I actually find myself disagreeing with Michael Chabon, somewhat, when he claims there's no real difference between literary and genre fiction. I've spent enough time in the literary scene (well, a literary scene) to get a sense that there is such a thing as literary writing. It has its own set of clichés, its own expectations, and its own chosen subject matter. You don't pick up the New Yorker, much less a small lit journal whose name ends in "Review," expecting to see the same kind of thing you'd see in Asimov's. You just don't.

At the same time, there's no one "literary establishment," with a single viewpoint. A couple of years ago, the New York Times Book Review polled 125 critics and authors to decide the best novels of the past 25 years. The winner, Toni Morrison's Beloved, got only 15 votes. Most other selections got only a handful of votes, meaning that nobody could agree on the best works. Not only that, but the list of winning books absolutely screams "lowest common denominator," with an over-representation of boring hacks like John Updike. (My hero Donald Hall spends a whole chapter in his seminal writing handbook Writing Well explaining, pitilessly and irrefutably, why John Updike really is a terrible writer, sentence by sentence.)

And that's the thing: the most literary writing from the "literary world" never really attains much prominence outside of a cloistered scene that talks amongst itself. There are tons of writers who are literary superstars in some context, but they'll never get profiled in Entertainment Weekly or reviewed in the NYTBR, any more than any paperback scifi writer will. In fact, the literary world is a lot like science fiction in that respect. There are literary stars who never break out of the lit ghetto, and then there are some who cross over and become "mainstream." There are people who the Quinnipiac Review will fall over itself to publish, whom you'll never in a million years hear of.

Which is the point, sort of — maybe at some point in the past the term "literary" referred to works, from whatever genre, that had stood the test of time and gained classic stauts. But nowadays "literary" refers to a particular type of writing. It's a genre in its own right, just like science fiction.

"Literary" certainly doesn't mean "good." It's a description for one way in which writing can be good. But something can be literary and not particularly good, and writing can be good without being particularly literary.

Let's take a concrete example: I recently reviewed David Louis Edelman's Multireal, and a while before that I reviewed The Stone Gods by former literary darling Jeanette Winterson. There is no doubt in my mind that Edelman's novel is a much better book than The Stone Gods, which is a severely flawed work. But The Stone Gods is a thousand times more literary than Multireal. Literary qualities that The Stone Gods possesses include a masterful, poetic prose style; a clever experimentation with narrative form; a heavy layer of irony over the main characters' inner lives; a story that jumps around in time and repeats the same motifs and characters across different settings. Multireal, by contrast, tells a complicated story in a fairly straightforward way. The earlier novel, Infoquake, has one big flashback that takes up a third of the book, and there are some dream sequences here and there. But it's not that arty.

Certainly there are some SF writers writing today who are "literary." Kim Stanley Robinson comes to mind, as does Geoff Ryman. Sarah Hall's Carhullan Army/Daughters Of The North, which just won the Tiptree Award, is extremely literary. Many lit snobs now talk about Samuel R. Delany with as much rapture as they reserve for Raymond Carver or Alice Munroe.

What would you get if science fiction novels and stories were more "literary"? It wouldn't necessarily make them better, or even help them gain respectability. But here's a random, and possibly wrong-headed, selection of what you might get if science fiction went more "lit.":

1) More ambiguity. A friend of mine used to joke that the New Yorker's short stories always had to end with a "clarifying moment of ambiguity." We're not sure what's just happened, and nothing has actually been resolved, but we feel somehow better, or worse, about the whole business now that it's over. Oh, and here's a teacup. Isn't it shiny? So forget having everything explained — in fact, the less we understand about what just happened, the better.

2) Fancier word-play. Most science fiction stories and novels use language as a tool to get the story across. They're usually written serviceably, but not sparklingly. There are usually way too many adverbs, too many passive sentences, and too much use of the verb "to be." In literary writing, by contrast, there's an obsession with prose style. Every sentence must dapple, like sunlight through a babboon's toes in the jungle. A couple years ago, I got on the mailing list for a few of the biggest literary publishers and found myself receiving a couple dozen literary books a month. I read as many of them as I could, and the writing was often quite lovely, even when the stories left no other impression on my mind. MFA programs are exploding with people who have been drilled to create prose bonsai.

