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 young adult novel in question is Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce and the graphic novel series is Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn, Pia Guerra and others. Also on the "Honor List" is Charles Stross' Glasshouse, which I liked a lot. Here's what I said about Glasshouse in recommending it for inclusion:

It's set in a John Varley-esque world where you can have any body you want and you can back up your brain. But the main character agrees to take part in an experiment where he'll live in a reconstruction of America in the 1990s. Because so much data from that era of history was encoded on magnetic tape and digital media, it's been lost and historians know little about the period from 1950-2040. So the 1990s reconstruction is fatally flawed, especially as it relates to gender roles. It's sort of a pastiche of the 1950s, where women are expected to be subservient and sexually available. The main character gets stuck in a female body and quickly discovers how non-consensual gender roles can be. On top of that, participants receive points (towards a promised bonus) for gender conformity, including sexual behavior.

JAMES TIPTREE JR. AWARD WINNER ANNOUNCED

A gender-exploring science fiction award is presented to Sarah Hall for The Carhullan Army (Daughters of the North)

The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2007 Tiptree Award is The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall (published in the United States as Daughters of the North). The British edition was published in 2007 by Faber & Faber; the American edition in 2008 by HarperCollins.

The Tiptree Award will be celebrated on May 25, 2008 at WisCon (www.wiscon.info) in Madison, Wisconsin. The winner of the Tiptree Award receives $1000 in prize money, an original artwork created specifically for the winning novel or story, and (as always) chocolate.

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winners and compiles an Honor List of other works that they find interesting, relevant to the award, and worthy of note. The 2007 jurors were Charlie Anders, Gwenda Bond (chair), Meghan McCarron, Geoff Ryman, and Sheree Renee Thomas.

The Carhullan Army elicited strong praise from the jurors. Gwenda Bond said, "Hall does so many things well in this book - writing female aggression in a believable way, dealing with real bodies in a way that makes sense, and getting right to the heart of the contradictions that violence brings out in people, but particularly in women in ways we still don't see explored that often. I found the writing entrancing and exactly what it needed to be for the story; lean, but well-turned." Geoff Ryman said, "It faces up to our current grim future (something too few SF novels have done) and seems to go harder and darker into war, violence, and revolution." Meghan McCarron said, "I found the book to be subtle and ambiguous in terms of its portrayal of the Army, and its utopia....The book became, ultimately, an examination of what it means to attain physical, violent power as defined by a male-dominated world. And it asserted that it could be claimed by anyone, regardless of physical sex, provided they were willing to pay the price."

The book, which is Hall's third novel, also won the 2007 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama) from Britain or the Commonwealth written by an author of 35 or under.

The Tiptree Award Honor List is a strong part of the award's identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list for the rest of the year. The 2007 Honor List is:

* "Dangerous Space" by Kelley Eskridge, in the author's collection Dangerous Space (Aqueduct Press, 2007)
* Water Logic by Laurie Marks (Small Beer Press, 2007)
* Empress of Mijak and The Riven Kingdom by Karen Miller (HarperCollins, Australia, 2007)
* The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu (Hyperion, 2007)
* Interfictions, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (Interstitial Arts Foundation/Small Beer Press, 2007)
* Glasshouse by Charles Stross (Ace, 2006)
* The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper (Harper Collins 2007)
* Y: The Last Man, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Pia Guerra (available in 60 issues or 10 volumes from DC/Vertigo Comics, 2002-2008)
* Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce (Harcourt, 2007)

The James Tiptree Jr. Award is presented annually to a work or works that explore and expand gender roles in science fiction and fantasy. The award seeks out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. The Tiptree Award is intended to reward those women and men who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.

The James Tiptree Jr. Award was created in 1991 to honor Alice Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. By her choice of a masculine pen name, Sheldon helped break down the imaginary barrier between "women's writing" and "men's writing." Her insightful short stories were notable for their thoughtful examination of the roles of men and women in our society.

Since its inception, the Tiptree Award has been an award with an attitude. As a political statement, as a means of involving people at the grassroots level, as an excuse to eat cookies, and as an attempt to strike the proper ironic note, the award has been financed through bake sales held at science fiction conventions across the United States, as well as in England and Australia. Fundraising efforts have included auctions conducted by stand-up comic and award-winning writer Ellen Klages, the sale of t-shirts and aprons created by collage artist and silk screener Freddie Baer, and the publication of four anthologies of award winners and honor-listed stories. Three of the anthologies are in print and available from Tachyon Publications (www.tachyonpublications.com). The award has also published two cookbooks featuring recipes and anecdotes by science fiction writers and fans, available through www.tiptree.org.

