

Where is science fiction leading us and what does it concern?  - jseliger
http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/on-science-fiction

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mechanical_fish
_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_.

------
jackarcalon
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
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.

~~~
jseliger
"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_.

