In the 1970s, Kingsley Amis, Arthur C Clarke and Brian Aldiss were judging a
contest for the best science-fiction novel of the year. They were going to
give the prize to Grimus, Salman Rushdie’s first novel. At the last minute,
however, the publishers withdrew the book from the award. They didn’t want
Grimus on the SF shelves. “Had it won,” Aldiss, the wry, 82-year-old
godfather of British SF, observes, “he would have been labelled a
science-fiction writer, and nobody would have heard of him again.”
Undeterred, Aldiss has just published a new version of A Science Fiction
Omnibus, a fat collection of classic stories. In the 1960s, the original was
on everybody’s bookshelves, dog-eared and broken-backed. Aldiss says that
was SF’s one golden age, when Oxford dons were happy to be seen indulging
the genre. Now they wouldn’t be seen dead with a Philip K Dick, a James
Blish or a Robert Sheckley. Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale
and Oryx and Crake, insists her books are not SF, but “speculative fiction”
or “adventure romance”. “She’s quite right,” says Aldiss. “She had this idea
that a certain amount of opprobrium always hovered around the title science
fiction. You might call it double-dealing, but I can quite understand it.”
I remember, as a young boy, overhearing a neighbour remarking snootily that
they were surprised such an intelligent man as my father should read
Astounding magazine, the greatest of all SF periodicals. I knew at once that
SF was the real deal. Yet it is the embarrassing uncle at the British
literary feast. He’s one of the family, but nobody wants to go near him. He
has, they say, disgusting habits, and his only friends are sad little creeps
who memorise Star Trek scripts. But we need the uncle now more than ever.
“The truth is,” Aldiss has written, “that we are at last living in an SF
scenario.” A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide
bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel
pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers –
it’s all coming true at last. Aldiss thinks this makes SF redundant. I
disagree. In such a climate, it is the conventionally literary that is
threatened, and SF comes into its own as the most hardcore realism.
The British will resist. This is, of course, ridiculously parochial.
No other country is quite so contemptuous of the literary genre, though, in
the movies, we happily accept SF as high art: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris is
rightly regarded as a great film, as is Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Blade
Runner. (If you want to see just how great Scott’s film is, the seventh and
“final” cut has just been released in cinemas and on DVD. It’s visually
enhanced and, says Scott, “tweaked”. It looks, and is, superb.) The further
oddity is that fantasy – Terry Pratchett, Tolkien, Philip Pullman – is not
embarrassing to us at all; indeed, it’s downright respectable. Perhaps this
is because these are seen as children’s books that grown-ups can read,
whereas SF is seen as irredeemably adolescent. This is to ignore the fact
that it tends to be much more demanding and much bleaker.
“In a fantasy story,” Aldiss says, “there’s a big evil abroad, but, in the
end, everything goes back to normal and everybody goes home to drink ale in
the shires. In a science-fiction story, there may be a terrible evil abroad,
and it may get sorted out, but the world is f***ed up for ever. This is
realism. It’s certainly not beach reading, unless you can find a really
nasty, shingly beach.”
The big problem with being sniffy about SF is that it’s just too important to
ignore. After all, what kind of fool would refuse to be seen reading
Borges’s Labyrinths, Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco, Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave
New World or Wells’s War of the Worlds just because they were SF? These are
just good books, irrespective of genre. But they are also books that embody
the big ideas of the time – both Wells and Lem were obsessed with human
insignificance in the face of the immense otherness of the universe, Huxley
with technology as a seductive destroyer and Orwell with our capacity for
authoritarian evil. Borges, like Lem, suspects we know nothing of ourselves.
Interested in these things? Of course you are. Read SF.
For this is where it excels. It is the most vivid and direct chronicler of our
anxieties about the world and ourselves, what Mary Shelley called “the
mysterious fears of our nature”. It was Shelley’s Frankenstein that was,
Aldiss argues in his superb history of the genre, Billion Year Spree, the
first true SF novel. Her big idea – and it is the big idea that haunts all
SF – was that our imperious ingenuity would backfire horribly.
Frankenstein’s monster runs amok, the Skynet computer in the Terminator
films decides to destroy humanity, Philip K Dick’s robots think they are
human, and his humans fear they might be robots. And when the scientists in
Fredric Brown’s one-page story Answer ask their new super-computer if there
is a god, it replies, “Yes, NOWthere is...”
