientifically outside the realm of what’s possible today (we too have access to wonders like guns, sneakers, tattooes, and mini-fridges in hotel rooms.). Science isn’t a theme of the book, and it’s no more technologically involved than real life.
This (erstwhile) librarian and (eternal) trufan can tell you that 1984 is treated in all the major histories and encyclopedias of SF.
See post #59. The blurb on the book even says “It’s Catch-22 by way of The Matrix.”
ETA: The world being taken over by giant megacorporations is one of the defining themes of cyberpunk.
Of course people’s tastes are different, but I have to say that much of what is studied in HS and college as Literature is not all that great a read. Sometimes I feel that novelists of popular fiction are sort of like illustrators: they don’t get the prestige and respect that “true artists” do, but they do fantastic work nonetheless. Are Iris Murdoch or Toni Morrison lesser writers? Perhaps not. But what of Georgette Heyer or Mary Stewart? Ruth Rendell or <insert name of pop male author here; I’m tired and it’s late>? Sometimes it’s hard to not consider the whole lit crit thing a massive shell game of sorts. Much of it IS pretentious and patronizing. As has been stated upthread, there are quite a few books that when first published were considered crap and now are classics and much esteemed.
What makes one novel “literature” and another just fiction?
Most would say the ability of the author to convey plot, character and theme–but is that all? There are some novels that are considered “literature” that have no plot per se. There are well plotted novels that are considered “beach reads”–somehow plot equates to formula often. I’m not sure I understand or agree with that premise, but I learned long ago that life is short and I will spend it reading what pleases me. If what I read is considered “trash” by some, so be it.
From Star Trek: The Voyage Home:
After a little more digging on the intarweb, it seems that the author of Jennifer Government, Max Barry himself, says that it is a science fiction novel.
The “if this goes on” story is a very classic sf plot.
There were a few rockets in Gravy Planet (the Space Merchants) also, but it had nothing to do with science, and everything to do with the society of the day extrapolated.
The only possible reason I could see for someone saying 1984 is not sf is that Orwell was not an sf writer, and that it was too good (see my Kingsley Amis quote.)
My uncle amassed a huge collection of American pulp SF magazines and in my early teens I devoured them totally, until then I hadn’t been interested in the genre.
My memory of them was that they were incredibly imaginative and totally enjoyable and were TRUE SF as opposed to the Space Opera that we seem to have now .
I dont know if in all honesty I would still find them as enjoyable now,I attempted to reread some Elric of Melnibone’ stories not long ago and found them very simplistic and "barebones "compared to my memories of them.
But that said I would love to get the chance to reread them in their original format with the loony ads,and line drawings etc.
Many pulp mags and stories have been reprinted in facsimile editions.
As for the question of what is sf, I’ve always said that sf is about ideas, not spaceships. Once you make that mental adjustment everything else falls into place. That’s why alternate history has also been claimed as sf (or the larger f&sf), along with utopias and dystopias, apocalyptic fiction, magical realism, vampires, Arthurian fantasy, technothrillers, time-travel, and a great many other “literary” subgenres that manifestly work with the themes and techniques of the field. All these subgenres also appear in the man body of f&sf genre literature as well. Vonnegut’s Player Piano is obviously sf. Flowers for Algernon. A Man in the High Castle. And all were originally published as genre books. The mainsteam just has a habit of taking anything it considers “good” and removing it from the field.
The marketing definition of sf is wildly differently from the content definition of sf. Any serious study of the field - and there have been libraries full of serious studies - will point out how much mainstream literature is sf in all but name.
What do you define as early? Space Opera is hardly a new subgenre, especially given that the first draft of The Skylark of Space was written in 1919…Golden Age Astounding might seem early now, but I’d hardly call it that, since it is so much more developed than the Gernsbackian footnoted science lectures passing as stories.
A good source, if you can find them now, are the mags Sol Cohen published after he took over Amazing and Fantastic in 1965 or 1966. He stuffed those magazines with mostly reprints, but published a bunch of others that are totally reprints, many from the early days of Amazing. He ripped the writers off, true, but they were a cheap source of these stories, and they ran with their original illustrations.
This is the most profound statement I have read here in a long time.
Again, we’re in agreement wrt individual works. That’s quite a book – the writing, yes, and also the way Nabokov draws the reader into his narrator’s psyche so that even though you never forget the guy’s a warped and coldblooded wretch – hell, he’s a flat-out monster – you nonetheless begin to understand where he’s coming from, sort of, and to appreciate his twisted aesthetic and intellectual acuity.
I think this is the answer to the question. If you define science fiction this way, that science drives the plot points, then it’s no wonder it’s not considered high-grade literature, in which people generally drive plot points.
BTW, this is all really interesting in that Michael Chabon won a Hugo for The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. A book that isn’t “filed” under SF, doesn’t have a lot of the SF characteristics (alternative history), and wasn’t written by an SF author, but a mainstream piece of literature written by one of America’s most highly respected novelists.