purplecthulhu

Margaret Atwood's new book Oryx and Crake is set in a world in the aftermath of a geneticly engineerd catastophe. I've not read it, so can give you no details of what happened or what the nature of the aftermath might be, but to a seasoned SF reader, it all sounds quite familiar, in the context of post-singularity fiction.

And that's the problem.

Margaret Atwood denies that she is writing science fiction. She did this before with The Handmaid's Tale. The claim didn't really work then, and it works even less now that she is dealing with some of the nuts and bolts of science within her fiction. She calls what she is writing 'speculative fiction', and in so doing she denigrates the tradition she is parasitizing at the same time that she is displaying her ignorance. Her mistakes must be corrected.

Why is her work literature and deserving of serious attention while those of Vinge, Stross, Ryman, Bear, Goonan, Egan and others who've dealt with similar subject matter labelled science fiction and deserving of denigration and obscurity?

There was a discussion about this on the Today Programme on saturday morning. In the red corner, standing up for science fiction, was Brian Appleyard. It was the first time I've ever agreed with him on anything. The other speaker, whose name I forget, was effectively claiming that SF is characterized only by bad writing and had nothing to do with content or subject matter. Examples of well respected writers mentioned by Appleyard, who work within science fiction, like Ballard and Lem, were written off as literary writers who really don't know that they are, while the issue of bad writing in genre literature was ignored.

I wonder how he, Margart Atwood or others who've written SF butr dare not admit it (eg. PD James, P Theroux), would have written off any longer list of literarily acclaimed SF writers that one could come up with: Banks, Bradbury, Aldiss, Wells, Shelly, Lessing, Moorcock, Gaiman, Wolfe, Dick, Crowley, Delaney, Ryman, Butler to name but a few.

I also wonder how they'd react when its pointed out to them that their dazzlingly original works are just reinventions of ideas and situations that SF has looked at time and again.