This is why the genre is called “science” fiction. It deals with the effects
of scientific insight and technological application. A new book, Different
Engines by Mark L Brake and Neil Hook, makes this clear by showing how
closely SF follows scientific developments. The Copernican revolution that
displaced the earth from the centre of the universe produced 17th-century
space fantasies by Kepler, Godwin and Bergerac. Darwin, by showing how life
might evolve anywhere, generated a wave of alien-encounter literature that
still submerges us. The weird physics of Einstein and Planck made fictional
interstellar travel – such as the “warp drive” in Star Trek – seem possible.
And the rise of the computer-inspired “cyberpunk” SF, most famously in
William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the novel that preinvented the internet in, of
course, 1984.
But Brake and Hook go further. They suggest this is a two-way street: SF also
influences science. Brake points out to me that it was Wells who invented
the atom bomb in The World Set Free, in 1914, in spite of the fact that two
of the leading nuclear physicists of the day, Rutherford and Soddy, had said
it was impossible. Leo Szilard read Wells’s book in 1932. A year later,
Szilard discovered the idea of a nuclear chain reaction while waiting for
the traffic lights to change on Southampton Row, in Bloomsbury. “Wells’s
fictional bomb led straight to Hiroshima,” write Brake and Hook. I would add
that Astounding magazine led to the cold war. Werner von Braun had the
magazine smuggled in while working on rockets for the Nazis. His V-2 – a
pointy cigar with fins – was plainly inspired by an Astounding cover.
This is not so surprising. SF writers are free to speculate in a way that
scientists aren’t, and this can suggest the path ahead. Perhaps the best
example of this process is the way the idea of the alien has moved from
fiction to reality. The Nasa historian Steven Dick has pointed out that the
billions spent by the agency on investigating the possibility or likelihood
of alien life is a direct result of the invention of the extraterrestrial in
fiction. Furthermore, there is now an entire scientific discipline – astro-
or exobiology – that exists to study a so far entirely fictional entity,
life beyond the earth. In effect, science has accepted a terrifying,
uniquely SF insight that has been with us ever since the fantasies of Kepler
and Godwin: simply, that we are nothing special, and that the universe is
unimaginably large. There must be aliens out there, said the SF writers, and
the scientists now, on the whole, agree.
The point is that SF is, in fact, the necessary literary companion to science.
How could fiction avoid considering possible futures in a world of perpetual
innovation? And how could science begin to believe in itself as wisdom,
rather than just truth, without writers scouting out the territory ahead?
Which is why this widely despised genre should be read now more than ever.
Unfortunately, as Aldiss and Brake agree, this does not seem to be a great
time for the production, never mind the reception, of SF. The classical age
– of Wells, Lem and Dick – seems to be behind us, and the emerging genre of
New Weird, led by Britain’s China Miéville, shades too much into fantasy and
horror to be strictly classified as SF, a genre that must remain true to a
certain level of logic and realism. But one can try Greg Bear, a
practitioner of old-fashioned “hard” SF, the kind that, like the work of
Michael Crichton, sticks most closely to real current science. Bear’s
celebrated Blood Music is a brilliantly horrible vision of genetics gone
wrong. Or there’s another Brit, Stephen Baxter, who writes hard SF strongly
influenced by HG Wells; or Iain M Banks (Iain Banks’s SF guise), who has
written a series of novels about the Culture, an alien civilisation existing
in parallel to the human. Banks’s emphasis is more philosophical than
strictly scientific, and seems to descend from the supreme practitioner of
philosophical SF, Olaf Stapledon, a man incapable of writing about anything
less than everything.
Aldiss is the great champion of logical SF – with good reason. He worked on
the film script of his short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long with
Stanley Kubrick for 10 years, much of the time simply trying to persuade the
director not to bring in a Pinocchio theme of a robot boy seeking love from
the Blue Angel. “But you might as well try to persuade this table to be a
chair as persuade Stanley of anything. I should have known better.” Kubrick
died without making the film. Steven Spielberg took over the project and
made AI, a film that toppled over into whimsy and fantasy. “It’s crap,”
Aldiss says. “Science fiction has to be logical, and it’s full of lapses in
logic.”
