My eye was caught by an article in Sunday’s paper about the eminent Canadian novelist Margaret Attwood. She’s travelling on the Queen Mary 2 across the Atlantic, and is giving nightly readings from her new book The Year of the Flood, sharing top billing with Dr Peter Dean, a forensic scientist and expert on the Jack the Ripper murders.
The bit that initially captured my attention was the mention of Peter Dean – he was our forensic science consultant on the ITV series McCallum, starring John Hannah. And even then, he was developing a sideline giving talks on cruise liners – what a great way to earn a living! Peter’s a lovely man, and a font of knowledge about things macabre.
But having spotted Peter’s name, I read further in the article to learn a bit more about Attwood and her new novel. It’s an apocalyptic vision about a Darwinian cult which survives after ecological disaster has destroyed nearly all humanity. So far, so fascinating. But this book, I also learn, is NOT in Attwood’s view a piece of science fiction - no, no, it’s a ‘realistic extrapolation of the present’. Quite a different proposition!
Oh, and, by the way, the Queen Mary 2 is not in fact a “ship”; it’s a metal object that floats on water.
Grrr…
The whole debate about what is and isn’t science fiction is a lively one of course. Last year there was controversy when two ‘literary’ novels appeared on the shortlist for the Clarke awards; various bloggers queried whether these books were actually science fiction at all. One of these books was The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall – which for my money definitely IS science fiction, despite its disappointing lack of an action climax. The other was James Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, which I would tend to see as witty and iconoclastic magic realism rather than SF – but hey, that’s all certainly open to debate!
But there is without doubt an assumption among some readers and critics and writers that any novel with a science fictional premise which is written by a ‘posh’ writer is not SF. Thus, Jeanette Winterson has argued that her novel The Stone Gods is not sci-fi, even though it has spaceships and a future civilisation. And, in exactly similar vein, Attwood doesn’t want her posh novel to be associated by a grubby genre like Science Fiction.
This isn’t literary discourse; it’s just literary snobbery. And to my delight, Ursula Le Guin, in her brilliant review of Attwood’s novel, uses irony and cleverness like surgical scalpels to ruthlessly dissect this diseased argument. No one can mock cultural snobs like Le Guin – and she has all the authority of a grande dame of the fantasy world who can also hold her own in literary circles. (Her latest novel Lavinia is a novel based on a character from one of the greatest epic stories of all time - Virgil’s The Aeneid – which I’ve read in translation many years ago, but which Le Guin has read in the original Latin.)
Click here to experience for yourself Le Guin’s priceless review of Attwood’s book in the same paper; the book itself she likes, it’s the author’s literary snobbery she hates.
And as my own contribution to this debate, my next blog will be a brief essay on the SF classic that literary types hate to describe as ‘sci-fi’ – George Orwell’s 1984.
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Thank you for sharing this article. By the way, the Queen Mary 2 is a luxury liner, not a ship or a metal object that floats (metal object?).
The debate about what is science fiction is a classic example of crows coming home to roost. Book publishers created the sci-fi ghetto by relentless schlocky marketing and forcing great authors like Phil Dick to “dumb down” novels to fit the marketing. Now that literary authors are fishing around in all kinds of territory trying to keep the novel alive and relevant this toxic heritage of the sci-fi genre is in need of honest remediation.
The post modern novel looks suspiciously like a dead end and a couple of other ideas have turned out badly. Tom Wolfe argues for hyper-journalism in his amusing Hooking Up. Unfortunately, this requires what some may consider an inordinate amount of research and presents other challenges of style to an accomplished wordsmith. In contrast serious authors have been successfully exploring science fiction for nearly 200 years without exhausting it’s potential.
Atwood’s distinction is as disingenuous as it is absurd. It insults her “non-sci-fi” readers with the implicit assumption that they are as unsophisticated as to have no exposure to the significant authors whose work is discussed as science fiction. If in fact, the demographic she targets is so unsophisticated, shame on her for insulting the people to whom she is trying to sell books.
Maybe she should try Cormac McCarthy’s approach. Write the book and let other people do the talking.
Interesting points, and I agree about Attwood. But I’ve always liked ‘schlocky marketing – it’s a way of signifying the genre, and the fact it’s not ordinary naturalism…
In terms of aesthetic I like the old schlocky marketing also. It’s why I like the retro look of the font on your covers for Red Claw and Version 43 (photos are cool too).
The part I didn’t like about the schlocky marketing was when it was utterly misleading as to the content of the book. I also like the schlocky books that go along with the marketing. Some of my favorite books are the ones that the publishers made Phil Dick dumb down. He managed to maintain a subversive brilliance in wire frame that I find extremely compelling.
It may be nostalgia but I like the old pulpy stuff even if it’s badly written. I take it in small doses, but it’s great fun.
Cash – I’m glad we think alike on pulp – and glad you love the look Lauren Panepinto achieved on Red Claw and Version 43!
I’ve got some crime novels with really racy covers which are tame as hell inside – so frustrating! But I’ve also got Mickey Spillanes and James Hadley Chases which really are shocking even now.