Snooze the Snob Alarm
Sub-literary? Sub-literary?!?!
It’s been almost a month since the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America took down links to authors’ work on Amazon. The fallout hasn’t been especially significant, so far as I can find, but it’s an interesting move. Their reasoning is simple and subtly pissed-off: “we would prefer to send traffic to stores where the books can actually be purchased.” Makes sense. And today I heard that the SFWA may have a couple of new qualifying members: Ian McEwan and Rick Moody.
Both McEwan and Moody have science fiction books coming out in the next few months. McEwan’s Solar is about a physicist who stumbles onto a potential fix for climate changes. He is also, apparently, a philanderer and kind of an asshole. And when McEwan read an excerpt of the book at the Guardian Hay Festival a while back, folks were very surprised that it was, well, funny. This is a guy who had been writing books about the Iraq war, sexual inadequacy, and betrayal by family, so humor-laden science fiction was something of a departure.
Likewise, Moody, who was in the issue of Electric Literature that Jason reviewed a few days ago, isn’t exactly well-known in SFWA circles. His foray into SF is less surprising, perhaps, because he is unafraid of trying new things (like twittering a short story). But The Four Fingers of Death, a 700+ page novel about a severed arm with four fingers in the Sonoran Desert in 2026? Not exactly The Ice Storm.
Clones. That's realism. Right, Mr. Smith?
And despite stepping foot in genre waters, in an interview with Night Train Moody reinforces the problem of pigeonholing non-realism, saying about the origins of the book: “I really love bad, old horror movies, the b-film variety, the drive-in variety…so I picked a particularly embarrassing example, The Crawling Hand and began adapting it.” That’s a disparaging sort of nostalgia, especially when he says that the style is similar to books of a “sub-literary genre” by folks like Vonnegut, Dick, and Pynchon. Not “literary sub-genre,” mind you, but “sub-literary genre.” Ouch. Does this mean we’re not supposed to take his most recent book seriously? I think not. I suspect it’s just an unfortunate result of the literary establishment being terrified of classifications and labels, the sort of vestigial tail of literary writing.
Most non-genre writers will tell you that they’re not interested in labels because they go where the work takes them; that is, if the work ends up seeming like sci-fi, so be it, but the primary purpose and goal is to explore humanity. But if what we are doing, as literary writers, is diving into humanity and trying to find out what it is that makes us human, what that means, then we are by definition playing with philosophy. And while I’m more or less agreed with the general consensus that books with a message are annoying, I’m starting to wonder if that’s not unfair and, in a way, irresponsible. It falls in line with the general western (and particularly American) feeling that we don’t want to be confronted with anyone else’s opinion because we like our own better.
I can’t say that’s bad, exactly, because ego is part of the human condition, for better or worse. But to be unwilling to hear another person’s beliefs is just plain selfish. (It works both ways, too: here’s a fundamentalist denouncement of sci-fi that’s quite closed-minded.) Now, of course reading fills this funny little niche somewhere between relaxation and research, and most people, in their fun time, aren’t going to want to be preached at. But if you’re a reader who wants to engage with ideas and use your own brain a little, science fiction is kind of the last bastion for big ideas. At least, that’s what Clive Thompson says.
In that excellent article for Wired, Thompson says:
I was reading novel after novel about the real world. And there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality. After I’d read my 189th novel about someone living in a city, working in a basically realistic job and having a realistic relationship and a realistically fraught family, I was like, “OK. Cool. I see how today’s world works.” I also started to feel like I’d been reading the same book over and over again.”
I’m with Thompson on this. (Also be sure to check out his blog, which currently has a picture of the Milky Way Transit Authority route map on the front page.) As I read more and more stories—for workshops, for teaching, for journals, for contests, etc.—I find myself numbed to the point where everything seems flat. A couple of weeks ago I read a clearly written, accessible, and well-organized piece about a couple in suburban America. There was nothing wrong with the story, exactly; the dialogue was fairly snappy, the action and back story were well-integrated, etc. But I couldn’t get through it. Clearly the writer had some skill (if not talent, which is very different), and it’s possible she deserved more than the generic rejection she got, but I couldn’t take it because though there was some emotional depth to the characters, there was nothing beyond that. No resonance. The story did not do anything with the world outside of itself—it was completely self-contained. And I couldn’t take the emotional revelations and apply them to my world, or use the story as some kind of gateway to a deeper understanding of myself.