But if new hard, logical, shingly-beach SF is now a rarity, at least there’s a
lot of old stuff to read. The literary snobs will say it’s badly written,
which most of it is. So is most “literary” fiction. Badly written literary
fiction is, however, wholly unnecessary. There’s a lot of badly written SF
that is driven by an urgent journalistic desire to communicate. That is
necessary. So, watch Blade Runner for the seventh time, or curl up with
Aldiss’s Omnibus. And remember, it’s all happening now.
A Science Fiction Omnibus edited by Brian Aldiss is published by Penguin at
£9.99. Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives
Science by Mark L Brake and Neil Hook is published by Macmillan at £16.99
This discussion reminds me of one of my favorite quotes (don't know who said it):
"Reality is for those who can't handle science fiction."
For a great story, well-written with very human characters, read Ship of Fools by Richard Paul Russo
Jim, Okanogan WA, USA
If I may submit my humble opinion, I believe science fiction is the only realm of unexplored literature left to us. It is the final frontier if you will, only it extends as far as we want it to go. I personally am a big fan of Dan Abnett and his Warhammer 40k novels. Not only are his books superbly written, but he manages to offer a great story as well, all while exploring the dark times that loom in the future. And can anyone deny that Ender's Game was a masterpiece of science fiction? My point is that SF is extraordinarily relevant because it allows us to think about the future in the grander context of humanity and the direction of our race, rather than the pithy daydreaming of an individual life.
P.J. Bradrick, Great Falls, USA, Montana
In France, from what I've understood, A.E. Van Vogt, hardly a household name in many countries these days, is a giant, a most revered writer per se, and I don't quite buy the notion that SF is so sneered at. Why would so many SF novels be published every year, and in hardcovers, too, if it was a "fringe" genre, not read by that many? It simply doesn't make sense. Anyway, why care what the mob says, or snotty critics? We who love SF knows that the genre, at its best, outshines most other genres/writers. The mob is scared of the Big Issues SF often deals with, and literary snobs are frightened that even more readers will be "lost" to the genre, a genre they themselves cannot understand,
The amount of coverage being rightfully given to Arthur C Clarke shows that the genre, with which he is identified, is anything but sneered at.
Ulf Claesson, Gothenburg, Sweden
I had an interesting introduction to this snobbery, and NOT at the University of Glasgow when I attended, but at SUNY Binghamton where I went for grad studies (in upstate NY, USA). John Gardner (Sunlight Dialogues, Grendal) taught creative writing there. I talked to him about attending one of his classes, and told him I loved SF. He sneered & said there were no good SF writers - I said Ursula LeGuin was not only a wonderful SF writer but a great writer period. Then Gardner informed me that Ms LeGuin did NOT write SF. I wrote a letter to her about that LOL because, at least in the 70s, she self-identified as a SF writer :D
BB
Teleri
teleri, Asheville, NC, USA
The article covers interesting points but the central premise is wrong; British people don't dismiss written SF. certainly no more than other countries tend to- and as has been mentioned most SF is awful; particularly when filmed.
Some great stuff yet abounds; seek out Jeff Vandermeer's "Veniss Underground", that rare boook that hits the genre buttons and also works as a cracking thriller and literary novel to boot.
Keith, Newcastle, Uk
I had been pondering the hypocricy of a society that hates SF, yet uses the word "Orwellian" to describe what they don't want in a society, forgetting that Orwell's book, 1984 was, in fact, science fiction. I'd be interested in finding out to what extent that book may have prevented the scenario it described from actually happening in 1984? Or what about the scenario in H.G. Wells' Time Machine? That was about what Wells thought of the widening rift between the working class of his day and the elite. Could that book not have played a big role in opening peoples minds to the extent that we are now more politically sensitive about that? You could ask the same about Huxly's Brave New World. It would be interesting to see a study on the possitive effects of SF on the course of history.
H.G.Wells being responsible for the Cold War? I suppose that's a different angle on the same question.
bob charters, bangkok, thailand
It's Great to see SF at least getting a mention in the broader media. Like other art forms such as music, liturature continues to develope, and many SF writers are at the coalface so to speak. Much of the opinion on SF seems to be at least 30 years out of date. Of course there's always going to be a lot of rubbish, but there are also some real gems. It would be hard to imagine such narrow mindedness being accepted in the worlds of art or music. A lot of the negative attitudes to SF are based on pure ignorance and an unwillingness to deal with the issues that good SF is about. I honestly think that along with a rediculous type of snobbery the main reason why Sf is ignored is because so called well-educated people who are interested in liturature are afraid that they probably won't understand it. For anyone who thinks Sf does'nt have a sense of humour, my answer is Rudy Rucker.
