Found via my referer log: this whole concept of genres is maddening. Some people want to be genre authors and don’t want mainstream types to crash the party, while others resent the mainstream types for writing about ideas they claim as theirs.
What is SF?
I was going to write a long and thoughtful response to this entry about science fiction and its comments in Paul’s journal, but it turns out whoever runs Daft Dystopian has alread done it, and better than I would have: draft and later version.
[Interestingly, I recognized this as something that showed up as contextually relevant, via the WayPath engine.]
So reading through this, I get the sense that SF has claimed certain ideas (tropes) as its province and if you use those, it makes you a genre writer, no matter if you don’t know Heinlein from Hall Caine.
I’m not sure calling Margaret Atwood a liar is all that useful:
For Atwood to so thoroughly use the genre, extracting some of the oldest tropes in Science Fiction, and then to deny her works as genre, smacks of disingenuousness. The plot synopsis of each book places them solidly within the genre. They are dystopic Science Fiction. Because Atwood cannot be dismissed as ignorant of the genre, one can only assume her false statements are deliberate.
Why can’t they be dystopian, full stop? How did dystopian fiction become the exclusive province of science fiction? And why is Gulliver’s Travels omitted?
Another snippet: Stephen King, Anne Rice and Michael Crichton, who are regularly listed as best-selling authors, are marketed as mainstream, despite the fact that they all write works which fall within the Science Fiction and Horror genres.
Perhaps they’re considered mainstream because they are read by — wait for it — mainstream readers, ie readers who don’t profess a love for any genre, who just want a good read.
The mainstream appropriates other genre works posthumously, and for less financial reasons. As in the case of Franz Kafka, whose novel, Metamorphosis, could only be described as a work of fantasy — the protagonist turns into a giant beetle and the entire plot follows from there. Kafka’s work falls under the mainstream label not because it isn’t genre and not to sell more copies, but because of Kafka’s ultimate importance in helping contemporary society understand the encroaching disillusionment and isolation of modern life that he predicted so early in the 20th Century. We find Kafka on the mainstream shelves because the greatness of his work is understood, and not set upon by a burden of stereotype as are later works within the genre. This absorption of genre work by the mainstream points to a similarity between the two. For mainstream to assimilate some genre works, there must be a commonality between the forms.
Yes, that makes sense and underscores the “broken the boundaries of the medium” comment that started this whole thing.
One more:
John Clute illustrates another example of the mainstream’s bias against Science Fiction:
When a revered non-SF writer such as Doris Lessing publishes a series of books — the “Canopus in Argos” sequence — which she is perfectly happy to call SF, reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic rush to her “defense” insisting that it’s anything but. (Clute)
The next paragraph blasts the mainstream for hypocrisy for claiming Lessing’s works were not science fiction, thereby “reinforcing the marginalization of Science Fiction.” But the SF writers also said she doesn’t belong in their canon, even though Amazon lists it there. What, she’s not good enough?
Aargh, this is a stupid thing to argue about. I’ll have to couch my swearing off of science fiction as “I don’t like rayguns or space ships or time travel or aliens science fiction but good old fashioned dystopias are fine: what have you got?”