It's Margaret's fault
Apr. 2nd, 2010 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreaminghopeI blame Margaret Atwood.
Don't get me wrong; I'm a fan of her books. But she's still wrong about one thing.
It's not even necessarily current-Atwood who is the problem - she has apparently softened her stance somewhat - but past-Atwood, who insisted that The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake aren't science fiction books but are instead 'speculative fiction' because "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen."
I blame Atwood for making it sound like science fiction is a limited genre and that any book with literary merit - or literary pretensions - actually belongs to a different genre: "speculative fiction", "distopian fiction", "magic realism" (the academic name for a certain kind of literary fantasy).
It's good marketing: Ms. Atwood surely knows that science fiction fans will read "Oryx and Crake" no matter what she calls it, but literary fiction fans and awards committees don't take genre books seriously. It just bugs me that so much well-written, intelligent science fiction gets pulled out of the category, furthering the (incorrect) assumption amongst much of academia that what's left is pulp. To some, if something's not trashy, it can't actually be science fiction, and if it is science fiction, it can't be smart or thoughtful.
It is also interesting that distopian science fiction is often elevated over more optimistic visions of the future. Not to say that their writing is equal, but consider that The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood is held to be literary, where Stardance by Spider and Jeanne Robinson is firmly situated in the science fiction and fantasy section of the bookstore. That doesn't surprise me; cynicism and pessimism are often considered marks of intelligence, where optimism means that you aren't smart enough to grasp how awful things really are.
I like science fiction, whether it be literary or trashy or something in between. So whatever, Atwood: You have written three science fiction books. Distopian speculative fiction, sure, but that's a science fiction sub-category. Deal with it.
Don't get me wrong; I'm a fan of her books. But she's still wrong about one thing.
It's not even necessarily current-Atwood who is the problem - she has apparently softened her stance somewhat - but past-Atwood, who insisted that The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake aren't science fiction books but are instead 'speculative fiction' because "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen."
I blame Atwood for making it sound like science fiction is a limited genre and that any book with literary merit - or literary pretensions - actually belongs to a different genre: "speculative fiction", "distopian fiction", "magic realism" (the academic name for a certain kind of literary fantasy).
It's good marketing: Ms. Atwood surely knows that science fiction fans will read "Oryx and Crake" no matter what she calls it, but literary fiction fans and awards committees don't take genre books seriously. It just bugs me that so much well-written, intelligent science fiction gets pulled out of the category, furthering the (incorrect) assumption amongst much of academia that what's left is pulp. To some, if something's not trashy, it can't actually be science fiction, and if it is science fiction, it can't be smart or thoughtful.
It is also interesting that distopian science fiction is often elevated over more optimistic visions of the future. Not to say that their writing is equal, but consider that The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood is held to be literary, where Stardance by Spider and Jeanne Robinson is firmly situated in the science fiction and fantasy section of the bookstore. That doesn't surprise me; cynicism and pessimism are often considered marks of intelligence, where optimism means that you aren't smart enough to grasp how awful things really are.
I like science fiction, whether it be literary or trashy or something in between. So whatever, Atwood: You have written three science fiction books. Distopian speculative fiction, sure, but that's a science fiction sub-category. Deal with it.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-05 05:53 am (UTC)Any genre or non-genre has complete crap. But each genre has really intelligent writers. Even romance, I'm sure.