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The Lit-SF Debate Has Become A Trope In Its Own Right
San Francisco, 3:24 PM
Thu Dec 3
24 posts in the last 24 hours
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12/19/08
Perhaps our genre needs to get over this pathetic collective inferiority complex. SF is what it is.
12/19/08
12/19/08
The moment I read that, I realized the person who wrote that article is an imbecile. Also that article is shit, written by an OLD GUY.
And you seem to have this idea that literary studies somehow classifies things, and MAKES them into something. Literary studies only looks at "what is happening", tries to explore things, to make sense of trends, and ideas, and currents of thought in literature.
And if you can't handle thinking about literature, then you better quit typing right now, because you're going to be the shittiest writer your remedial high school ever produced.
12/19/08
12/19/08
12/18/08
"I really, honestly, seriously don't give a fuck. Seriously."
12/18/08
Neal Stephenson once made the observation that the real litmus test of any good SF story depended on whether or not it was built around a neat idea; any other concerns, like characterization or style, was largely secondary. I don't necessarily agree with this, but it does seem to be why people enjoy SF in the first place. If you want elegant wordplay, read Nabokov; if you want to read about massive stellar engineering projects, read Larry Niven. That's not to say that a novel about a 600 million-mile space ring can't be gorgeously written, but commercial realities and reader preferences dictate otherwise.
12/18/08
Fans of a genre literature simply cannot stand to be told the weaknesses in that genre. And will misunderstand any argument, or invent any reason to dispel them. Just as there are weaknesses and strengths in any area of art, even those you blithely label as "mainstream" or even "literary", there are weaknesses in those works of art that are "speculative" or "science fiction". Kunkel is merely pointing out certain weaknesses in the types of fantasy and speculative novels that are crossing into the mainstream these days. And he's very accurate about it all.
What KUNKEL said about LITERATURE: Now his point is that genre literatures CAN be LITERARY, and he uses Austen, Dostoyevsky and Orwell to illustrate that fact. But he asks what it then means to be literary. The novel, the type of literary work that exemplifies "literature" these days does so precisely because it so carefully explored the moral weights and measures of life, the careful balancing act of living as a person, in this society. It is a genre devoted to problematising individuals. Not simply a mechanism for delivering moral certainties, or carefully ticking clockwork battles between GOOD and EVIL. But whole individual lives that take place in the world we're located in. It doesn't mean that genre literatures have to abandon the individualistic moral exploration, but his point is that they so often DO.
1) Henry FARRELL: Whines about the difference stated between "Real literature" and speculative fiction. Claims that Kunkel doesn't deal with "REAL" science fiction, but in fact only deals with "hybrid" science fiction, while "real" science fiction remains oh so literary. Then he hilariously references excellently-written but still non-character driven things like China Mieville's New Crobuzon books.
Kunkel deals with two things: 1) the neoliberal "apocalypse" novel, and 2) the neoliberal "dystopia" novel. (Remembering that this is an article for a pop-culture mag, and not an SF genre wankfest, he uses as example only novels that have indeed crossed into the main imagination of the WHOLE culture. So things like "the road" or "pesthouse" or "never let me go".). He makes it perfectly clear that he's only dealing with two things. But Farrell just doesn't want to see that, and so wanders off on his own pathetic rant.
2) Cheryl MORGAN: Writes with a kind of SF fangirlism that leads her to take pointless potshots at Kunkel in prose (he is "groping" towards insights. he presents things "simplistically").
Says things like: I should first note that this is by no means the only definition of what "literary" means. Many writers will defend the idea of original language and sharp perceptions being important.
But misses the point that Kunkel is trying to illuminate only the MAIN ATTRIBUTE of what is seen as "literary". The one single thing that without which, a thing descends from "literary-ness" to something more mundane. And that one thing is pretty much what he imagines it to be - the exploration of individual character from a moral standpoint.
But the funny thing is that she pretty much agrees with everything Kunkel says, but can't muster up the ability to say so because he appears to have demeaned her wonderful genre.
like when she says: as if by choosing to write (gasp!) science fiction otherwise sane authors such as Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Kazuo Ishiguro have somehow taken leave of their senses and thereby lost their ability to write.
But Kunkel's not saying that they WOULD do that. He's saying that they DID. In books already released. Already published. There's actual evidence for this claim. He's merely illuminating it.
Atwood's Oryx and Crake IS NOT a novel, really. Neither is Ishiguro's. He's merely exploring the circumstances around it.
Finally she ends off with the tired old chestnut: The real issue here is confusion of tropes with genre. There is a (perhaps understandable) tendency for people to assume that if a book is set in the future, has spaceships in it, or whatever, then it must be a generic science fiction novel with a hackneyed plot and poorly defined characters.