Paul, Eskilstuna, Sweden
Ah, what a fine article. I offer, for your edification,
Richard K. Morgan -- perhaps THE best, at least
for adult readers -- contemporary
sf writer. And he's one of your own, you delicious
Brits!
kathleen, Greensburg, PA USA
The difference between the SF bookshelf now and in the 1960s is twofold - the gross size of the shelf is larger today, but it is mostly filled with fantasy novels and spin-offs from TV & movies. Thus the net result is not that different to what it was when I grew up reading those wonderful yellow-jacket Gollancz novels and subscribing to the SF Book Club.
"Hard core" or "traditional" science-fiction has been and always will be a minority interest because the majority of people simply don't find stories set on other planets or in other centuries accessible.
Michael O'Brien, Hobart, Tasmania
Sheri S. Tepper & Ursula K. LeGuin!
Kathrine Kristiansen-Olsen, Oslo, Norway
I'm afraid I totally disagree with the article.
not about the qualities of sci-fi - it is clear that a sci-fi novel can contain all the same qualities of characterisation, richness of writing and inventiveness as "normal" fiction, with the added bonus of an imaginary world. the best writers are simply good writers, whatever the genre. sci-fi probably does suffer from too many writers who think setting a poor story in the future will make it a better story, but then other genres have more than their fair share of poor writers, it's just that they don't get taken seriously enough to be worthy of consideration. many great sci-fi novels are clever enough to give the appearance of being about the future, whilst being allegories dealing with contemporary issues.
where I disagree strongly is with the concept that sci-fi is somehow seen as a literary second class citizen. I think the whole article is based on a false premise. if there is any truth, blame hollywood adaptations.
jem, london, uk
I imagine a lot of people are reading the comments for hints on what to read. Might I suggest Molly Brown, Gwyneth Jones, Paul J. McAuley, Richard Morgan, Adam Roberts, Justina Robson, Stephanie Swainston, and Liz Williams, all British writers?
Miriam Jones, Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada
SF as literature always seems to be on the fringe. Is it the literature for a group of people who themselves are on the fringe (budding or current technoscientists)? I seem to recall that Aldis himself termed it the "Science Fiction Ghetto" in the early 70s. Film production, increasingly driven by reaching a market of youth with plenty of idle time and disposable income does not seem to have the same constraints. Perhaps SF film is like fantasy in that it is (to paraphrase) "children’s [movies] that grown-ups can [watch]. And yes, the heroes do go back to their local pub where little has changed (except the heroes themselves). Aldis might have had it right when he termed Frankenstein as the first SF novel. Even the more optimistic American style SF of the golden era relates to evolution. Seemingly inevitable evolution at the hands of a few of mankind that few others have any control over is frightening. Perhaps this is one reason why Fantasy has become so popular.
David Ferro, Tampere, Finland
The late Robert Heinlein said that sf deals with two issues: What if? and If this goes on.
George R., Seattle, USA
Lets not forget other British SF writers such as Charles Stross and Ken Macleod who are writing up to date novels that are relevant to today in all the right ways.
guthrie, Edinburgh,
Great, insightful article. However, I'm flabbergasted there was no mention of Neal Stephenson ("Snow Crash," "The Diamond Age," "Cryptonomicon")! Great stuff; relevant stuff.
HLyon, Tucson, USA / Arizona
Aldiss has a point to make, and makes it well. I agree there is more to SF than accurate dystopian speculation or satirical warnings of current trends taken to extreme, however much those things may demonstrate "relevance", oh the awful term.
Good writing is good writing and SF's acknowledged share is reduced by the sheer dreadfulness of adventure-writing prose as the first comment laden with leaden exposition.
Aldiss has created good work (though to my taste the concrete plots of Helliconia & his starter novel Non Stop work better than some of the others). Good article!
Gideon, Herne Hill,
I think the problem could be the hackneyed plots. "John was an astronimical engineer, Sheila came in, he was reading the vidi-screen, she said " What about this gene therapy ?"
I find a distinct lack of believability about the characters in SF/Fantasy novels. The novels might be set in the future, but the characters always seem based in the present
The best SF, 1984, War of the Worlds, Blade Runner, Dune had characters who reacted to the context and environment of the novel.
