Mainstream writers and science fiction

Typical. For the second time in a week somebody pulled a post I had set aside to respond to. This time it’s Will Ellwood who got cold feet and deleted his post on whether you can get too old to write science fiction. To be honest, it is an incoherent and rambling post, one of those where you can see the writer isn’t sure themselves what their points are, if any, but if I had to delete all my incoherent posts… Luckily Google remembers everything, because hidden in the jumble was an interesting point:

Often literary writers who have a go at writing what seems to be genre fiction get derided and mocked by genre fans for being unoriginal and clichéd. But are literary writers like Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Cormac McCarthy writing classical SF which is based around the question of ‘what if?’ or are they writing allegories and metaphor about the human condition which use the tools of SF as emphasis?

I would argue that to attempt to critique ‘The Road’ as a traditional post-apocalyptic novel would fail, as the novel is not an example of speculative world building and exploration, but a meditation on many themes. Not least the theme of a relationship between a dying father and his son in hopeless circumstances. To attempt such a critique would be to be genuinely and wilfully interpreting the book wrong.

Ellwood is riffing here on an earlier post by Damien G. Walter on whether or not new science fiction writers need to know their genre history:

But is knowing the history of SF essential to becoming a writer in the genre? On the one hand SF can be considered as an ongoing conversation spanning decades. It you enter that conversation without knowing what has already been said, you are not liable to say much of interest to people who have been following the arguments unfold for decades. But on the other hand if SF is a genre that seeks to find meaning in modern life, raw responses to that life might be mire interesting than viewpoints filtered through the mirror shaded gaze of the SF genre.

Ellwood argues that judging mainstream writers in genre terms when they’re attempting science fiction is missing the point, while Walters finds that it might even work in a writer’s favour to be ignorant of the genre. Both are provocative arguments in a field that has always had a bit of an inferiority complex when comparing itself to the literary mainstream. An inferiority complex fed by the frequent denial of mainstream writers dabbling in science fiction that they do so, of which Margaret Atwood is the most prominent recent examplar. It also galls that so often inferior works of mainstream writers are praised for their originality when so often they’re rote reworkings of old, old science fiction ideas and some never recognised sf writer has done it much better much earlier.

However, it’s not the 1970ties anymore and science fiction, though still routinely portrayed as an activity practised by spotty nerds living in their parents basement, has become ubiqitous, something you can’t help but be aware off, similar to how most people have some understanding of football (be it proper football or the American version) even if not interested in the game. Contemporary writers like David “not the comedian” Mitchell or Cormac McCarthy start with a much greater familiarity with science fiction than earlier writers could have. The science fiction ghetto has long since had its walls torn down and besides which, those walls have always been a lot less high than some sf fans like to believe. Heck, roughly half the writer entries in Clute and Nicholl’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction are from outside the genre.

All of which means both Ellwood and Walters are right, up to a point. It is pointless to judge mainstream writers using science fiction as a tool for not adhering to traditional sfnal strengths like worldbuilding or sense of wonder when that’s not their intent. In Walters’ words, these writers may not be interested in joining the conversation sf as a genre is engaged in. Which is fair enough.

Yet having other priorities does not excuse a writer from getting the science fiction elements right. It is possible to critique The Road on its worldbuilding and unoriginality while still acknowledging its other strengths, to recognise that it stands in a long tradition of post-apocalyptic works, both genre and non-genre. And if people like Michael Chabon — who really should know better — insist that it isn’t science fiction, this should be protested. Science fiction’s own achievements should not be swept under the carpet just because some more literary acceptable writer has taken a shine to the subject. To be fair though, this seems to be more of a critic’s disease, with writers putting on some protective colouring not to be tarred by outdated notions about sf’s illegitimacy by those critics.

If we look at the big picture we may see that science fiction, which had a long prehistory of being proper literature before becoming a real genre in the safety of the pulp ghetto, may migrate back into the literary mainstream again, eventually just becoming one option amongst many for a writer. At the moment it’s almost where the detective story was in the seventies: acceptable for respectable writers to dabble in, as long as they don’t take it too seriously.