Why the hatred for Science Fiction?

[Bosstone]

@MGibson

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.

Dammit, I was eating when I got to the end of that. Nearly choked, thank you very much.

[Spoons]

@Dangerosa

That’s probably fine since Atwood has said numerous times she wasn’t writing Science Fiction.

I have to say, I find it a little odd that Margaret Atwood is considered by non-Canadians to be a writer of science fiction. In Canada, she’s seen as a writer of fine poetry and literature; and certainly, the Canadian literary establishment thinks she’s a wonderful feminist author. But nowhere in Canada do you find reference to her as a writer of science fiction. Her biography on her own web site speaks of her poetry, novels, and non-fiction, but says nothing about science fiction:

Throughout her thirty-five years of writing, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and many honorary degrees. She is the author of more than thirty-five volumes of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman (1970), The Handmaid’s Tale (1983), The Robber Bride (1994), Alias Grace (1996), and The Blind Assassin, which won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2000. Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), was published by Cambridge University Press in March 2002.

Atwood’s dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake, appeared in 2003. The Tent (very short fiction) and Moral Disorder (short stories) both appeared in 2006.

Of course, others are free to see her as a writer of science fiction, and from the posts in this thread, that seems to be the case; but I’d guess that many Canadians would be as surprised as I am to hear that some folks consider her just that.

[Dangerosa]

@Spoons

I have to say, I find it a little odd that Margaret Atwood is considered by non-Canadians to be a writer of science fiction. In Canada, she’s seen as a writer of fine poetry and literature; and certainly, the Canadian literary establishment thinks she’s a wonderful feminist author. But nowhere in Canada do you find reference to her as a writer of science fiction. Her biography on her own web site speaks of her poetry, novels, and non-fiction, but says nothing about science fiction:

Of course, others are free to see her as a writer of science fiction, and from the posts in this thread, that seems to be the case; but I’d guess that many Canadians would be as surprised as I am to hear that some folks consider her just that.

Outside the Science Fiction community, Atwood seems to be percieved as she is in Canada. She wrote a few books with Science Fiction themes, but I’m not even sure the SF community thinks she is a SF writer. However, I have met SF Fen who do not realize Atwood ever wrote anything other than two SF themed books, or that, despite their belief that she writes “crappy SF” she’s actually really well respected and considered one of the best writers of this generation in both fiction and poetry.

[Mister_Rik]

@MGibson

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.

Actor Patrick Stewart said much the same thing during his interview on one of the X-Men DVDs (probably the X3 disc, because I can’t seem to find the interview on the X1 or X2 DVDs that I own). He actually stated (paraphrasing from memory), “I don’t even like science fiction, and yet my career is littered with it. I’ve taken the roles I have because ultimately, the stories are not about the science, they’re about the people, and that’s what makes a good story.”

[Voyager]

@Dangerosa

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?

Stephen King seems to be getting a lot more respect now.

In any case, I hope we’re talking about the reaction to good sf, not crappy sf. Damon Knight stopped the practice of giving crappy sf a pass more than 50 years ago. It seems a lot of literary critics are still in the days of stories that were blueprints with dialog, or think all sf is Star Wars and Star Trek.

[Dangerosa]

Seems like Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union both got positive reactions from mainstream critics. Mainstream literary critics also praised Neal Stephanson and William Gibson. Coraline got a lot of good critical review outside of SF/Fantasy circles, as did American Gods.

[Terminus_Est]

@Dangerosa

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?

See Exapno Mapcase post #7. Some more samples from Ansible:

More merry litcrit snobbery was heard on BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read (11 Jan), as Frederick Raphael and others struggled to define Ronald Wright’s A Scientific Romance as non-sf. No matter that its protagonist uses the Wellsian time machine to seek a future remedy for incurable disease, encountering long-term effects of global warming: the panel decreed that this couldn’t be sf, because they liked the book and – Raphael’s clincher – it wasn’t written in the future tense.