I read a lot of SF and most of it is hackneyed, although I think publishers could be to blame for this because they target the SF novels at a particular audience, adolescents, who do not value literary quality. SF is no longer a zeitgest form.
It is another example of hammy television shows pigeon holing a genre in the eyes of some faceless publishing corporation, and churning out identikit crap at the expense of what can be a serious genre.
D E Emsum, Edinburgh,
If you judge it by its best stories, genre fiction (including sf) is usually better written than so-called "literary" fiction from the point of view of plot, characterization, narrative, dialogue, etc. Most literary authors seem to be frustrated poets: they can turn a poetical phrase quite beautifully, but seem incapable of constructing a story or engaging the reader's interest.
I suspect that many non-readers of sf are judging the genre from poorly-written sf movies and TV shows. I would agree that a lot of written sf is only average in quality, but applies to any genre or indeed any art-form.
steve mcgarrity, scarborough, uk
I would add a good word for Paul McAuley whose work is just barely ahead of reality by oh, say 10 or 20 years. It gives an uncanny feeling, especially if you read something he wrote ten years ago, of being current non-fiction rather than science fiction.
Steve, New Harmony,
Nice article, but it only touches on one particular type of SF-- the pessimistic, dystopian type. It's not true that "all SF" features the Frankenstein scenario. Such a definition would exclude Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein, Vernor Vinge, and others. There is certainly SF where the true dangers are the same human emotions and weaknesses that predate science, and where the scientist and science is the hero, not the villain, where science and rationality helps us conquer our fears.
Both genres have their place, but too often people are only willing to grant that the dystopian type has literary merit. I feel that this article is doing that as well.
john Thacker, Centreville, VA, USA
As an avid reader and writer of SF, I have to admit that a lot of the genre's most celebrated authors are tone deaf when it comes to language, characterization, cultural nuance, and political-economic accuracy. Even Charles Robert Wilson, who tries harder than most, falls short. Some of the dialog in "Spin" is abysmal and his representation of the US military-industrial complex is off-key.
It's terrific to find writers--like William Gibson, Maureen McHugh, K. Stanley Robinson (sometimes), etc.--who transcend these characteristic limitations, but it can be a lot of hard work to find authors like these in the SF section of the bookstore. A reader of "mundane" fiction can smell a SFish novel miles away and--for better or worse--most readers are mundane. My view is that all SF writers should go through an apprenticeship writing mundane fiction, then graduate to writing SF.
PS: "Grimus" is a pretty crappy novel, SF or otherwise, and definitely not in any way "logical.
LK, San Francisco,
Ted Sturgeon observed that SF is criticized by pointing out the 90% that's bad, whereas 90% of other fiction is also bad.
SF can illuminate the human condition as well as any other fiction.
My opinion is that people don't like science fiction because it involves science. Most people don't like science because it's too hard for them and people who can handle science are considered nerdy.
Jim C., Chicago,
Why not? Let's assume that Gaugin is right for a second, and that the three questions most worth asking are, "where do we come from?" "who are we" and "where are we going?"
Because the question of the role of technology in our psychic and social realities is a fairly limited one, and fails to address the fullness of the three questions above. And so while Sci-Fi may be valuable insofar as its essential questions are real and its answers potentially artful, it isn't capable of producing the very highest level of art, because it restricts itself so heavily.
The combined genre of sci-fi/fantasy has produced some real gems, but those books tend to transcend their genres as such by addressing more than genre-specific themes.
Bill, Washington, DC
Lois McMaster Bujold, Martha Welles,Elizabeth Moon, C. J. Cherrych, and of course Andre Norton, now deceased. A few of the many very talented female authors of sf and f.
David R. King, Bedford, Iowa, USA
You can appreciate many of the ideas of an SF work while experiencing a sense of horror at the quality of much of the prose - including some of the landmark works. Equally, what passes for 'literary fiction' can be well written but have little point beyond being a solipsistic exercise by a writer. Many writers, like Kurt Vonnegut, who were published in pulp SF magazines like 'Worlds of If' in the sixties, did not want to be classified as genre writers, and that is understandable - a writer is a writer is a writer - and certain kinds of status (literary) are deemed more worthwhile than others (pulp or populist). The term 'literary fiction' as used by a certain kind of writer, when it is not self-serving, is used to separate a work from any genre afflictions. 'Mainstream fiction' will no longer do these days.
I am old enough to prefer to use the term SF, as you may have noticed, and I still cringe at the sound of 'sci-fi' - not for the insiders.