Well YES. When a book chooses a setting, it chooses all the corollary logics and semantics and results of that setting. If you choose to set your book in the far reaches of space, as a battle between two declining galactic empires, you can't also expect it to deliver an intimate moral inspection of the everyday lives of people.
12/19/08
You're right that Charlie wildly misrepresents Kunkel's article, but some of your own arguments here are a bit puzzling.
Kunkel is merely pointing out certain weaknesses in the types of fantasy and speculative novels that are crossing into the mainstream these days. And he's very accurate about it all.
Well, no, that's NOT all he does, but it's what he does most successfully. His points about THE ROAD are well-made, if a little obvious.
Remembering that this is an article for a pop-culture mag, and not an SF genre wankfest, he uses as example only novels that have indeed crossed into the main imagination of the WHOLE culture. So things like "the road" or "pesthouse" or "never let me go"
"The Road" is the only one of those books we could even BEGIN to say has entered the imagination of "the whole culture."
When a book chooses a setting, it chooses all the corollary logics and semantics and results of that setting. If you choose to set your book in the far reaches of space, as a battle between two declining galactic empires, you can't also expect it to deliver an intimate moral inspection of the everyday lives of people
Can you justify that claim? Which intrinsic logics of space opera undermine the genre's likelihood to problematize the individual? And precisely which everyday lives, which people are uninspected, or rendered uninspectable?
I find it hard to believe that we can set a nuanced, humanistic LITERARY story anywhere on Earth, in the whole jaw-dropping range of circumstance that entails, but the instant we extrapolate from a current or historical war to an imaginary one, in space, the game's up.
It's an article of faith for Kunkel that the artificiality of plot necessarily undermines realistic (and for Kunkel, morally/politically imperative) character work. The old genre = plotted, lit = not framework.
By this definition, it seems a literary novel must be unipolar -- that is, driven by nothing BUT character, or at least principally by character. This is more than a question of classification; Kunkel's arguing for the superior importance and moral force of realist fiction. When you say...
Then he hilariously references excellently-written but still non-character driven things like China Mieville's New Crobuzon books
...I wonder if you're relying on this unipolar conception. The Bas-Lag novels are driven by engines apart from character, surely -- monsters and worldcraft and plot, yes -- but the protagonists are complex and carefully limned individuals who relate in problematic ways to their given society. Without that element, Mieville's novels simply would not function.
(Incidentally, it was pretty weak to ignore Farrell's citation of M. John Harrison. Most everything Harrison's written in the last couple decades is indisputably character-driven.)
I know that neither you nor Kunkel is saying all sf is shit, all sf is unliterary, etc. But Kunkel meanders pretty far afield of his focus, and his foundational assumptions -- about both the political/moral force of the mimetic vs. genre AND the sort of works that have enough pop cultural currency to bear discussion -- are dubious at best.
12/19/08
I can ignore it specifically because it's not of the particular type that Kunkel is tackling in his essay - the two types of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction that have been crossing into the main body of culture's conscious imagination.
Can you justify that claim? Which intrinsic logics of space opera undermine the genre's likelihood to problematize the individual? And precisely which everyday lives, which people are uninspected, or rendered uninspectable?
You can't seriously be making this argument. I can't defend my position here because it's completely axiomatic. When you write a story whose setting is completely apart from the modern day existence of people in culture, it becomes that much more difficult to reflect their existence in your literature.
It's the same reason why SF is so much more entertaining than a regular novel, why no novel will ever be as entertaining - because of the sheer alienness and fantastical nature of the world you're making.
It's an article of faith for Kunkel that the artificiality of plot necessarily undermines realistic (and for Kunkel, morally/politically imperative) character work. The old genre = plotted, lit = not framework.
No this isn't what Kunkel said, when referenceing Trilling he SPECIFICALLY mentioned that things like "sharp perceptions, language, and sequence of events" (i.e. PLOT) mean very little in the literary sense if they don't reveal psychological and social aspects about a person, if they don't venture into the territory of the literary.
This is why the New Crobuzon books aren't novels. The plots are fabulous and language intense, but the characters don't drive the action, there's no moral indecision or weight to any decision, there's no postponing or agonizing over decisions. From a certain vantage point the characters aren't really limned at all. They serve the plot, and Mieville is such a good writer that he can twist his characters into something really incredibly fascinating.
But go read Don Delillo's White Noise, or any part of Underworld, and then go read The Scar, and you'll feel the difference.
12/18/08
12/18/08
I don't know anything about Dhalgren, but I'm pretty sure it's by Delaney who, although very very good, is not at the level of Pynchon or Burroughs.
12/18/08
12/18/08
I usually refer those who say Sci Fi can't be literature to "Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie, but if their mind is made up in advance it's hopeless.
12/18/08
12/18/08
12/18/08
12/18/08