QuickTidal, on 18 April 2019 - 05:00 PM, said:
Andorion, on 18 April 2019 - 04:18 PM, said:
Honestly, he seems rather ignorant. He just seems to assume that SF is all light speed travel (as if there is anything wrong with that)
This is exactly the problem.
Most "literature" snobs associate Sci-Fi or Fantasy with Pulp novels and comics from their youth (you'll notice it's almost always Boomers or previous Generation who hold these ideas; rarely if ever younger ones)...because that's all those genres largely
were when they grew up. Popular Fiction to them CANNOT be Literature, because it's the domain of Pulpy, soapy nonsense in their eyes. This is not right, or good....but this is how it happened. Combine this MASSIVE generation (Boomers like Atwood and McEwan) with the things that surrounded them in their idealist/impressionistic youth....pulp genre fiction that was sold in grocery stores and magazines for 10 cents...and you have a recipe for a pretty blind, and uninformed,
embedded/entrenched belief system and dogmatic view of the fiction universe and the imaginary difference they see between what they do, "Literature", and what they used to sell to the plebs (pulpy soapy stuff) for popular entertainment. To them there is no way that genre fiction can equal literature.
I don't think thats entirely true QT.
Asimov wrote I Robot in 1950. He wrote Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun in between 1952 and 1956. Clarke wrote Childhood's End (which I consider to be his best novel) in 1953.
Even as cheap pulp was being churned out, the grandmasters were working their craft when people like Mcewan and Atwood were being born and growing up. The good stuff was there.
SF has never really followed the - Pulp - philosophy - mainstream path. The greatest works were already being written in the 50s and Ursula LeGuin started the Hainish books in the 1960s.
I think the snobbishness we see from people like this is the product of a conscious cultural decision - to recreate the high culture/low culture binary that has been alive in literature since Guttenberg, and enforce it on the basis of apparent thematic content rather than in-depth critique. Thus it didn't matter that Asimov was exploring the fuzziness at the border of AI and human sentience, or that Clarke had struck a serious blow against the implicit anthropocentrism of a lot of literature, because their writing could be plotted along a certain axis, they were not really literature as such. Of course I am not saying that authors like Atwood arrived at this decision by themselves, I think the whole literary world - literary critics, the literature departments of universities, all share the blame.
It is this arbitrary assigning of "literary" qualities that makes me revolt against a lot of classic literature. Dickens to me is someone who discovered a certain literary formula - poor but plucky boys, depressed girls, sickness, poverty and misery, that worked well with his audience, and he stuck to it, even if it meant that the prose was blander than stale oatmeal and the plot felt arbitrary and artificial. Austen to me is someone who while able to identify and articulate the problems of Regency and early Victorian society could not find a way to move beyond it, and thus her work is less a critique and more a chronicle.
It is this quality of moving beyond that I think we need to look for and need to give centre stage.
Asimov moved beyond the "robots of doom" archetype, something that most forms of media still struggle with. Clarke struck a blow against the "space cadet" themed adventurous anthropocentrism in Childhood's End and this theme of the smallness of humans was something he went on to explore, though in my opinion never as radically.
Even if we look at the birth of SF, at Jules Verne, at the ambiguous Captain Nemo, at the critique of colonial rule and white racism in 20000 Leagues articulated in 1860s when Britannia ruled the seas, there was this quality, of not staying with the status quo but looking over the horizon. At the end of the day, I think this is what counts.
This post has been edited by Andorion: 19 April 2019 - 01:33 AM
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