3) Paragraphs that start with numbers. I have no idea where this fad came from — maybe poetry? — but I still see it a lot, especially in short fiction. It used to be lists, or fake memos, but I think those are out now. But numbers are still around.

4) Heroes who are less heroic. Look at it this way: Why is Hamlet the most written about of Shakespeare's plays? It's not because it's good. Hamlet is actually a pretty weak play, lacking the cleverness of As You Like It or the heaviness of the Scottish play. Several other Shakespeare plays, including The Tempest, have nicer writing. Actors like Hamlet because the lead role gives them a chance to have fun grandstanding and Burbageing. But critics love Hamlet because the main character is such a poor hero. He couldn't lace his boots without agonizing about it for hours, and he's horrified by his own mortality in precisely the way that a hero isn't supposed to be. So goodbye escapist science fiction heroes, hello angsty wanderers!

5) Tell us more about the teacup. It's chipped on one side, but somehow the friction from all those fingernails holding it steady has worn it down. So the chipped area feels almost polished, as if the cup-maker chipped it herself, and then glazed it. There's a stain on its base that no amount of scrubbing with the wiry brush is ever equal to removing. It has a pattern of flowers and baby's breath, which you haven't noticed in years.

6) A fetishization of a certain kind of person. People joke about the literary story revolving around suburban malaise, but it's sort of true nonetheless. During my year of reading piles of literary books, I read tons of near-identical stories of growing up with a nanny, or being a soccer mom, or being a business dad. For some reason, a lot of literary novels start with a funeral, forcing a successful thirtysomething or fortysomething person to return to his/her family and uncover the buried secrets of his/her childhood. (Think Sweet Home Alabama, but not quite as cute.) In science fiction terms, this would mean more stories about middle managers, shuttling around below decks on the starcruiser and wondering if this is all there is to life.

7) Why do we feel bad? A lot of the most interesting literary fiction that I've read lately has a kind of malaise running underneath it. Angsty, or maybe angry. I'm thinking Gary Amdahl type stuff. Stories about people who feel bad or pissed off for reasons they can't articulate, and which we understand even less well than they do. Science fiction has come a long way since the days when it had to feature "happy, competent characters" with no emotional problems. But it's still the literature of problem-solving, not anhedonia.

So it's a "be careful what you wish for" type of thing. As I said earlier, some science fiction is genuinely literary, as much as anything in The New Yorker ever is, but I wouldn't want to see all science fiction writers making that their life's goal.

I love literary fiction, for mostly different reasons than I love science fiction. There are truths you can only tell by being playful with words, or by delving into intentional murkiness. The best literary fiction is both clever and heart-throttling, making you confront the "boredom, the horror and the glory" of life by forcing you to see more clearly, or more murkily, than you're accustomed to seeing. The best science fiction, by contrast, is about exploring brilliant ideas, thought experiments, possible futures or just escapist fun. And there's nothing wrong with that.

The Stone Gods tells the story of two characters, three different times. The first time, Billie is a cynical human who gets roped into helping colonize a new planet, and Spike is the beautiful slutty android who falls in love with her. The second time, Billy is a cabin boy who gets marooned on Easter Island, and Spikker is the Dutch sailor, also marooned, who competes with natives to harvest a precious seagull egg. And then the third time around, Spike is a female android again, but she's under construction and is just a head so far. Billie is a software engineer helping to create Billie. And then there's a twist at the end of the book that brings the three narratives together. It's cute, even if you see it coming a long way off.

Winterson has dabbled in science fictional themes, so it's not surprising that her new novel The Stone Gods is full of androids, space colonization and post-apocalypses. Her second novel, Sexing The Cherry, had a sort of time-travel motif. But Stone Gods is probably Winterson's most scifi book so far.

