
Dark Futures: What happens when literary novelists experiment with Sci-Fi - samclemens
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2017/05/literary_fiction_is_borrowing_the_tools_of_the_science_fiction_genre.html
======
glangdale
I think it's pretty clear what happens when literary novelists experiment with
SF, to wit, it is not defined as SF and is shelved with the literature.

This is devoutly desired by most authors as being tarnished with the "SF
Author" label is a ticket to lower pay and guilt-by-association-with-trash.
Margaret Atwood furiously resists the idea that her stuff is Science Fiction
because "SF is talking squids in outer space".

What often feels irritating about literary adventures into SF is that they
allow themselves to loot the treasury of SF ideas and present them under
respectable covers to readers who would never venture into the SF section (I
view Atwood as a repeat offender in this department).

This is considerably less irritating than the bulk of the F/SF section, of
course, which is 90% extruded paint-by-numbers escape literature. The average
page count should be the first clue that 'we're not here for the ideas'. Thank
goodness for the "Masterworks" series (and a few other lines) which do the
admirable job of keeping something other than the Escape Lit du Jour in print.

~~~
uncletaco
> Margaret Atwood furiously resists the idea that her stuff is Science Fiction
> because "SF is talking squids in outer space".

It was a little more nuanced than that. Her argument was that _The Handmaid 's
Tale_ wasn't really science fiction because it was set in a dystopian "now".
Recall there wasn't anything particularly advanced about the technology in the
story and its timeline forked from ours sometime in the 1970s (the book took
place in the 1980s I think). She instead preferred if the story were called
"speculative fiction".

While some of that could rightly be attributed to not wanting to be shelved as
science fiction, that's also not the full story. Pre-internet, Margaret
Atwood's audience was primarily a literary audience. So it makes sense that
she'd want this new book to be shelved in the same place her old books were
shelved. Otherwise she might lose out on some of her core audience.

Atwood being a repeat offender of looting "the treasury of SF ideas" is
baseless hyperbole, and your entire rant falls on a throwaway comment she made
30 years ago. She looted the "treasury of SF ideas" in the same way Delany
looted Moby Dick to write _Nova_ or Jo Walton looted Greek myth to write _The
Just City_

~~~
thebooktocome
I had the extreme privilege of seeing M. Atwood speak this year, where she
made the same argument as quoted in the OP (with a different example than
squids, but the point was the same).

It is not a throwaway remark. It is something she strongly believes.

~~~
uncletaco
Did she not maintain that her fiction was "speculative" and not "science
fiction"? Because everything I've seen has her being very clear in her
description of the two.

~~~
thebooktocome
Yes, of course she did. I'm disputing the end of your remark, not the
beginning.

~~~
uncletaco
I see what you're saying now.

------
Animats
The classic SF by a literary novelist is E.M. Forster's "The Machine
Stops".[1] This is over a century old and still reads well.

[1]
[http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html](http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html)

------
jejones3141
I'll never forget something Lloyd Biggle Jr. wrote in the intro to a short
story. It went something like this: given a group of people in a sewer, the
mainstream author will lovingly write about those who stay there. The SF
author will write about those trying to get out.

------
phaemon
This seems an appropriate place for an Iain Banks quote:

" "Well," he says, "if you are going to write what a friend of a friend once
called 'Made up space shit', then if it's going to have any ring of truth that
means sometimes some of the horrible characters get to live, and for there to
be any sense of jeopardy, especially in future novels, the good people have to
die. Sometimes."

Banks freely admits that he enjoys writing his SF novels more than his
"literary" novels, and the Culture novels more than his other SF. The
hedonistic, anarchistic, post-scarcity series is "a hoot. It's my train set. I
adore the freedom and the size of the canvas," even though writing them
"requires a greater degree of concentration. And there's so much baggage with
the Culture now that I have to get each new novel aligned with earlier Culture
history. I don't have the same leeway to make things up compared with when I
started." "

From his last(?) interview:
[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/15/iain-banks-
the...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/15/iain-banks-the-final-
interview)

------
pavlov
I've always had a soft spot for Doris Lessing's bizarre '70s sci-fi experiment
_Shikasta_.

Ursula Le Guin wrote a review of _Shikasta_ in 1979:

[https://newrepublic.com/article/115631/doris-lessing-
shikast...](https://newrepublic.com/article/115631/doris-lessing-shikasta-
reviewed-ursula-le-guin)

I found this review really fascinating because I consider Le Guin and Lessing
to be writers of equal caliber. Le Guin was pegged as a sci-fi / fantasy
author, while Lessing just experimented with the form. (She won the Nobel
Prize in 2007.)

