[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
If it is still possible for anyone outside the literary establishment to seriously argue that 1984 or Jennifer Government is not science fiction, then my point is made. And I can go lie down with a cold compress on my head. :smack:
[/QUOTE]
Stop smacking your head, dude. You’ll feel much better.
[QUOTE=Dangerosa]
That ignores that there is a lot of “Literature” which is enjoyable and interesting.
[/QUOTE]
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.)
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
If it is still possible for anyone outside the literary establishment to seriously argue that 1984 or Jennifer Government is not science fiction, then my point is made. And I can go lie down with a cold compress on my head. :smack:
[/QUOTE]
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-
[QUOTE=Justin_Bailey]
Bullshit says this librarian. What “science fiction” is there in 1984?
[/QUOTE]
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?
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
If it is still possible for anyone outside the literary establishment to seriously argue that 1984 or Jennifer Government is not science fiction, then my point is made. And I can go lie down with a cold compress on my head. :smack:
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=elfkin477]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=Justin_Bailey]
Bullshit says this librarian. What “science fiction” is there in 1984?
[/QUOTE]
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.)
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
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?
[/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.
[QUOTE=Lust4Life]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=Lust4Life]
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.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=Mister Rik]
What Exapno Mapcase is saying is that science fiction is basically the progressive rock of literature 
[/QUOTE]
This is the most profound statement I have read here in a long time.
[QUOTE=Dangerosa]
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.)
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=Mr. Excellent]
I have to call “shenanigans” here. The defining characteristic of science fiction is the use of fiction about science to drive key plot points.
[/quote]
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.