Too bad she's so clueless about how to deal with speculative world-building. Chances are, most science fiction readers won't make it past the first 20 pages of Stone Gods before the urge to start tearing the pages gets too overwhelming. Winterson goes for the "massive info-dump" theory in establishing her future setting. And just in case you don't understand how brave and new her world is, she starts way too many paragraphs with a weird alphabet game. "F is for future." "R is for robot." Etc. etc. (No, I'm not kidding. She actually starts a paragraph "R is for robot.")

It's sad, because the dystopian futures she creates are actually extremely compelling — at the start of the book, we see a more dissolute version of our world, where everyone is genetically "fixed" to look young and beautiful, and pedophilia is becoming accepted. (Early on, we meet a woman who is trying to have herself genetically modified to become a 12-year-old "Lolita" for her husband, who visits a sex club featuring bestiality and pedophilia.) And then towards the end of the book, we encounter another future dystopia, where a nuclear war has left the world under the domination of the MORE corporation, which owns everything. (Humans can't own property, but they can rent things from MORE, in a weird sort of corporate communism.)

In all three of the linked stories, Winterson explores the idea that humans are destroying the planet through not just greed, but the pursuit of stupid status symbols. (Like the "stone gods" of the book's title, which are the Easter Island statues that the tribespeople ruin the island's ecosystem to create.) And just in case we miss the significance of her message, she includes some long rambling lectures towards the end.

I have a feeling Stone Gods could have been a great novel — and a great piece of speculative fiction — if Winterson had only been edited more heavily, or forced to do a total rewrite. It's full of great ideas, and every time I was about to give up on it completely, I hit on another fascinating scene, or another piece of beautiful lyrical writing. Winterson's major comfort zone is obviously writing "queer romance," so when the various permutations of Spike and Billie have a tender moment, the quality of the prose suddenly goes way up.

And Stone Gods has moments of genuine cleverness — like the sequence where the expedition to colonize a new human homeworld fucks up spectacularly. It reminded me of the wonderful turning point in The Sparrow where the humans mistakenly send their shuttle to pick up some of their crew — and then realize they don't have enough fuel to get off the planet any more. I like reading science fiction where people make disastrous mistakes, because this happens a lot in real life and not nearly as often in regular science fiction. It's interesting to me that both The Sparrow and The Stone Gods were sold as literature — I'm racking my brains to think of novels published as science fiction where human error by the good guys plays a major role.

But as it is, the Stone Gods doesn't just fail as science fiction. It fails as metafiction as well, and for much the same reason. Winterson uses a whole passel of postmodern tricks (most notably the three permutations of the same story, but also a host of stylistic tricks). But she's not engaged enough to use them all that well, and you can't escape the feeling that all of the cleverness (like the main character of the third segment finding a manuscript of the rest of the book) is a way of covering up a certain disengagement from the story and characters.

It's hard to care about these people, because you get the feeling Winterson doesn't quite care about them either. They're just a platform for Winterson's ideas. All three versions of Billie are sort of disaffected and unlikeable. And all three versions of Spike are sweet and naive, but a little superficial.

For another point of view on Winterson's novel, here's a thoughtful review by brilliant Ribofunk author Paul DiFilippo.

As I said above, the story of evil humans coming and despoiling an alien planet is nothing new in written science fiction. Off the top of my head, there's Ursula LeGuin's The Word For World Is Forest, among others. I'm almost done reading Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods (review coming soon) which deals with this theme. But I can't think of too many movies which have handled this type of storyline. (Enemy Mine, I guess.)

We still don't know all of the plot details for James Cameron's Avatar, coming in 2009, but an early "scriptment" that's reputed to be real includes a lot of information. In a nutshell, Earth is ruined due to centuries of exploitation, and we've used up all our resources. So we decide to go and plunder the mineral wealth of the planet Pandora, whose atmosphere is poisonous to us. Humans can only walk around on Pandora by growing special alien bodies, akin to the native Na'vi aliens. The humans can control their own vat-grown Na'vi bodies, which are called avatars. (We don't know how much of this stuff survives in the final script, but Sigourney Weaver's comments about her character having "her own avatar" make it sound as though it's still there in some form.)