~~~
andy_wrote
I've never read Lessing, but Le Guin is one of my favorite authors. For me,
_The Left Hand of Darkness_ is easily on a par with other canonical "great"
20th-century literature I've read. I've always felt that if she were born
later, now that sci-fi has become a little less fringe and a little more
respectable, that she'd be more properly grouped this way.

~~~
Pica_soO
She really pushed the envelope on sociological SciFi. "You may have the
handkerchief i carry."

------
Simulacra
The author Charles Stross stopped writing his Halting State series because the
events depicted in his books were becoming real, and it frightened him.

~~~
arethuza
He's actually an HN user:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross)

[NB As long as the events in his "Laundry" series don't start happening then
we're probably fine]

~~~
Animats
The real world keeps derailing his Laundry universe. The next book, due out in
July, was delayed because he had to rework it to accommodate Brexit.

------
andrewflnr
I'm pretty sure anyone who thinks sci-fi doesn't deliver good characters isn't
reading the right sci-fi. Go read _Blindsight_ and _The Quantum Thief_ and see
if you can still tell me that with a straight face.

~~~
lmm
Some sci-fi has good characters, but character is inherently secondary in sci-
fi. An ability to enjoy works without good characters (e.g. those of Asimov)
on the strength of other merits is what separates sci-fi fans from dabblers.

~~~
watwut
That does not makes much sense to me. You can be SF fan while demanding that
arbitrary aspect of the book is high quality - whether character, action
quality, gore, logical consistency or the text itself.

Just because you personally don't care about some aspect of the book does not
mean all who do are dabblers.

~~~
lmm
I didn't mean to insult others' tastes, and I'm sorry if I came across that
way - I'm all for enjoying whatever palette of genres you like. But if your
primary interest is character, surely you would want books written with that
in mind. And if a book is primarily about its characters, why would that book
be written as SF?

~~~
watwut
For me personally, if the character is unrealistic, then it bothers me. It is
not that it would be primary interest, I don't read because of it. But when it
is badly written it make me stop to read - it prevents immersion to me and
makes me feel like that world does not "work".

------
lmm
I loved Station Eleven, but I was conscious of how incredibly suffused with
privilege it was; somehow in this post-apocalyptic world our viewpoint
characters can live as a travelling theatre/symphony and a museum curator and,
aside from an offhand mention of a few hours' hunting, never have to worry
where their next meal is coming from. I guess actual hardship is genuinely
unimaginable for the literary audience.

~~~
jhbadger
True, but isn't this pretty much the case for post-apocalyptic literature in
general? The protagonists are usually threatened by zombies, radioactive
mutants, or roving gangs of punk rockers but not so much by starving to death,
which would be a more realistic (if less interesting from a dramatic
perspective) fate after the collapse of civilization.

~~~
VLM
Disease is even more realistic. Before modern civil engineering (at least in
the west) almost all newborns died before age five. If a kid made it to 5 and
avoided accidents and stuff, they made it to 80 just like we do today. But
until 1900 or so in the west, about 80 to 90 percent of humans died before age
5.

~~~
neaden
This is a pretty inaccurate exaggeration. While death in childhood was a lot
more common it was more like 30% in the middle ages and lower then that by the
1800s. And while people living to 80 wasn't rare it was by no means as common
as today given that diseases and injury were both more common and treatment
was worse. Childbirth was also a very dangerous time for the mother and
accounted for a substantial amount of post-childhood mortality.

~~~
VLM
Yes I agree in the old days childbirth was more dangerous for women than
warfare was for men (at least in that warfare isn't usually constant but
pregnancy was).

I'd disagree in that the fundamental point is under those circumstances people
would be dying of diseases and such faster than they can die of starvation.

As a concrete example where I live the civil engineers provide wells for water
and sewage treatment plants dumping safe waste into the river. Without that
engineering, people would die from waterborne illnesses faster than they can
eat canned foods.

~~~
neaden
Sorry, my comment isn't about how people would die post-apocalypse, it was
about you saying that 80-90 percent of people died before age five before the
year 1900 which is much higher than reality (probably about 30% in the middle
ages, less then that in the 1800s) and also your assertion that if they
survived to adulthood they lived to 80 at a similar rate as today when in fact
it was much less common.

------
WalterBright
"it depicts a dystopian future in which a celebrity becomes an authoritarian
politician. As shocking as the presidency of Donald Trump has been, there’s a
history of mulishly regressive Americans electing such people, from Ronald
Reagan to Jesse Ventura."