In addition to presenting the Tiptree Award annually, the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council occasionally presents the Fairy Godmother Award, a special award in honor of Angela Carter. Described as a "mini, mini, mini, mini MacArthur award," the Fairy Godmother Award strikes without warning, providing a financial boost to a deserving writer in need of assistance to continue creating material that matches the goals of the Tiptree Award.

Reading for the 2008 Tiptree Award will soon begin, with jurors K. Tempest Bradford, Gavin Grant (chair), Leslie Howle, Roz Kaveney, and Catherynne M. Valente. As always, the Tiptree Award invites all to recommend works for the award. Please submit recommendations via the Tiptree Award website at www.tiptree.org.

In The Carhullan Army, England's economy and government have collapsed, and the country spends most of its resources on wars to secure overseas oil pipelines. England has become a reverse-colony of America, and people subsist on American canned food. (Insert your own joke about how this would be superior to actual British cooking here.) The main character, known only as Sister, works in a factory making water-power turbines that will never be used. To prevent overpopulation, she and other women have a brutal IUD-type device, known as the Coil, inserted, and the authorities randomly inspect women to make sure their Coils are still in place. The only way you get your Coil out is by winning a lottery to become a mother.

Sister flees, even though travel is forbidden without a special permit, and makes her way to Carhullan, a self-sufficient women's commune that lives off the land. Once there, she falls under the spell of charismatic leader (and ex-soldier) Jackie, and learns to fight and think for herself. Until Jackie decides that it's only a matter of time before the Authority which governs Britain comes to take Carhullan away from them — unless the women of Carhullan preemptively attack first.

The Carhullan Army is beautifully written and often manages to juxtapose nature and technology in jarring ways. Just look at this passage, set in the forest right after Sister has had sex with another woman for the first time:

"Look," she whispered. I directed my gaze where she pointed. An owl was flying over the grassland, sweeping down towards the ground and then up. Its white, clock-like face hovered gracefully, while its wings worked hard and silently in the air. For a second I caught a reflection in its eye, a weird flash of yellow-green, like a battery light flaring on then off again.

A lot of the time, Hall's prose adheres to the "short, choppy sentences" thing that's in vogue these days, but when she breaks out a bit, it's really lovely.

In fact, almost all of the stuff that takes place at Carhullan is beautifully depicted and inspiring. Like all utopian communities, it's nowhere near as perfect as it appears at first. There are petty politics, and the cult of personality around Jackie, the leader, becomes a bit scary at times. The debate over whether to mount a rebellion before the government can come and crush the women is fascinating. And we discover there's another side to Carhullan: the community has five "kept men," who live off in the woods in their own separate area. (The men trade with the women of Carhullan, but more importantly they're the husbands — or in one case gigolo — of the straight women who live there.) How to treat these men (and the two little boys who live with them) becomes the source of the biggest rift within the community.

The other thing Carhullan Army does really really well is to show how the ordinary people of Sister's original home town, Rith, start out opposing the rise of totalitarianism in England, but slowly become more and more complicit and cowed.

That said, the book had a couple of near-fatal problems, for me. The book takes the form of a deposition by Sister, after she's been captured by the authorities. And parts of the deposition have "[Data Lost]" written in them abruptly, as though the file is corrupted. This lets Hall get away with skipping over some of the slow parts of her story — but then she also uses it to avoid having to write some of the crucial parts as well. It feels a bit like a cheat.

Most importantly, though, I felt as though Hall failed to make the authoritarian dystopia which Sister rebels against believable. We never really got even a glimpse of the Authority, or even its propaganda, except for the doctor who installs Sister's Coil. It felt like an absence rather than a presence. We learn a lot about how bad things have gotten, and hear people saying how evil the Authority is, but the Authority itself isn't really in evidence. This makes it a lot harder to feel connected to the characters and their situation, for me.

Bottom line: The Carhullan Army/Daughters of the North is worth reading for its gorgeous prose and layered depictions of the relationships among the women in a commune. But as a future dystopian narrative, it presents a few really terrifying ideas — the Coil chief among them — and then falls a bit flat.