In addition to these surrogate aliens, the humans have also landed some bloodthirsty troops who hate the natives and want to wipe them out. So there's a conflict between the Avatar-using humans, who want to understand the natives (who are basically Native Americans) and the power-armor-using troops, who want to bulldoze all the natives' sacred lands and kill them all. This leads to a speech by our hero, Josh:

Pandora is not Hell, it's Eden. And Eden is being bulldozed and stripmined and raped. We have no right. We are the aliens here. We are the space monsters.

If that sounds too subtle for you, then there's Terra, which we covered the other day. The new full-length animated film is about humans coming to terraform a planet of peaceloving aliens, after Earth has become basically uninhabitable. We already terraformed Venus and Mars, but then the planets had a huge civil war. So now we have to come and use our transforming device to turn Terra's helium atmosphere into oxygen.

Are you seeing a trend here? The stories about humans as scourge of the cosmos are what come after the post-apocalyptic Earth stories. We ruin our own planet, so we have to go and fuck up someone else's planet. (That's also the storyline in the Winterson book, where Orbus is about to become unable to support human life.) There could also be some guilt about the Iraq war and our various other foreign adventures, which we could be excising.

There's also the remake of the original humans-are-assholes movie The Day The Earth Stood Still, coming this December, in which peaceful aliens warn us not to take our asshole ways out into space. And there's a new direct-to-DVD sequel to Starship Troopers coming out in a couple of months. In the original Troopers, director Paul Verhoeven's aim was to show that humans were the aggressors and the bugs were simply reacting to human colonies encroaching on their territory. This message flew over a lot of people's heads, so maybe Troopers scriptwriter Ed Neumeier (who's directing the new movie) will make it more blatant this time around.

And then there's also the animated Planet 51, starring the Rock, in which the peaceful aliens think the humans are there to invade and despoil their planet. But they're wrong... or are they?

I guess there's not enough examples there to argue that this is a sweeping new trend. And of course the post-apocalyptic Earth movie has one major advantage over the alien world epic: it's cheap to film, since you can make a post-apocalyptic landscape almost anywhere you can find some rubble.

We surveyed the stories tagged "science fiction" in the New Yorker's archive, and the results are below. It's interesting to see the rise and fall of certain authors. Also, some themes seem to hold sway over the years: a high proportion of these science fiction stories are satires or parodies, including two cyberpunk parodies in a row. And there are two stories about insomnia and outsourcing sleep.

The New Yorker only published three science fiction stories prior to 1978, when it started flirting with the genre actively. Its main love object in the beginning? Polish satirist Stanislaw Lem.

Here's our complete history:

1978

The New Yorker goes on its first Stanislaw Lem kick, publishing three of his fictional book reviews within a four-month period. He reviews the non-existent books Gruppenfuhrer Louis XVII an SS novel by Alfred Zellerman; Non Serviam, a weird science book by James Dobb; and two books about how physics proves nothing can ever happen, by Cezar Kouska: De Impossibilitate Vivae and De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi. (All three reviews appear in the book A Perfect Vacuum.

1980

"Nana Hami Ba Reba" by Garrison Keillor. A satire. In the year 1984, everything in America has gone Metric, including Metric Time and a weird Metric language. The main character, responsible for this transformation, gets expelled from this perfect future and zapped back in time to the 1950s.

1981

Another Stanislaw Lem kick. The New Yorker publishes four of his satirical Ijon Tichy stories within a three-month period: "The Washing Machine Tragedy," "Phools," "Let Us Save The Universe" and "Project Genesis." These stories, collected in Memoirs of a Space Traveler, are more Earth-bound than earlier Tichy stories. They take out-of-control technology to its furthest extreme, including crazy washing machines and mind-controlling computers.

"Snorkeling" by Nicholson Baker. An executive "beats fatigue by employing drones to sleep on his behalf," says the Guardian.