There’s a problem, in my opinion, of an over-abundance of suburban white middle-class fiction that’s related to this. And while it would seem that reading characters who are more or less in similar situations to myself would be, if anything, better at helping me understand humanity, it simply isn’t the case. I get more out of a genius space pilot prodigy like in Ender’s Game than I do from almost any contemporary fiction I’ve read. Cloud Atlas gave me a thousand times more to think about than the last Tim O’Brien book I read.
Maybe this is why I’m attracted to eastern European stuff, like Bohumil Hrabal and Martin Simecka. (Hrabal wrote my favorite book, Too Loud a Solitude, which, holy crap, is being made into a movie with puppets, and Simecka wrote my favorite book I read in 2006, The Year of the Frog.) Also Ismail Kadare and Andrzej Szczypiorski. (I wonder what Czech or Polish spelling bees are like.) There’s a lot of mysticism in that part of the world, and it’s the most beautiful part of books like The Three-Arched Bridge. I know that mysticism isn’t the same as science fiction, but its end result is similar: it refuses to be limited by what is empirically observable at the moment of the writing. It asks What if? and sometimes tries to answer it, though the best books are the ones that make/ask you do the answering. If we don’t want to be told/preached at/lectured to, then shouldn’t we invite literature that asks us to do that work? Books that demand we put away our focus on reality and allow our minds to consider things larger than ourselves? After all, even science is in a constant state of flux (see “Earth, flatness” and “Medieval medicine”), so to presume that work grounded in reality is somehow inherently more significant than work that isn’t would defy all sensibility.
Super awesomeness, now with puppets!
What I really want is the unexpected, because that makes me think about something I haven’t considered before. Of course, things are only unexpected for a while before they turn into tropes (the so-called stripper with a heart of gold). So a piece of writing must, for me to be really emotionally and intellectually engaged, find something unexpected in reality. And as Thompson notes, “there are, at the risk of sounding superweird, only so many ways to describe reality.” So if you change a couple historical facts (like Roth did in The Plot Against America) or extrapolate current technology into the future, or presume that humans might be able to live for a millennium, you encounter a much broader range of possibilities for the unexpected. (Of course I don’t just mean you say, “Surprise! This book has orange aliens!” I’m talking about relationships that take a surprising course that simply isn’t possible given our contemporary limitations. Thompson: “What if you could confront, talk to, or kill God?”)
Of course I’m not arguing that science fiction is necessarily of literary merit. There’s a lot of crap out there, and Thompson notes that “the genre tolerates execrable prose stylists” and also sexism. But with more of what we consider literary authors taking a stab at science fiction, there’s reason to hold out hope that the divide between genre and literary fiction is shrinking. Not everybody’s excited about that, and the regret is not from who you’d expect. Fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, who has sold more than 55 million books and was the UK’s best selling author from the 1990s, was interviewed for the same NPR piece as Ishiguro. Pratchett says, “I think the future of science fiction, alas, is to be subsumed into mainstream literature. Not necessarily the Booker Prize-winning subset of mainstream literature, but just the books that we read every day. It’s become part of the culture now.”
Ian McEwan won a Booker Prize. So who’s subsuming who? Even if McEwan, Moody, and Ishiguro don’t want to be labeled as science fiction writers, you can bet they’re not going to regret adding that segment of the book-buying population to their potential customer base. Of course, these writers aren’t going to be shelved under SF at your local Barnes & Noble, but the subject matter may lead some literary snob readers to sample some more science fiction, and the crossover will hopefully work the other way. I don’t believe that anyone has anything to lose here; the idea of the literary marketplace being diluted by genre writing is silly and elitist and plays into the egoism I mentioned earlier. Writers in all genres have much to learn from each other. After all, if one considers genre writing to be somehow less worthy, doesn’t one then have a moral obligation to try to fix the problem rather than simply whine about it? So I may be joining that genre writing group soon, or at least stopping by, and I’d like to think I can offer them something, and that they can teach me a thing or two. And that means that, at least for the time being, I’ve installed a snooze button on my literary snob alarm.
