SO YOU WANT TO WRITE TEH SCIENCE FICTIONS

[defrog]

ITEM: io9 has an interesting poll asking one of the great literary questions of our time: Which mainstream author do you wish would write science fiction?

It’s an interesting question, as some of the better sci-fi ever written has been from authors you don’t usually find in the SF section of Borders (Kurt Vonnegut, William S Burroughs, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Jonathan Letham, Michael Chabon, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Gore Vidal’s The Smithsonian Institution, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, etc).

Granted, it depends on what you consider to be sci-fi (space operas, alt.histories, post-apocalypse, speculative fiction, etc), or possibly even what one means by “mainstream author”. (Bestseller? Popular? John Grisham? Jackie Collins? Nicholas Sparks? Slice-of-life historical novels?)

My personal view is: fuck genres. Whatever purpose they might have once served, these days they are nothing more than bullshit marketing categories. The fact that Michal Crichton’s books are still in the “general fiction” section when he’s been writing sci-fi for most of his career is more than ample evidence of this. And I’d pit a “genre” writer like Philip K Dick, Neil Gaiman or Robert Shea/Robert Anton Wilson against respected “mainstream” writers like Mitch Albom, Ian McEwan, Annie Proulx or whoever.

Anyway, of io9’s choices, I’ve never read any of the nominated authors, though David Sedaris is the one I’m most likely to read at some point in the future. As for my own choices, the only ones I can think of are the ones who are no longer alive, and would probably have zero interest in SF anyway, though if, say, Bukowski had given it a shot, it could have been fun. Alcoholic layabouts on Neptune – that sort of thing.

As for living authors, I dunno. Tom Wolfe (Charlotte Simmons, Eager Young Space Cadet)? Gabriel Garcia Marquez (The Space Captain In His Labrynth)? James Ellroy (Mars Confidential)? Carl Hiassen (can’t think of a title, but it’d be about greedy property developers raping the Martian environment to build condos)?

Maybe Kinky Friedman would be fun. He’d probably call it Jews In Space.

Ride the silver rocket,

This is dF

Comments

[jasonfranks.livejournal.com]

I'm so with you on that.

I'm very tired of hearing that works than some people deem to have literary value are exempt from genre classifications. "If it's in a genre it must be bad, right?"

Genre is just a set of tropes or themes, structures and conventions, and 'ungenred' works have these, too. At the end of the day, that's simple close-minded snobbery. The shelves are full of bad work, no matter how it's shelved.

Then again, you could argue that the cultures that evolve around certain genres exclude certain people. I don't wear a beret, I can't read Proulx. I don't wear thick enough glasses, I can't be a fan of SF. Klingon speakers embarrass me just as much as emo haircuts and coffee-shop writers who wear their grandfather's clothes.

[dinopollard.livejournal.com]

I don't have a problem with genres. My problem is when people sneer at genre fiction like science fiction. I'd see this happen all the time, people looking down their nose at science fiction but then turn around and praise 1984 or Brave New World.

Kurt Vonnegut once lamented being labeled a science fiction author in his early days because he said so many people have mistaken that particular drawer of fiction for a toilet.