1982

"Spoons In The Basement" by Ursula K. LeGuin. A woman comes across a set of valuable apostle spoons while cleaning her house. She accepts them as a gift from the house. Much later, she discovers a hidden "second basement" in the house, where three unmarried women live, along with an obnoxious middle-aged married couple. She lets the three women stay, but kicks out the married couple. After that, she can't find the spoons, and it seems the house has taken them back.

1984

"Offering" by Stainslaw Lem. The last gasp of the New Yorker's romance with Lem: a fake ad for the Extelopedia, a volume that contains information about the future.

1987

"Plan 10 From Zone R-3" by Polly Frost. A parody of Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, despite the title referencing Plan Nine From Outer Space. A weird plague turns everybody in a town into a real-estate agent clutching a Filofax.

1988

"Worlds Of Love" by Jeffrey Shaffer. Satire, sort of. A series of funny personal ads with silly scifi themes, like "Star Warrior" and "Pardon my Polarity."

"Numeromancer" by Michael Caruso. A parody of William Gibson's Neuromancer, in which cyborgs play baseball.

1992

"Cyberprez" by Richard Liebmann-Smith. Another parody of Gibson's Neuromancer, this one touching on the fact that then-President Bush admitted taking tranquilizers.

"Offloading For Mrs. Schwartz" by George Saunders. A man who creates porno-horror holographic "modules" for people to experience grieves for his wife. He steals memories from a woman in a nursing home, then ends up selling his own memories. This story appeared in Tina Brown's first issue as editor, but a previous editor had bought it.

1994

"Several Birds" by David Foster Wallace. A homeless tranny junkie lives in 21st. century Massachusetts. The junkie steals a woman's artificial heart by mistake, gets involved in a Quebec-separatist assassination, kicks drugs, goes through withdrawal and hallucinates. A much different version of this piece appears as part of Infinite Jest, Wallace's mega-novel.

1995

"Paper Lantern" by Stuart Dybek. A researcher is building a time machine, but accidentally burns the lab down by leaving a bunsen burner going. A fortune cookie at a Chinese restaurant warns him too late, and he realizes his ex-lover's nude photos are being burned up in that lab fire. (He'd falsely told the ex-lover he destroyed those nude photos already.)

1996

"Warm Dogs" by Paul Theroux. A widespread virus causes infertility in a future dystopia. A couple tries in vain to adopt a child, then winds up buying a mixed-race kid. But then they get nabbed by the police, along with their kid. The couple winds up in a warehouse, blindfolded and surrounded by children who poke them with spears. One child touches the woman and says, "This one is mine." She cries out.

1998

"Tough Girls Don't Dream" by Jeanette Winterson. Later retitled "Disappearance I." Takes place in a futuristic dystopia where sleep has become as much a taboo as kinky sex. But some people are paid to sleep so everyone else can spy on their dreams. (This is the second of the two New Yorker stories about lack of sleep, and outsourcing sleep, the first being Nicholson Baker's from 1981.)

"Sea Oak" by George Saunders. More weird satire. The main character's aunt dies, and comes back from the dead. Then she starts pimping out the main character, encouraging him to show his penis to random women for money.

"The Janitor On Mars" by Martin Amis. In 2049, a robot known as The Janitor On Mars suddenly contacts Earth, because humanity has just passed the point of no return: no matter what we do, we're doomed to extinction, thanks to changes in the environment. The robot relates the rise and fall of Martian civilization, while on Earth, a mentally disabled boy reveals the principal of his school raped him. (I read this story back when it appeared, and it remains my favorite thing ever to appear in the New Yorker.)

And then there's a gap of nearly five years before SF graces the New Yorker again. And it's only one story:

2003

"Jon" by George Saunders. In a weird future, a group of teenagers are trapped in a facility for assessing products, where they view ads and represent the teen demographic. The girls have velcro chastity-guards and everyone's encouraged to masturbate instead of having sex, but one girl, Carolyn, still manages to get pregnant.