I like what you’re saying here Marcus, but maybe thats just because I agree with you. I feel that I have read so many stories about basically normal people, living basically normal lives, that they all run together. Is it possible we could learn even more about the human condition if we read/write about situations we will not or cannot encounter in everyday life (enter genre fiction). Why is it that a great piece of writing cannot simply be evaluated for what it is, even if it is in space?
I find myself desiring to read something that hasn’t been canonized as a trope yet. I want something with literary quality and something original. Perhaps the best place to get that is in the Sci-fi genre, or if I may take it one step farther, in the (gasp) fantasy genre. Certainly there is a lot of crap out there which isn’t worth the paper its printed on. But I for one would love to see more of the cross-over Marcus is describing, resulting in more books by good authors of literary merit, complete with ray guns.
i like this idea of the crossover. it shows a sort of playfulness. i like to see writers play on the page. i think the main problem with bad sci-fi is the lack of humanity. some writers get too attached to cool technology or a different species. what i mean by humanity is something that i the reader can connect to. bad sci-fi is because of bad writers and if they wrote something that was supposed to be literary, it would still suck.
i’m sure i was going somewhere with all of that, but i’m tired.
All good points, for sure. And it’s interesting, because science fiction, in its early stages, was supposed to be a vehicle to explore humanity through technology, not the other way around. The best stuff does exactly that, and does it in ways that realism doesn’t have access to. But, yes, it’s easier to get into the non-literary genres, which I think attracts a lot of writers who, as you mention, simply aren’t that good. That’s why it’s sort of promising to see widely-known and respected authors getting into sub-genres, because it should help raise expectations there.
Good for Ian, says I. “Extended comic stretches” – of course he would phrase allegations of humor like that. This has me waiting for Jonathan Lethem’s romance novel to debut. On the cover: Fabio gets swallowed by the new, sexy black hole in town?
90% of everything is shit. Except shit. 100% of shit is shit.
That was a great blog post, Marcus.
The part that I find really interesting is that the genre fiction/literature distinction doesn’t exist in Latin America. I was in a Chilean bookstore and tried to find some original South American sci-fi, and all I could find was Isabel Allende——which is lovely magical realism semi-autobiography (I don’t know if that’s a valid term). It was a very professional bookstore, but everything was just sort of mixed together under the categories fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Your math is impeccable.
I’m very interested in that Latin American difference, which I wasn’t aware of. Seems fine to me that there were only three categories, and that readers were allowed to make any further labeling themselves. Maybe the contemporary American bookstore is a result of the strange Western need to label everything in sight, lest we get confused or have to think at all on our own. Looking at Barnes & Noble’s website, they have nine categories of fiction (one of which is Fiction Books & Literature), and (brace yourself) forty-two categories of Non-Fiction. Poetry is listed under Fiction in the B&N universe, which surely is one in which all the people have pointy black goatees.
So why is this? Is the American consumer really so brainless that he/she must have everything pre-digested?
I wonder, also, what the concept of a well-known or literary writer means in a place like Chile.
(And, too, “I walked into a Chilean bookstore…” could be the start of a very good or very bad joke.)
Thanks for the book recommendations. Those sound really awesome. Have you read Street of Crocodiles yet? It is seriously the best thing ever.
Great post Marcus. I love genre fiction–sci-fi, mystery, thriller, romance–you name it, I read it. I just love books. I get different things out of literary writing than I do genre writing, but find good and bad writing in both places.
Your post made me think about something I pondered when I read the post on The Lost Booker Man Prize (http://thebarking.com/2010/03/lost-man-booker-prize-2/). The 1970′s titles list includes mysteries and others which we would classify as “genre” today. I wonder if the range seen on that list will be on any non-genre literature awards list again.
[...] this month, esteemed writer and fellow Barker Marcus admitted to have published SciFi, so I thought I too would spill my secret love affair with genre fiction. In my case it really is a [...]