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San Francisco, 12:14 AM
Sun Nov 8
11 posts in the last 24 hours
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09/01/09
08/31/09
Everyone (esp. in CanLit) needs to read this.
09/24/09
Anyone who follows CanLit has heard of the Canada Reads contest on CBC. I have always hoped that someone would have the guts to suggest Neuromancer, which was written in Vancouver (as I believe all Gibson's works have been) To those who gripe that none of the novel takes place in Canada, or that Gibson was born in the US, I would say a) Michael Ondaatje wasn't born in Canada and b) none of the English Patient takes place in Canada. It's elitism, pure and simple.
08/31/09
As others have said, it's not as if Atwood has anything to worry about in her career, so (even though we can't look into her mind and know for sure) any reason other than literary snobbery for these weird distinctions seems somewhat baffling.
08/31/09
That's why Atwood protests too much.
08/31/09
If anything, acknowledging that a few of her works are in this genre would get her fannish accolades as well as all of the prestige she already has...
08/31/09
But if we judge it by the standards of literary fiction, it utterly fails, because it disregards the tropes of that genre and adopts the tropes of speculative fiction. She's trying to have her cake and eat it too. (And as we who are familiar with sci-fi tropes know, the cake is in fact, a lie).
08/31/09
08/31/09
08/31/09
08/31/09
Cases in point:
-If you write an episode of Old Tricks, one of the BBC's detective shows, you get about forty grand. If you write an episode of Torchwood, it's half that.
-The average advance for an SF book in this country is three thousand pounds. The average advance for a crime novel is fifteen thousand.
-I've had a DJ contest the fact that Doctor Who is science fiction because, basically, normal people watch it.
It's an unlovely combination of massively popular and commercially slightly unviable. And, frankly, the deserved reputation some SF fandom subgroups have does absolutely nothing to help matters.
08/31/09
that the contents of a book can sometimes be easily placed within a genre doesn't validate the general usefulness of that genre.
the definition of any genre is a moving target...more support for it's lack of real world (outside the fiction industry) applicability.
on my bookshelves there are two categories:
fiction and non-fiction
Philip K. Dick is right beside Charles Dickens and Hawthorne right beside Heinlein.
08/31/09
It's good to see Ursula K. LeGuin call Atwood out onto the carpet for this, though. I've always liked LeGuin's stuff.
And if you've never read The Dispossessed, please give it a shot. Great book.
08/31/09
08/31/09
08/31/09
Whether she believes it, has talked herself into believing it, or what, who knows.
08/31/09
08/31/09
08/31/09
OK, so your suggestion works for The Handmaid's Tale. But in Oryx and Crake, she is clearly not making fiction containing things that are possible today. The story has crazy genetically engineered monstrosities that are far too complex for modern genetics to create, and there's no guarantee we'd ever be able to create organisms like the ones in her book.
Sorry Margaret, but if you're writing fiction, and there is science involved that is beyond the limits of modern technology, you're writing science fiction.
08/31/09
Maybe this is a personal issue for me; I've never found an author's opinion on their own work to be anything other than kind of annoying.
08/31/09
08/31/09
08/31/09
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08/31/09
It reminds me of the author who said he didn’t want to do science fiction because of all the weird names using "x" and "z". It’s like they can’t get past the stereotypical idea of what science fiction is. Don’t they realise that some of the best writers of the past century (Orwell, Huxley, Bradbury, Vonnegurt, Wells) wrote books that are considered science fiction?
*Edit: Ok, so the list of great authors is really just a list of authors I really like. But I think my point stands.
08/31/09
Who cares? She gets to see her own books however she likes. Just like everyone else gets to talk about them the way that they want. C'est la vie. She's writing the books she writes so she obviously respects and enjoys looking at the future. If you're going to be insulted because she doesn't specifically call what she does "science fiction", then I suppose that's your choice.
08/31/09
08/31/09
08/31/09
I’ll still be purchasing "The Year of the Flood". My comment was mostly addressing the fact that so many authors (and other media types) feel the need to distance themselves from science fiction.
08/31/09
08/31/09
08/31/09
I don't know. That little acid aside makes me think a LOT less of Leguin. It's pretty snide and petty, to be honest. Unless there's an interview out there I'm not aware of in which Atwood has admitted she's only in the game for prizes and lauds, in which case I am certainly on the wrong side of this argument.
08/31/09
Here's the link I posted below. As of 2005 Atwood was saying that both The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake were science fiction (after saying for years that they weren't). The back and forth seems to imply an effort to appeal to others, rather then simply seeing her own books however she likes.
Edit: Here's the link
[www.guardian.co.uk]
08/31/09
08/31/09
"If you're writing about the future and you aren't doing forecast journalism, you'll probably be writing something people will call either science fiction or speculative fiction. I like to make a distinction between science fiction proper and speculative fiction. For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can't yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe; and speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards, and that takes place on Planet Earth. But the terms are fluid. Some use speculative fiction as an umbrella covering science fiction and all its hyphenated forms - science fiction fantasy, and so forth - and others choose the reverse.
I have written two works of science fiction or, if you prefer, speculative fiction: The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake. Here are some of the things these kinds of narratives can do that socially realistic novels cannot do."
I guess that answers our questions as to what these books are? If they're anything, it seems like Atwood would call them "speculative fiction", since they're near-to-present technology works.
Interestingly enough, Douglas Coupland's next book is a near-to-present spec. fic. I wonder what it is about Canadians and this genre.
08/31/09
Huh, I just looked up something that has changed my opinion of Le Guin. Le Guin bases her argument that Margaret Atwood "says she doesn’t write science fiction" on Atwood’s 2004 essay collection "Moving Targets". The article I linked was written by Atwood in 2005 (and I’m of the opinion that in the article Atwood is recognising that what she writes could be called science fiction). So the information and quotes that Le Guin used are pretty much moot.
So . . . I guess everyone is entitled to their own opinion and Le Guin is kind of a bad person. Especially considering that the review by Le Guin and Atwood’s 2005 article were both written for The Guardian.
08/31/09
I would call her quote in The Guardian an outlier--and proof that she knows all about genre distinctions, but chooses to redefine them anyway to suit her own snobby purposes.
08/31/09
That's why the debate about HOUSE, M.D. Is McCarthy's THE ROAD science fiction? How about Chabon's THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION? Fowler's SARAH CANARY? THE PRISONER? Any of Gibson's last few books? Damned if I know, but I know they all stimulate the fannish receptors in my brain, regardless of what their authors might claim to the contrary.
I don't envy Ms. Newitz's job in deciding what or what not to cover.
08/31/09
08/31/09
Now, the part of her job that involves keeping Meredith well fed and groomed, on the other hand...
08/31/09
08/31/09
08/31/09
I agree.
08/31/09
08/31/09
Other examples: CSI (original flavor) is a hugely popular TV show, yet there have been a bazillion panels about it at cons. Sherlock Holmes (and his "descendant" Greg House) are both beloved of fandom. Accurate recreations of various parts of history? Not SF, but forsooth, you see a lot of the same folks at cons and Ren Faires.
08/31/09
08/31/09