Where is science fiction leading us and what does it concern?

http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/on-science-fiction

by jseliger • 18 years ago

6 5 18 years ago

jseliger.wordpress.com

Many writers are very good at making already extremely complicated subjects (like social mores, conflicts, depression) even more impenetrable. There are very few writers indeed willing to explain complex subjects (like relativity or quantum physics) in simpler terms. If they did, it wouldn't be 'literature'.

tungstenfurnace• 18 years ago

Agreed. Much writing which is self-consciously 'literary' in nature seems knowing and deliberately obscure.

There's a problem too with long-winded SF authors: they leave too little to the imagination. Most of my fave authors write fairly succintly, with gaps for my imagination to fill. This makes their stories seem more real and exciting.

jseliger2• 18 years ago

"Much writing which is self-consciously 'literary' in nature seems knowing and deliberately obscure."

I would say "some" rather than most, and the best are not deliberately obscure: look at writers like Fitzgerald, Bellow, (some) Updike, Flaubert, Hemingway and

Others are more difficult to read because of the nature of how they try to express reality, feeling, and point of view, like Virginia Woolf, Joyce, or Proust.

But I don't think neither is all that obscure or all that direct, as both words seem to be synonyms for the same ideas expressed along the axis of "nature" and "artifice" that James Wood describes in _How Fiction Works_.

jseliger2• 18 years ago

I'm not sure it's so much a matter of ideas as of how those ideas are expressed; in literary fiction, the two seem inseparable, but one aspect of the post tries to cover how in SF I'm not sure most writers think of language that way.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

Why does so little science fiction rise to the standards of literary fiction?

Because the standards of "literary fiction" are, at best, orthogonal to the factors which make a book sell well?

"Science fiction" and "literary fiction" are modern marketing labels. When a publisher labels a work "science fiction", they're trying to say "if you like stuff by Heinlein, Clarke, Bujold, Cherryh, Dick, Stross, or Stephenson, you might like this. It might or might not be literature, but we think it's a good read". Whereas a publisher who labels a work "literary fiction" is trying to say "if you drop quotes from this at a party full of literature professors they won't laugh at you. It might or might not be a good read, but it's literature".

Naturally, one of these genres sells more books than the other.

The situation is complicated by the lingering death of the novel as a popular art form. Guys like Nabokov or Fitzgerald or Thurber or Joseph Conrad wrote in an era where everybody bought and read novels of one kind or another -- TV didn't exist, you couldn't watch movies except in a theatre, radios weren't portable. In that world, the novel was at its peak. There were more marketing channels for books, and a larger population of people who were highly print-literate and appreciative of subtle literary gestures. So publishers were that much more willing to print stuff regardless of whether it could be sequelized, or sold to Hollywood, or stamped with a genre label. Life today is harder. It might well be true that nobody [1] would buy Heart of Darkness if it were published today... unless it were in the form of a movie, or an HBO miniseries, or a video game, or a series of Youtube shorts [2] -- you know, a living genre. Or unless it could conform to the restrictions of one of the remaining established marketing channels for books, like the SF market, or the fantasy market, or the "Harry Potteresque" market, or the "will get recommended by Oprah" market.

[1] Where "nobody" is defined as "not enough people to make it a profitable use of the publisher's limited resources".

[2] Incidentally, the first person to turn Heart of Darkness into an awesome series of Youtube shorts will win my admiration. And the videogame version would be fascinating.

Where is science fiction leading us and what does it concern?

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