Thursday, July 21, 2005

Beating A Dead Horse

First off, I wanted to make some remarks on a great book I read (no, not Harry Potter - which was, by the way, extremely good, and I plan to make a rather long and rambling post about it next week, so consider yourselves warned). The book I'm talking about is The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. It was assigned in my Utopian Lit class and really knocked my socks off. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it definitely deserves a place equal to the legendary dystopian trio of Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four and We. If you haven't read it and you're into dystopian fiction, be sure to check it out.

The thing I'd like to discuss, though, is Atwood's views on science fiction. And yes, I know I posted recently about how I was fed up with people slagging SF (which, by the way, resulted in me getting an email from Girl at POD-dy Mouth explaining that she doesn't have a bias against it, she just didn't think she was qualified to review it). Anyhow, a few years ago, Atwood came to Ottawa and gave a talk about SF and speculative fiction. I didn't go, but received the gist of the proceedings from classmates. Basically, she did whatever she could to dissociate her works (this was right after Oryx and Crake had come out) from science fiction. Instead, she called them speculative fiction. Why? Well, because SF is silly and not for those who like a book with literary value.

Now, before I start criticizing, I'd like to mention that my reading tastes consists almost entirely of literary fiction and that which is considered speculative fiction. I completely agree with Atwood that there seem to be to sides of SF, a sociological side and a scientific side. I also agree that it's acceptable to assert that one genre generally has more literary value than another. Anyone who tries to tell you that Ian Rankin is every bit as literary as Ian McEwan clearly has a screw loose. However, here's the thing: Just because a book lies within a certain genre does not mean that it has more or less literary value than a book in another genre.

And that, to me, seems to be what Atwood is trying to do with all this 'speculative' fiction nonsense. As far as I know, speculative fiction is an invention of the literary world - in SF, everything is speculative, therefore creating a subgenre with that title would be a little absurd. It seems to me that the genre of speculative fiction is bestowed (by the literary establishment, of course) on any SF book that has been written by a mainstream author or has been sufficiently accepted by the mainstream. Basically, it's a way of saying "It's OK for us to read this book, even though it's chalk-full of SF elements, and still put down science fiction because, as we all know, SF is just silly escapism."

It really irritates me that Atwood should have to attach this label to her books. Not only because the books are clearly science fiction (the final chapter is a transcript of an academic lecture held in 2195) but because Atwood is such a ridiculously accomplished author that it shouldn't really matter to the literary crowd whether she's writing science fiction or not. I mean, if she didn't go through all this trouble to term her books 'speculative' and instead came right out and said "I've written a science fiction novel" do you think the literary crowd would balk and think that Atwood had gone loopy? Doubtful, but the fact that one has to stop and ponder the possibility, which isn't that far-fetched, is rather disconcerting.

Anyhow, I'm done beating this dead horse (until the next opportunity). Feel free to return to your lives.

1 Comments:

Gale said...

I read the Atwood comments on SF and thought several of the same things you did. Thanks for writing.

4:21 PM  

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