Snobbery as a universal?
George Eraclides, Kinglake, Australia
If I may refer to Peter's comment, I think he has it figured out quite wrongly. I think it is the literary world that needs to jump off its ivory tower and stop its snobbery. It is possible and definitely beneficial to love both Joyce's Ulysses and say, Zelazny's Lord of Light. For example, Modern's Library "Board's List" of 100 best novels does not contain a single science fiction or fantasy novel, not including token science fiction titles such as Brave New World, 1984 and perhaps Catch-22. Embrace both, I say!
Daryl Lim, Singapore, Singapore
Well-considered and eloquent piece, but I must take issue with the the assertion that:
"... this does not seem to be a great time for the production, never mind the reception, of SF..."
and that
"... new hard, logical, shingly-beach SF is now a rarity".
Bear is still consistently good, but he does not stand alone. From Britain alone, Ken McCleod is writing excellent, thought-provoking stuff, while Alastair Reynolds evokes the good old-fashioned "sense of wonder". Peter F Hamilton is producing some excellent epic space-operas. Across the ocean, Kim Stanley Robinson has written some era-defining stuff and his just-completed trilogy of near-future ecological catastrophe novels are both highly rewarding and still give some cause for hope. And there's a new Vernor Vinge novel out, too.
In fact, I'd say the last ten years have seen some of the best new SF of the last three decades or more.
Liam Proven, London, England
Science fiction writing, like all writing, succeeds or fails on the quality of its writing. Bradbury spins wonderful webs; in the world of fantasy, Madeline l'Engle writes beautifully. Some of the current generation of writers are quite good - Charles Stross is one example.
"Sturgeon's Lemma" (see Ted Reynolds' post) holds true - a great story, badly written, about people you don't care about, goes nowhere. Sometimes, though, a bad story may grow wings from great writing.
Mike Zorn, Santa Ana, USA, CA
I dont know about we but I love sci-fi. as a child in the 50's my mother was a fan and I literally read the lot. the real fact of the matter is that no one can write like that anymore and furthermore post modern humans do not want to read anything that engages them. the preferences these days is for pure pap. Even the publishers are at fault. they release a few reprint philip k dicks but only a few from his corpus and as for briton colin kapp one may as well give up on finding one of his.
writing has now become stultified by the ignorati emerging from various academies who can write but cant think. As the quality of everything else diminishes why should writing be any different
Charles Leighton, Wellington, New Zealand
Two comments:
* I'd like to read comments from people who DON'T like SF and tell us why; and
* crime fiction has defeated science fiction
Widya, Canberra, Australia
At least fantasy gets respect in the UK. Both SF and fantasy are reviled on this side of the pond.
Rachel, Kansas City, KS
Steven Hawking is not only a SF fan, but a Trekkie. He appeared, as himself, in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. If SF is good enough for a successor to Newton's Lucasian Chair at Cambridge, it is certainly good enough for me.
Tregonsee, Franklin, TN
Science fiction writers have only themselves to blame. They narrowed and restricted their own audience by pretentiously claiming that their fiction is prophetic and by dividing it into hierarchical sub-genres. ‘Hard Science Fiction’ has to be logical, intellectual, and prophetic. Why can’t speculating about the future fun? They have forgotten the main purpose of fiction, which is to entertain. Fantasy thrives because it entertains and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Science fiction films thrive for the same reason. I love science fiction, I write science fiction (although, I would never call it that otherwise it will never get published). As a child I loved Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat, because it was both speculative and fun, fun, fun. For the reading public to rediscover the joys of science fiction, sf authors need to climb out of their ivory towers and start entertaining readers.
Peter, Bournemouth, UK
I like Lloyd Biggle Jr.'s statement about the matter: "Given a bunch of people in a sewer, mainstream literature will write in loving detail about the people who stay there. SF will write about those trying to get out."
James Jones, Des Moines, USA/Iowa
Hear, hear!
I wish you'd have mentioned a few of the sterling female science fiction writers since Shelly, though.
Dan Krashin, Seattle, Washington
Fiction,whether SF or literary,is a work of imagination and it should be evaluated purely by its capacity to engage our imagination.The mischief is actually done by academicians who have to produce theses and papers and therefore categorise every form of fiction neatly to prey upon it for specialisation.Specialisation knocks all excitement out of literature and works which are otherwise dull and drab are raised to the status of literary masterpieces.it is an in-house thing.Those who read literature to be transported to the imaginative world created by its author love good SF as any other good fiction.
