Margaret Atwood can be a fine writer - the stuff I’ve read like ‘The Robber Bride’ and ‘The Blind Assassin’ is good. When she works with a traditional SF backdrop though the results are poor. A Handmaid’s Tale is garbage IMHO - I accept that I may be in a minority with this one as a lot of people seem to rate it. Oryx and Crake, though, was just embarrassingly bad - I defy anyone with a SF background to say otherwise. Seeing a respected (although obviously past it) writer cack-handedly manipulating heavily-worked SF themes like genetic engineering without any creative insight or imagination was almost baffling in its futility. There was no weight or currency to her ideas - it read like she had completely failed to take stock of the genre.
I’ve not read Michael Chabon - but he sounds like he has done precisely this, taken the measure of SF in terms of the heritage and classic texts of the genre. This really has to be attempted - even if you think the entirety of SF is total shite, you need to be aware of what the canvas looks like - what you’re working with. To just rock up and say ‘I am a good writer, therefore I can write a SF novel off the cuff’ is dim-witted arrogance at its finest and the results are predictable.
What really rankles, and is the reason I mentioned Atwood upthread, is the critical reaction to a turd like Oryx and Crake. Nodding dog critisicm whereby she is applauded for pushing the boundaries of the romantic novel and not afraid to grasp the nettle of SF. If a young SF author had submitted such a dated yawnfest they’d be openly laughed at and restraining orders issued between them and the pen.
Upon reflection, what irks me about the above definition of genre fiction is the notion of progress. If you wrote a book in January 1969 about men on the moon, it would be “crap genre fiction.” However, in six months, with the benefit of hindsight, the same book would be classified as “mainstream fiction” and the author would be “prescient” and “ahead of his time.”
Or likewise, a true-crime novel about a real criminal committing crimes is “literature” and an identical book about a fictional criminal committing identical crimes is “crap genre fiction.”
Frankly, if any purported English literature expert told me that load of shit, I’d object with, “What you’re saying is, you don’t understand science, so we have to dumb our stories down and not write anything that you’re not qualified to critique?”
Have you read Wolfe’s entry in the Encyclopedia of SF? John Clute writes a pithy first line something like: Wolfe may never have had an original science fiction idea in his career, he is nevertheless the most important SF writer at work today’
Something like that - nice dichotomy between ideas-driven SF and literary SF that you allude to in your post.
Wolfe has a new book out next month btw Entitled An evil guest
The Borders near me has several employees who seem to know something about SF. On several occasions I’ve asked for assistance in locating something in the SF section and not only was the employee able to find it, but he, or in one case, she, suggested some similar titles that led to me discovering a new author.
The same thing happened with Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I recall quite a bit of complaining along the exact same lines when it won. And then there was the howling over Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix which had similar echos. My feeling is that it’s a good thing; the facet of SF fandom that hands out these awards tends to be so insular that breaking out of their own locked SF conceptions is in improvement.
I don’t know Clarke’s reaction but I know that Chabon has been pleased with the awards being showered on him by the SF establishment (it also took the Nebula and Locus awards). His publisher isn’t likely to use them in their promotions but Chabon isn’t rejecting his SF roots.
I really liked Oryx and Crake–out of all her books, it’s definitely my favorite. I mean, the ideas themselves (genetic engineering, apocalypse) may not have been all that developed, but I didn’t really care about that–I thought the way characters reacted to it, concepts on a more philosophical level–were really interesting. I mean, if you have to have a background in what is plausible/believable, does that really define good “genre fiction”?
There is an important kernel of truth here. I am a science fiction fan. I am fully aware that I am a little weird to most people. What makes me, and other science fiction fans, weird is that we have different values than a lot of other people. Science fiction is not just a genre of fiction, it’s a subculture. Science fiction is fundamentally about exploring. That emphasis on exploration of new or different ideas, new or different places and new or different things is placed above everything else. Sometimes the result is a breathtaking work of art. Sometimes the result is execrable tripe. The majority of the genre is just good, competent entertainment, but what people remember is the tripe and the art. Fans remember the art. Everyone else remembers the tripe.
