Unlike Tolkien or Frank Herbert’s ‘back of the book stuff’, 1984′s is part and parcel of the novel itself, arguably its the ending. I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t read the book, so I’ll just mention its in the way Orwell wrote it. It rings with something Winston Smith thinks, but I’ll say no more.

I get the argument that SciFi is a setting, but really to say that that stops it from being a genre is ridiculous… The whole snobbery over genre does my nut in, that english teacher also had my slightly religious parents try to stop me a dyslexic from reading fantasy (what I mainly read in my teenage years)… Sheer lunacy but fortunately I was able to convince my parents that me reading lots of books was actually good for me rather than bad just because they were fantasy books.

What gets me most about the genre snobs and critics is that most of the books they love are pure drivel, there are any number of excellent scifi / fantasy / horror novels that have far amazing characters / plots / insights into the human soul. To anyone who says otherwise get them to read Elizabeth Moon’s ‘The Speed of Dark’

While we’re on the subject of genre – one of the things that really winds me up is when film theorists (whose work I read, because I occasionally teach screenwriting) loftily say that science fiction is not in fact a ‘genre’ at all, it’s a setting. In other words, ALIEN is really a horror movie which is set in space, etc etc. But you can’t say that! If SF is not a genre, nothing is!

It’s more useful to say, as Andy does, that a book or a film can be many genres, all at the same time.

And sometimes the genre can change when a book is adapted for screen. A great example of this is James Ellroy’s LA CONFIDENTIAL, which is a dark and very literary novel but is firmly in the detective genre. (Except, unlike Chandler, Ellroy has no knights in shining armour in HIS mean streets.) But when Curtis Hanson brilliantly adapted it as a movie (cowriting the screenplay with Brian Helgeland) he created a different climax in which, for no good reason, the good guys hole up in a shack which they have to defend against the bad guys. This leads to a massive shootout, in the classic Western tradition; and suddenly, the detective genre gives way to the action genre. And subtle problem-solving yields to exhilarating shoot-’em-up action. (Because movies need to escalate in the final reel – and Hanson is smart enough to know this. And the movie made a lot of money, as well as being a masterly film by any standards.)

By the by, my ambition as a writer is to get the most genres in a given novel ever. RED CLAW, my new book, is SF novel/action thriller/ xeniobiology textbook. But that’s only three! I’ve clearly been slacking…

From an historical perspective, modern critics would do well to note that in Orwell’s time SF had not yet become accepted as genuine ‘literature’ which would explain his own reluctance to associate himself with the genre. Orwell spent most of his life struggling to be a voice taken seriously; in the literary environment of the 1940′s associating himself with SF would have been professional suicide.

Many of the great pioneers of science fiction did not set out to create the genre: H.G. Wells was more motivated by his politics than by his literary aspirations, and Jules Verne during his life was better-received for his work in the theatre than his fantastic literature. Reclassifying their work as SF is not an insult to them or their creations, and I’m sure if Orwell or any of the others could see the great things that have been done in science fiction since their time they would heartily approve.

Science fiction itself, like the worlds it builds and describes, is a work in progress. It’s moved beyond the ray guns and scantily-clad women in peril to become literature of the first rank just as surely as Shakespeare’s work moved beyond being the pulp entertainment of its day and Beowulf became something more than a way to amuse drunken Saxons. It’s now literature of genuine insight into the human condition.

To say it is anything else is just laughable, that’s not to say that it isn’t a Satire, political commentary or anything else…. books can belong to a number of different genres at the same time. I remember having this argument with my English teacher at school and writing an essay arguing my case that she marked with a D-, that essay was then externally moderated and given a B

Thanks for your comments…yes, the idea that a good SF book ‘transcends’ its genre can be very annoying. I’d say that very good SF ‘uplifts’ the genre.

I’m currently working on an SF book that is loosely inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s novel RED HARVEST – a hard-boiled pulp crime novel that is also a remarkable piece of sustained polemical and, dare I say it, allegorical writing. In other words, it works as a cracking yarn; but it has a hell of a lot of other resonances too. But detective fiction has always, it seems to me, been treated with more respect in literary circles. (Q: Is The Moonstone the first ever detective novel?)

Your workshop on Dystopia sounds fascinating..where was it held?

I’ve read a number of articles over the years on 1984 claiming it as ‘not-SF’. But hand on heart, I don’t have a quotation to support the notion that Orwell himself saw it as a piece of literary rather than genre writing. I may therefore be wrong in my assumption; actually I hope I am.

Does anyone out there know what Orwell really thought?

However, I’m curious about one thing: you mention several times that Orwell himself didn’t consider 1984 to be SF. May I ask on what evidence you base this assertion? I’m not as up on my Orwell scholarship as I should be, but it strikes me as curious that he would even make such a statement.