Suresh Dogra, Batala, India
I just finished Gardner Dozois' anthology of SF (24th ed). The problem with SF: so much of it is bad writing. More than half of the writing in the anthology is flat: cardboard characters, no plausible motivation, simplistic story lines, etc. Very few SF writers can write good non-SF. SF's bad reputation isn't the genre classification; it's the poor writing.
Andreas Ramos, Palo Alto, California, USA
Best definition I know of (good) science fiction comes from Theodore Sturgeon, whose stories so exemplified it - "A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content. "
Ted Reynolds, Ann Arbor, MI 48105
I was expecting to see the Dune series by Frank Herbert referenced here. It is a cult classic at least and his son has done an admirable job extending the works based on his father's extensive outlines.
Carlette Whitesides, Mount Olive, USA/ North Carolina
I agree with the overall thrust of this piece, but I think Mr. Appleyard's definition of science fiction as the literature that "deals with the effects of scientific insight and technological application" is too broad.
Is there any post-Enlightenment literature that doesn't? Perhaps science fiction does so in a way more explicit than other genres, but to the degree that a work of fiction reflects upon the world in which the author lives, dealing with the effects of scientific insight and technological application is unavoidable.
Technological rationality is the substrate of experience in the industrialized world. Every time we make a decision on the basis of empirical considerations, that is an expression of the impact of scientific insight.
Maybe what Mr. Appleyard means is that SF refers to works that make effects of scientific insight and technological application the central theme. But even this may be inadequate for any good story is, above all, about human experience.
Simon, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Bob Shaw must have a mention - great near-future scenarios, like regular people with personal flight backpacks or interactive contact lenses. He can take a simple scientific idea and work through all its applications. He also wrote the very funny 'Who Goes Here' and it amazes me that this has not been made into a movie.
Diane, Sutton,
Another early SF story that is too often forgotten - EM Forster's "The machine stops". I'm not sure what prompted him to write it, but if you ever worry about the ultimate end of all this interconnectivity and "cocooning", this story will confirm your fears. It's free to read online, folks!
Ford, Sydney,
One of the best and most profound "hard" SF series today is The Man-Kzin Wars, edited and conceived by Larry Niven and now running to a 12-volume saga. It is the ingenius and well-researched story of a future pacifist humanity encountering aggressive aliens and the slow growth of empathy between them. Full of ideas. The authors (including the late great Poul Anderson) are among the best in the genre.
Kevin Dunn, Perth, WA, Australia
This is a open secrete that mataphysical novels have great value in literary world. Science fiction, detctive novel ,or any other kind of fiction people are not giving so much value.
People are ardent admirer of Dostoevsky,Tolstoy,Shakespear because these writer touch human mind. Metaphysical question are more deed,moreimportant then science.,
Science only improve our mundane life but mataphiysical question satify our spiritual quest.
Mundane life is never satify our mind. we want some thing more from life,we can get some solace from literatury novelist
Ramesh Raghuvanshi, Pune 411030, Maharastra[India]
Excellent article. For a recommendation i'd suggest folk not normally SF fans try Bruce Sterlings books.
D Rorke, Bristol, UK
I have always loved SF--I still go back and read Childhood's End...had a dream once in high school about drinkable books, as an artist, made "canned" Alice in Wonderland and Brave New World. Now I just have trouble remembering the names of short stories I read when I was young. SF can impress upon a person throughout their whole life and thus affect what they create for this world. I feel sorry for those who do not listen.
Lori Baker, Kansas, United States
Lori Baker, Overland Park, KS, USA
Great article, Bryan. May I suggest you take a look at Charles Robert Wilson for shingly-beach science fiction that is wonderfully readable at the same time?
Janet, Ottawa, Canada
I absolutely agree with you , Juliet. And if SF is still despised, then we fantasy authors are even further off the radar, supposedly writing poorly-penned stories for uncritical women or blood and gore for Neaderthals.
Glenda Larke, selangor, malaysia
An excellent article. Just a shame that Brian Aldiss' remark about fantasy perpetuates the outdated misconception that it's a literature of consolation. Contemporary fantasy goes way beyond this, in so many directions, just as modern SF goes way beyond rayguns and rocketships.
Juliet E McKenna, Oxford,