Part of that exploration is an exploration of other ways of doing things. I personally don’t spend any time or money on models, toys and costumes, but I recognize that the root of the behavior is a desire to reexamine the idea that toys and play are not a part of a proper adult life. I guess my point is that it isn’t surprising that you and other non fans think that we’re weird. We are weird because we ask questions and don’t accept “everybody else does it that way” as an end to the argument or even a valid response. I’m not saying that we are all noble philosophers who spend every moment dedicated to an ideal. But science fiction is a set of aesthetic values and its fans are people who adhere to those values.
I suppose that all genres may also be sets of aesthetics. In that light, the fact that great science fiction gets recategorized as Literature may be perfectly normal. Literature is supposed to be the very best of all genres. The oddity is that all non-genre fiction has been lumped in with Literature, when it manifestly is not Literature.
If that is the case, you might want to avoid referring to it as crap in your opinion and instead talking about having to go to the back of the bookstore “past all the stuff you aren’t interested in.” I’m guilty of using crap as a synonym for “stuff” but it isn’t the most respectful word.
(My Boarders and B&N have their genre fiction forward - and the general lit sections in the back.)
That’s probably fine since Atwood has said numerous times she wasn’t writing Science Fiction. For either book. Is it fair to condemn her for bad SF when she wasn’t writing SF?
Oryx and Crake is a powerful book with stunning prose. I don’t think Handmaid’s Tale is Science Fiction - its a book set in an alternative history, but so is The Other Boylen Girl.
Is SF judged by literary critics? When it is judged is it held wanting compared to other contemporary modern fiction? Or is it just perception that it is judged more harshly?
That should be contemporary POPULAR fiction. Sure the literary critics go wild when Umberto Eco releases a novel, but what about Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Carl Hiassen, Sophie Kinsella?
Most of the good science fiction stories I’ve read have been about people. It’s people who drive the plots not technology. Technology only provides the author with a vehicle by which he or she can examine a particular point. I, Robot explores what it means to be a sentient being, Ender’s Game could be about how gifted children are used up and burned out before they even become adults, and Star Trek’s “The Arena” is about our deep seated fear of and need to engage scaly humanoid reptiles and gladiatorial combat.
Marc
One of these things is not like the others. Read Fredric Brown’s original short story Arena, and you;'ll see why it’s in a host of “Best of…” collections.
The Brown story is credited as the source for the Star Trek episode, but I’ve heard that Gene Coon was already writing a script when the similarity was pointed out, and they then acquired rights. I’m not sure if it’s truye or not, but it’d explain the changes a bit better than simply the Heavy Hand of Roddenberry combined with the realities of TV producing. I’d dearly like to see this filmed properly, with a good script and CGI.
And by that token, often these themes cannot be explored on a backdrop of ordinary life. Many of the best books explore how people and society might react to situations that don’t exist. Even if you tried to cast them in the world that is familiar to us, you would have to throw in some SF&F elements just to make it work.
In what way, in case it hasn’t been asked already, is the existence of ubiquitous surveillance technology in 1984, outside this definition?
Heinlein’s ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’ has no obvious science driven premise beyond ‘what happened if we went to Mars and a kid was born and raised by Martians?’ and that pales into insignificance against ’ what if there were gods and angels’ etc. None of which capture the scope of the book’s themes. Yet it is undeniable sci-fi.
It seems to me that the criteria often in use is - ‘if it’s good it can’t be sci-fi.’
Your definition is just not useful. It is not in any sense a defining characteristic.
Have to disagree. Life is too short to ‘learn’ doing something you have no feel for. It is perfectly possible to write genre fiction well, in a literary sense. It’s just arrant snobbery of a teacher to say otherwise.
Any genre, no matter what plot devices are in operation, can be driven by character development and change. Good writing is good writing and good writers are good writers. Does Iain M Banks become somehow a worse, less literary writer, just because he adds an initial to his name and writes about ‘The Culture’ rather than steep approaches to garbadale or whatever?
No - he deals with interesting themes and great characters no matter if he is writing sci-fi or not.
I’m about to go back to University part-time in England to do a Masters in Creative Writing in which we are expected to write a good novel. The department rule is not - No Genre - but Good Writing. If I wanted to write sci-fi I could - it would just have to be good writing, meeting literary standards regardless if it had a warp drive underpinning the premise.
The department head has published two books of historical fiction and another tutor, whose work is considered very literary is full of fantasy elements.
All to often it seems genre is defined as automatically ‘bad’ and if it isn’t ‘bad’ it isn’t genre. This is just exclusion by definition.
Entitled An evil guest