Why science fiction authors just can't win

Science fiction authors have long been outcasts from the literary world, in some cases critics using the worst examples of the genre as ammunition against it. Unfortunately though, at times even science fiction authors themselves can turn on their own kind: "Science fiction is rockets, chemicals and talking squids in outer space,” mocked Margaret Atwood (The Guardian, 28 January 2009), one of her many attempts to convince people that she is not a science fiction author, even though one of her most famous novels, A Handmaid's Tale, is exactly that.

More recently, in an article in the New York Times (4 October, 2009) publicising her new novel The Year of the Flood, Atwood declared that her dystopian novels are not science fiction. The article described The Year of the Flood as a novel set in “a violent future society created by a man-made plague" with "genetically-engineered humans and animals amid a ruined environment”, which sounds a lot like science fiction to me.
Taking even the narrowest definitions of science fiction, I’d suggest Atwood would have trouble arguing that some of her novels are not part of the genre. Apparently though, as long as you persist, you can convince the established order that your heart and mind is in the right place. Just keep insisting that everything science fiction is tacky, silly and sad and ridicule its creators at every opportunity. Disown the genre as emphatically and publicly as possible. As a writer there are tremendous advantages to avoiding the label science fiction, and Margret Atwood has successfully done that throughout her career and gained literary credibility in exchange.

In her defence, Atwood's apparent fear that once the label "science fiction" is attached to a novel the literary establishment will treat it differently seems well founded.

"I am going to stick my neck out and just say it," begins Sven Birkerts' review of Atwood's science fiction novel, the Oryx and Crake, "science fiction will never be Literature with a capital 'L'" (New York Times, 18 May, 2003).

Read the rest Here.

Hm, well how about Science-fiction that combines fantasy, tragedy, and suspense elements? That's what my book is like.

Hmm I read an interview with Terry Goodkind which was even more hilarious. Listening to this man explain how his book is so philosophical that it cannot possibly be fantasy fiction, despite the prominence of dragons magic, and a largely feudal setting.

When push comes to shove sci-fi and fantasy tend to be defined by their equiptment rather than their themes and sorry to Margaret Atwood (Ive read Alia Grace, tis ok) but what's described there is Sci-Fi.

I guess the angst is caused by the fact that there are those writers who will simply implement sci-fi or fantasy equiptment without the themes, plot and characterisation to make it a good piece of literature, and that tars the entire genre. It is much easier for a bad fantasy author to be succesfully published than an ordinary writer.

Having A Handmaid's Tale (I'll never get those hours of my life back) labeled as Sci-Fi would be an insult to all the proper Sci-Fi writers out there.

Science fiction can't win because of the prevailing idea among literary critics that SF can't be good, so if it's good, it's not SF. SF classics such as 1984 are reclassified as literary fiction; really good SF novels are rewarded by being allowed to "escape" or "transcend" their genre. It's like applying Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap) to science fiction, but then labelling that top-quality 10% as another genre - leaving only the bad stuff.

SF is more open and thus more free then fantasy in many ways. Because at a certain point fantasy becomes SF and then you get not Science Fiction, but Science Fantasy! 1984 has long since past, but it doesn't change what it really is. Just wish the literary world did recognize such works properly.