Babel Clash

Over at SF Signal, there’s a “Mind Meld” discussion about the perennial bugaboo of “mainstream approval” for literary science fiction and fantasy. Does literary genre fiction have the respect of the mainstream? Does it need such respect?

The predominant response seems to be “no.” And whenever this topic comes up, the response invariably seems to be “no.” No, we don’t need it, don’t care, doesn’t matter, and here’s a list of a thousand reasons why (my favorite of all the responses is Gene Wolfe’s, who sums it up more eloquently than I could). I can’t think of an instance where a genre writer has responded, “I sure do crave the respect and admiration of the mainstream! Without such respect, all is for nought!”

So why do we keep asking the question? It seems self-evident that if we wanted to be in the literary mainstream, we’d write literary mainstream fiction. We all knew going into it that sf and fantasy weren’t mainstream. It’s not like this is any kind of surprise. What it really comes down to is that we as genre writers have deliberately opted out of the mainstream. The mainstream hasn’t somehow forsaken genre fiction; we abandoned it. And we did it on purpose, because our stuff is much more appealing to us than that stuff is. It’s like quitting the hockey team to go play football, and then questioning why we never win the Stanley Cup.

But then the argument goes, “well, what about The Handmaid’s Tale, or The Road?” Both clearly literary sf novels who have somehow managed to avoid the genre ghetto. What does their mainstream acceptance say about us?

All it really says is that those two authors are perceived as belonging to the literary mainstream; partly because they didn’t start out writing genre fiction, and partially because they don’t define themselves as genre writers. Atwood, in fact, insisted that The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake aren’t even science fiction (which they totally are). She distinguished “science fiction” from “speculative fiction,” the former being “talking squids in outer space”, and the latter being, apparently, the important stuff that she writes. Can you imagine Gene Wolfe caviling at the notion of having written science fiction?

(And truly, The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t so hot as genre fiction goes. Sure it’s a great feminist novel with engaging characters and universal themes, but I don’t recall anything blowing up in it, and there isn’t a single vampire or android from the future.)

These are endlessly muddyable waters, course. There’s enough semantics at work here to choke a talking space squid. The fact that Atwood stirred up a controversy by trying to distinguish her sf from your sf indicates that there isn’t any universal definition of what “sf”is, or what’s constrained by it, or who gets to decide. The people who nominated The Handmaid’s Tale for the Arthur C. Clarke award (which it won), were clearly not on the same page as Ms. Atwood.

Note that the insidious literary mainstream (which in my mind has is an army of vengeful, humorless little goblins wearing tweed jackets with suede elbow patches) also doesn’t award prizes for painting or music or trained cats. I don’t think it’s that they don’t see us as “not good enough,” so much as they don’t see us at all, and don’t much care. I think Margaret Atwood’s baffled reaction to her books being classified as sf is pretty telling. She didn’t really know what sf was, and didn’t really care to: in her mind, she’d just come up with a clever way to illustrate feminism’s worst nightmare, and didn’t really stop to consider what sort of brush she might be tarred with as a result. And let’s face it: if someone came to me and said, “Hey, I really liked Neuromancer; would I like The Handmaid’s Tale?” I’d probably be more inclined to point them toward Snow Crash instead, anyway.

I say, forget those guys. If I write a literary sf novel (as opposed to the nonliterary kind?) I want to win a Hugo for it, not a Booker Prize. The people who award the Booker Prize don’t have a clue about what makes a good sf novel. We’re not over here writing sf because we can’t write mainstream books, we’re writing it because it’s fun and we like it.

So let’s stop asking the question already, can we?

(And incidentally, Madge, if I wrote a book about a talking space squid it would be totally awesome and would have all kinds of cool metaphors and themes; and further, stuff would actually blow up in my book. I’m just sayin’.)

Related posts:

• Will the Mainstream Respect Us in the Morning?
  Hey Matt: I had some ideas about this mainstream/genre thing, which will hopefully show up on SF Signal next week when they unveil Part Two of this Mind Meld. (I raved about the same subject here, too.) But, like you, I have sometimes wondered why we keep asking ourselves this...
• Monster Cowboys In Space!
  Matt, I liked your piece on Dune and avoiding labels. When I first read the book I hadn’t formed a definite impression of what sf was yet, so Dune became part of my definition. It said “science fiction” right on the cover, but on the back was a quote from...
• Mix and Mash
  Hey Matt: I know what you mean about mash-ups, but I guess I’d draw a distinction between something like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (and similar projects, including unfortunately “Wyatt Earp Vs. Godzilla”) and genre-mixing in general. Mash-ups are gags that can quickly wear out their welcome, but genre-mixing is...
• Thank you, and our next guest is…
  Thank you to Bill, James and Matt.  It’s been a great conversation. Peter & Max didn’t get its fair share of time as a featured title, so I want to take a moment to recommend it.  If you’re a fan of Fables, then you’ll love Peter & Max.  That’s a...
• We Built This City…
  Rather than just respond to the alarmingly cogent posts of Matt and James, I thought I’d attempt taking the conversation in a new direction and talk just a bit about the collaboration between writer and reader. Now this partnership is vital with any story, but particularly so in the fantasy...