Nick Frost, star of the BBC2 sf comedy Hyperdrive, explains: ‘The series is set in 2151 on a spaceship called HMS Camden Lock. With science fiction there’s always a danger that 50 percent of the population is going to switch off immediately, so we’ve tried to make it more about the relationships between the characters than the fact they work on a spaceship.’ (Independent, 14 Jan)

Belatedly, here’s film critic Paul Byrne of the Sydney Morning Herald issuing the traditional disclaimer about Charlie Kaufman’s utterly skiffy Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: ‘Kaufman writes with an imaginative freedom that only sci-fi writers usually have, but his stories are not strictly sci-fi. He doesn’t so much transform the natural world into something bizarre or futuristic, as make a bizarre world of his creation seem natural.’ Which is very different.

Here, I’ll link to Ansible “As Others See Us” again: "As Others See Us" Random Selector. Keep clicking on “Try Again”.

And I agree that Margaret Atwood is not a science fiction writer. But, despite her protestations, she has produced a work (two or three, actually) of science fiction, and therefore deserves to be critically examined as such.

[Dangerosa]

And is that better or worse than those critics treat romance novelists, or mystery novelist, or Chick Lit? I’ve seen very similar statements to all of those about romance novels.

[Terminus_Est]

@Dangerosa

And is that better or worse than those critics treat romance novelists, or mystery novelist, or Chick Lit? I’ve seen very similar statements to all of those about romance novels.

This thread isn’t about romance (except for that brief hijack), mystery, or chick lit.

[OtakuLoki]

@Dangerosa

And is that better or worse than those critics treat romance novelists, or mystery novelist, or Chick Lit? I’ve seen very similar statements to all of those about romance novels.

I have never seen a review of a critically acclaimed work of fiction claim that it was not a romance. The book may not have been classified as Romance, but I don’t recall for example, any reviews of The Time Traveler’s Wife saying it wasn’t a romance.

I don’t disagree that many other genre works get short shrift from the literary community. I’ll even admit, and this is as someone who reads Romance novels regularly, that many of the criticisms I’ve seen of genre works are often spot on. (ETA: Including SF.) It still seems to me that SF is the only genre where the critics will make concerted efforts to emphasize that a work with SF elements isn’t actually Science Fiction.

[Terminus_Est]

Here’s what Ansible rolled up for me:

Patrick Gale’s review of the new Margaret Atwood novel admires her ‘gleeful inventiveness’ in imagining unheard-of wonders like ‘rats genetically spliced to snakes’ or ‘pain-free chickens developed to produce only multiple breasts’, yet deftly avoids calling this scnce f*ctn: ‘In Oryx And Crake she makes a welcome return to fantasy. She would probably chuckle at that and murmur “if only” for, like The Handmaid’s Tale, it is less a fantasy than an imaginative projection with a rational foundation in current facts.’ Gale’s other acceptable code phrase for the genre that dares not speak its name is ‘dystopian myth’. (Waterstone’s Books Quarterly)

[Emphasis mine.]

Well, then. If you want to consider it that way, then why don’t we compare it to other, similar, stories of “imaginative projection with a rational foundation in current facts”? How imaginative is the projection, really? How rational is the foundation? How current are the facts?

[Buran]

Wow…a lot to read through!

Just as an aside I was thinking about how hard it is to classify books to start with. The single most disturbing story I’ve ever read was ‘The Jaunt’ by Stephen King (a horror story premised on the invention of teleportation technology) and I’ve just finished the ‘Far Horizons’ anthology edited by Robert Silverberg which also had extremely stories more horrifying that anything I’ve ever read in a straight ‘Horror’ book (which to be fair I haven’t read much of, its not really my thing). ‘A Hunger for the Infinite’ by Gregory Benford set in the far future where starflung humanity is fighting a losing war against machine intelligences and ‘The Way of All Ghosts’ by Greg Bear where a secret experiment has terrible consequences.

[Lok]

@Dangerosa

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.

While at Denvention, both before and after the Hugos and the Sidewise awards, which Chabon also won, I heard several people complaining about his novel being nominated/winning. I asked one man why, and he said it was alternate history, with a minor change :eek: , and AH wasn’t SF. :dubious: (This was about the Hugo obviously, not the Sidewise. Although I heard at least one person complain that the change wasn’t important enough to qualify as AH, so it should not have been up for the Sidewise. I do not understand these people.) I was unable to get into a literary discussion at the time since I was trying to sell books, not piss off idiots, besides I have not read the book yet.

