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From "Squids in Space" at AMAZING STORIES
Jul. 10th, 2012 10:09 amFrom today's Chain Mail round table at Amazing Stories:
Amazing Stories: Margaret Atwood stated that she wrote speculative fiction, as opposed to science fiction which she characterized as “talking squids in outer space”*: what was your reaction upon learning of Atwood’s statement? Has your response to it changed now that Ms. Atwood seems to be backpedaling a bit?
Here's my response:
I’m a bit wearied by the expostulations of people who haven’t read science fiction because they know ahead of time they won’t like it, it’s trivial and self-indulgent, and therefore their (near-future/dystopic/etc.) work can’t possibly be science fiction. So they run around finding new labels for it. “Speculative fiction” as a term has been around at least since 1889 (Lippincott’s Monthly Mag. Oct. № 597: “Edward Bellamy, in LOOKING BACKWARD, and George Parsons Lathrop, in a short story, THE NEW POVERTY, have followed the example of Anthony Trollope and Bulwer in speculative fiction put in the future tense.”) Certainly, it was widely enough accepted in the science fiction community for Heinlein (1947), L. Sprague de Camp (1953), and Samuel R. Delaney (1969) to have used it. But this is neither here nor there, except to demonstrate that Atwood has, perhaps unintentionally, appropriated a term used by science fiction writers to describe their own work.
Underlying the attitude of “My work is serious literature, therefore it can’t be science fiction” are the assumptions that science fiction is either based on ignorance of human nature or it’s carelessly written, to abysmal literary standards, that science fiction writers are so enamored of gadgets or weird aliens that they don’t do their research or consider the social (etc.) implications of their concepts, and that they are uneducated about the larger field of literature. I find this small-minded and sad-minded, but I don’t suppose anything I (who featured a race of intelligent, star-travelling gastropods in my first published novel) can say will change their minds.
In the end, it’s their loss, while we continue to celebrate the creativity, insight, and excellence of our field.
Amazing Stories: Margaret Atwood stated that she wrote speculative fiction, as opposed to science fiction which she characterized as “talking squids in outer space”*: what was your reaction upon learning of Atwood’s statement? Has your response to it changed now that Ms. Atwood seems to be backpedaling a bit?
Here's my response:
I’m a bit wearied by the expostulations of people who haven’t read science fiction because they know ahead of time they won’t like it, it’s trivial and self-indulgent, and therefore their (near-future/dystopic/etc.) work can’t possibly be science fiction. So they run around finding new labels for it. “Speculative fiction” as a term has been around at least since 1889 (Lippincott’s Monthly Mag. Oct. № 597: “Edward Bellamy, in LOOKING BACKWARD, and George Parsons Lathrop, in a short story, THE NEW POVERTY, have followed the example of Anthony Trollope and Bulwer in speculative fiction put in the future tense.”) Certainly, it was widely enough accepted in the science fiction community for Heinlein (1947), L. Sprague de Camp (1953), and Samuel R. Delaney (1969) to have used it. But this is neither here nor there, except to demonstrate that Atwood has, perhaps unintentionally, appropriated a term used by science fiction writers to describe their own work.
Underlying the attitude of “My work is serious literature, therefore it can’t be science fiction” are the assumptions that science fiction is either based on ignorance of human nature or it’s carelessly written, to abysmal literary standards, that science fiction writers are so enamored of gadgets or weird aliens that they don’t do their research or consider the social (etc.) implications of their concepts, and that they are uneducated about the larger field of literature. I find this small-minded and sad-minded, but I don’t suppose anything I (who featured a race of intelligent, star-travelling gastropods in my first published novel) can say will change their minds.
In the end, it’s their loss, while we continue to celebrate the creativity, insight, and excellence of our field.
Hooray! My review of Marissa Meyer's CINDER is up - on the LA TIMES OF BOOKS!!!!!