Reagan was an authoritarian? I've heard endless complaints about him, but not
that one.

~~~
3131s
The slight towards Ventura is unfair as well. Although he is an odd guy, he is
not ideologically in the same category as the recent American presidents at
all. I am proud that my mulishly-regressive home state elected Ventura in a
way, even though I don't necessarily think he was the most effective
politician.

------
akvadrako
I'm surprised that an article about literature and scifi doesn't mention Gene
Wolfe, the only scifi author I know who gets occasionally placed in the
literature section at book stores.

Literature should not really be it's own genre, since the language used to
tell a story isn't related to the contents of that story.

~~~
zellyn
Can you recommend something of his to try? Go for best, not most palatable :-)

~~~
root_axis
Book Of The New Sun.

I've read about 300 fiction novels over the course of my life and that book
still maintains a hold on me like nothing else ever has. It is easily the best
fiction novel I've ever read.

~~~
akvadrako
I consider the Solar Cycle (including this book) possibly the best work of
fiction ever, but it's quite heavy. I'm not sure I'll ever reread them,
because I remember feeling a bit like I'm drowning in the story.

For someone new to Gene Wolfe, _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_ gives a good taste
about what's in store without so much commitment.

Besides those I also strongly remember these works:

\- The Wizard Knight: straight-up fantasy but quite philosophical like sci-fi
should be

\- Pirate Freedom: an interesting "historic" view of pirate life

~~~
root_axis
Agreed on the entire Solar Cycle. IMO the interplay between the Long Sun
series and Short Sun series is its own kind of magnificence. Like many Wolfe
readers, I came into Long Sun looking for "more" New Sun, and it took me quite
a while (probably 2 books in) to dispense with that expectation and start
appreciating Long Sun on its own merit. By the end of Long Sun I was enjoying
it very much, but it wasn't until I started reading Short Sun that I began to
see the brilliance of what the author was trying to accomplish between the two
stories.

------
Uhhrrr
Usually tedium is what happens when literary novelists experiment with Sci-Fi.
And the same when SF novelists try to get too lit'rary. Atwood has a couple of
corkers though.

~~~
douche
If the Handmaid's Tale is anything to go on, I don't want to see any more
Atwood. It takes a lot for me to toss a book in the trash, but there was
one...

~~~
throwanem
How come? I mean, I don't regard it as particularly _good_ , but I did at
least get all the way through it. (On the other hand, I was much younger
then.)

~~~
douche
I was probably ruined by reading a few hundred _good_ science fiction novels
before hitting that in a freshman lit class.

It's basically Newbury-level dreck. It reminded me far too much of The Giver -
wildly implausible dystopian societies bent on the authors childish
ideological sympathies.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
I gotta agree with you on that. All concept, no character. Which really makes
ideal as a kicking-off point for a tv series.

(ditto for Fahrenheit 451)

~~~
throwanem
> All concept, no character.

Also known as high-concept sf - though probably not in this case, unless
Atwood has stopped swearing at people who refer to her work in such terms.

On the other hand, postapocalyptic totalitarian religious dystopia isn't
really what you'd call breaking new ground, even in 1985.

------
andybak
No mention of Ballard? Or any of the New Worlds "New Wave" era writers?

~~~
tyrw
Who are the new wave writers? I'm looking for some more good authors, and not
finding these jump out on Amazon.

~~~
sbisson
Well, on the UK side of things you can probably pick any of the authors
published during Michael Moorcock's tenure at New Worlds: so Aldiss, Moorcock,
M John Harrison, Hilary Bailey, Ballard, Barrington J Bayley, Disch, Brunner.

You can also probably toss in Delany, Spinrad, much of Dangerous Visions, and
then go on from there.

The movement, if there was one, is best characterised by a shift from puzzle
stories to more complex fiction, with some authors crossing the divide, like
Silverberg and Zelazny in the US.

~~~
andybak
A volume of Robert Silverberg stories blew me away when I was young and eager
for ideas based fiction. I think he might be the under-rated author of that
era - talented with characters and narrative, yet provocative and thought
provoking in terms of his conceptual exploration.

However - decades (and probably puberty) sit in between me and my last reading
of his work so this is probably an unreliable viewpoint.

------
agentgt
I have read a lot of scifi books particularly post apocalyptic (yeah its
overdone but I still love it) and _" The Road"_ still haunts me.

I am more of a plot junkie and have very little to justify a good opinion of
literature but for whats worth "The Road" is very well written. Highly
recommend it.

------
zellyn
Don't let her description of Void Star put you off. It's not literary, but it
is fun scifi. Although I don't think it will ever be seminal, parts of its
world-building compare favorably to Snow Crash, and the treatment of AIs is
quite fun and sometimes thought-provoking.

------
Zigurd
Under the Skin looks like a novel about aliens on Earth. It's really about
meat, and about how people, especially women, get treated like meat. It's
brilliant. But based on the Amazon customer reviews, there's a sci fi audience
that doesn't want that kind of bait and switch.