While most AH would fit better under Speculative Ficiton, than Science Fiction, I don’t understand people that say it shouldn’t be up for a Hugo. If it isn’t SF, then it is Fantasy, which would still qualify it. They seemed to feel if it wasn’t published in the SF/Fantasy ghetto, it didn’t qualify for our rewards. Struck me as being rather limiting and self-defeating.

[OtakuLoki]

@Lok

While most AH would fit better under Speculative Ficiton, than Science Fiction, I don’t understand people that say it shouldn’t be up for a Hugo. If it isn’t SF, then it is Fantasy, which would still qualify it. They seemed to feel if it wasn’t published in the SF/Fantasy ghetto, it didn’t qualify for our rewards. Struck me as being rather limiting and self-defeating.

FWIW, I find this attitude you’re reporting to be just as annoying as the reverse that I’ve been complaining about in this thread.

[Lust4Life]

@Voyager

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.

I would have been thirteenish so it would have been back in 67 which I know isn’t very early at all but my recollection is that the magazines were mostly pretty old though I could be wrong but one was a story about a future character called I believe Ralph 124c41(One to forsee for one) which came from a mag called modern electrics most probably a reprint but not necessarily.

I’m not saying that there wasn’t Space Opera in the old days (and yes I read the Skylark etc.)but that there was SO AND SF whereas apart from the works of Ian M Banks nowadays there seems to be only SO.

I’ll probably have an outraged mob around my house for saying this but even all versions of S.T. are nothing more then SO,good guys taking on bad guys in space basically though I have watched and enjoyed them over the years)…and now I’ll do a runner while I’m still in one piece.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

I just discovered this essay in the New York Times Book Review by Margo Rabb, I’m Y.A., and I’m O.K.. It’s about how people look down on Young Adult (YA) writers.

Quoting Sherman Alexei:

"I thought I’d been condescended to as an Indian — that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing Y.A.”

Change the YA to SF and you wouldn’t have to change another word in the article.

[Jayn_Newell]

@Lust4Life

I’ll probably have an outraged mob around my house for saying this but even all versions of S.T. are nothing more then SO

I’m a fan myself, but I wouldn’t consider Trek to be a good example of the SF genre. It’s pretty much a western with phasers instead of revolvers.

[Just_Some_Guy]

@Lust4Life

I would have been thirteenish so it would have been back in 67 which I know isn’t very early at all but my recollection is that the magazines were mostly pretty old though I could be wrong but one was a story about a future character called I believe Ralph 124c41(One to forsee for one) which came from a mag called modern electrics most probably a reprint but not necessarily.

Just in case you’re not certain on this, “Ralph 124c 41+” is Hugo Gernsback’s story that he stuck into his electrical parts catalog and started the snowball rolling to his pulp magazines and the golden age of science fiction.

[Malthus]

@Exapno Mapcase

I just discovered this essay in the New York Times Book Review by Margo Rabb, I’m Y.A., and I’m O.K.. It’s about how people look down on Young Adult (YA) writers.

Quoting Sherman Alexei:

Change the YA to SF and you wouldn’t have to change another word in the article.

Heh, I haven’t read every post in this thread, but is seems to me that any fiction that can be easily classified as “genre” fiction isn’t going to get the sort of respect that fiction which cannot be so classified gets.

Fiction, to be respected, can energe from some genre - be it romance, Western, mystery, young adult, science fiction - but must, somehow, be seen to transcend the inherent limitations that being part of an easily identifiable genre imposes, to touch something universal in the human condition.

Huckleberry Finn is a YA fiction. It is also widely considered a great work of literature, because while it falls within that genre, it transcends it.

Science fiction is simply a specific example of a more general trend - no more, no less.

[Frylock]

Heh, just saw this on a review of Rainbows End by Vinge at [Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge | Goodreads]goodreads.com.

Those are literary complaints; from a SF POV it’s entirely satisfactory. "

-FrL-

(Shameless plug: My own review of the book is the one under the username Kris (or it might be Kris Rhodes; I don’t know how my user name shows up for other people))