Why thank you 
Michael Chabon has said quite a few things about literary vs genre fiction:
The term speculative fiction is pretentious? That’s kind of ironic: I bet Gene Wolfe would disagree.
The term has considerable pedigree, and only fell out of favor in the 70s or so. If anything, it is less pretentious than “literary SF”.
twitch Agreed. ‘Literary SF’ is pretty much a way of saying ‘SF is by definition crap’. Nevermind that I wouldn’t touch most ‘literature’ of my own volition.
You realize that the term “speculative fiction” was coined by Heinlein hisself, who considered himself the enemy of pretention.
Heh.
I am quite aware of the provenance of the term. It has served its purpose. Let it fall back into oblivion.
I took a short-story writing class in college.
We were instructed to write no genre fiction. Our professor’s distinction between genre fiction and regular ordinary everyday fiction was this: fiction has people driving the plot, genre fiction has the plot or elements of the plot driving the people. Anything historical was out, anything in the future was out, anything in another world is out – “Because if you’re writing anything worth reading that takes place on Mars or medieval England or whatever, you can set it today. People don’t change and you can’t write effectively about aliens without giving them human characteristics, and if they have human characteristics then they should be human.”
The irony that our textbook included The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas was not lost on me. I think it may even have been assigned reading. So what was okay to read? What was, in the professor’s opinion, an excellent example of what our writing should reflect?
John Updike.
Yeah, I hated that class. If you want me to write Updike I’ll write Updike, but I’ll hate it.
Wow, that is concept-for-concept (almost even word-for-word) exactly what my own creative writing teacher said when I was an undergrad.
I can’t remember my teacher’s name… I think his last name was Lee.
-FrL-
There has been sort of an interesting backlash against Chabon’s Hugo - which is some SF Fans saying “hey, don’t give it to a guy who writes ‘literature’ - he isn’t one of us.” (Ignoring the Chabon has fairly substantial geek cred), or “But that’s literature!” Its almost a reverse snobbery. To some extent - Atwood deserves derision from SF Fandom for her own attitudes about them (I love Atwood as a novelist, but her anti-genre snobbery is not my favorite feature about her - however, I think that the author has the right to state her own intent - her intent is not to write works that can be simplifed down into genre terms), but Chabon really doesn’t. However, it does point out bi-directional nature of the OPs question. To some extend, SF doesn’t get respect because the readers themselves reject it. When SF/Fantasy hits mainstream (Rowling’s Hugo for Goblet of Fire is another example), there is a certain rejection of that mainstream from the readers.
Reasonable people can disagree. For my part, I really like the term. I also kind of loathe the “hard/soft” SF distinction that is often made, so I recognize that this is very much a matter of taste.
Gene Wolfe also did say that all authors write fantasies: some authors are just more honest about it than others. I like the term speculative fiction because I believe it focuses more in the ideas and less on the “science” or often pseudo-science.
Now my mind is trying to play out a chicken-and-egg scenario (and tying itself in a knot in the process). When the SF/F section is always buried in the back of the store with the front filled with, what is in your opinion, crap, it might just be easier to split them into two groups, who never the twain shall meet, than to try and recognise that genre definitions aren’t cut and dried. Classic us vs. them mentality.
Frankly, your professor sounds like an ignorant, complacent dick. I wonder if he’d ever read any Mary Doria Russell or Michael Flynn–authors who use SF concepts to explore ideas about humanity and faith.
I really like that.
I am not a creative writer for a living, but I do think there is a pedagogic logic to this. It is critical to learn to express yourself and to learn to tell interesting stories. It is all too easy to rely on genre conventions to do the lifting for you. To that end, aspiring writers should avoid mystery, romance, spy, etc. The only genres they should rely on are structural and formal: short story, novella, novel, etc.
Once you have learned and internalized the rules, then you can write in your own voice in whatever genre you like.
But if they’re good books and people like them, how does that make them bad SciFi books? I mean, it’s science fiction–what makes them mediocre as ideas?
It is a dubious proposition that they are even good books in the first place.
Well, I’d disagree that they aren’t good books…but if people enjoy them and they’re getting literary praise, how can one argue that they’re bad sci fi , as opposed to just bad books?
But he seems to be ignoring a whole lot of potentially interesting “explorations” into the human condition introduced by science.
What happens when all disease is wiped out, and humans become essentially immortal? There are bound to be some profound socialogical and physcological ramifications there…
Yep. I know a lot of readers who don’t bother to purchase books from anywhere other than Uncle Hugo’s or Dreamhaven (Twin Cities SF/Fantasy bookstores). They don’t respect non-genre literature (or genre literature outside of “their” genre) enough to even be familiar with what is on the shelves at Barnes and Noble - and feel free to condemn it as “crap” - but get upset when their own genre isn’t respected.
A good example is Busy Scissors describing Atwood as a “pedistrian SF writer.” Atwood isn’t an SF writer at all - she has written two (arguably three) books that have some SF attributes out of 13 and doesn’t accept the label. However, she’s hardly pedestrian - or if she is you need to discount her five Booker nominations and one win, her two Governor’s General Awards, or her Prince of Asturias Award. (She also has an Arthur C Clarke Award for Handmaids Tale - so someone in the SF community thought she wrote one decent SF book). By objective measures, she is neither pedistrian nor does she write crap.
If the idea (i.e., the science fictional idea, the “what if”) is bad, illogical, or poorly presented. See The Time Traveler’s Wife for (arguably) good literature but bad science fiction. See Slaughterhouse Five for both good literature and good science fiction.
In my case it’s less lack of respect and more lack of interest. It’s rare that I go outside the genre into more mainstream books for my reading (though it does happen on occasion). Basically, there’s little there that appeals to me.