"softer" with less reliance on hard science.
Today, SF has dozens of pigeonholes: hard, soft, military, sociological, space opera, cyberpunk, steampunk, postcyberpunk, feminist, alt. history, new weird.
Douglas Adams was a genre on his own. Original SF is truly creative – it makes something which has never existed before, and maybe never will.
Despite a nascent academic interest in SF, the bad smell of pulp lingered, and the great Kurt Vonnegut suffered for his art.
He wrote: "I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since (I wrote Player Piano), and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal." Vonnegut made a valid point. Any published SF author can tell of prejudiced, sneering critics who know – before even reading the opus under review – that it's vulgar, sub-literate trash with clumsy dialogue and wooden characters, appreciated only by 14-year-old junior sex maniacs.
The defence against such critics is (Theodore) Sturgeon's Law: Ninety per cent of SF is crap, but so is ninety percent of everything else. Susan Sontag wrote in The Pornographic Imagination that porn and SF are both trying to achieve: "disorientation, and psychic dislocation."
She called SF: "a somewhat shady subgenre with a few first-rate books to its credit." One might fairly apply Sontag's assessment to a list of every Litfic novel ever written, in support of Sturgeon.
The victims of ignorant crits huddle in the genre ghetto. To use a political metaphor, they're inside the tent pissing out.
They badmouth Litfic, and comb the media for comically ignorant statements which they send to SF encyclopedist Dave Langford's Ansible site, for posting under the headline: "As Others See Us".
But if popular success comes to an SF author... Suddenly she's outside the tent pissing in.
The stench of pulp is no longer upon her pages, and people who wouldn't touch a squalid paperback with an alien's pedipalp are lapping up her uber-trendy Speculative Fiction.
It's so cool, it's mentholated! These days you may be reading old-fashioned trash without knowing it, in the form of lahnee "SpecFic".
Also pissing in are the practitioners of "Slipstream". These authors use off-the-peg worlds or situations invented by someone else.
An outworn postapocalyptic trope imagined in detail during the 1940s is hailed as "achingly beautiful" and original – when dressed up in portentous, steroid-pumped King James-approved prose by Cormac McCarthy.
Slipstreamers of note are Mesdames Jeanette (The Stone Gods)Winterson and Margaret (Oryx and Crake) Atwood. Despite accepting an SF award, Ms Atwood insists that she doesn't write about "talking squids in outer space".
As for Hollywood, it adds bells and whistles to slipstream. Avatar is highly original – to anyone who has never read Call me Joe by Poul Anderson, or The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin.
One theft is plagiarism – two is research!
Now let's throw out some more chaff and get down to the real goodness.
I use an acid test for true SF, akin to the “erection of the small dorsal hairs” by which Nabokov recognised great writing. Here's a quote from a well-respected lady who had just experienced a buzz from a good book: “I don't suppose that I have understood more than a small part – all the same, I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you – as one does those who reach what one has aimed at."
Virginia Woolf wrote that to the philosopher Olaf Stapledon after grappling with his scientific romance Star Maker; she was elated by the mental perspectives the book had unveiled. What she was feeling was the SF "sense of wonder" – of a new world opening up in the head, a discovery, an expanded view of an intoxicating universe and humankind's place in it. For me, the sense of wonder is what makes a true SF story, and that's the tightest definition of the genre I can find. Nabokov (a scientist who dabbled in SF) said that writers can be storytellers and teachers, but the best are also enchanters. Sturgeon's top 10 per cent of authors can do all of that; entertain, educate – and hold the reader spellbound, caught up in the wonder.
Tom Learmont is a newspaperman by day. His first SF was published in a school magazine in 1954, after teachers had censored the part about a trisexual creature from the planet Ysprot. In later years his Afro-socio-politico-sexual fantasy After the Eclipse (Discobolus 2004) won the Sanlam Literary Award. Light Across Time (Kwela 2011) continues to evoke a sense of wonder in some readers, and a blank expression in others. In the pipeline is the fabulous Radium Tales, which is mainly about drinking Tassenberg in Orange Grove down on Louis Botha Avenue while telling wicked lies.
to its credit."
One might fairly apply Sontag's assessment to a list of every Litfic novel ever written, in support of Sturgeon.
The victims of ignorant crits huddle in the genre ghetto. To use a political metaphor, they're inside the tent pissing out. They badmouth Litfic, and comb the media for comically ignorant statements which they send to SF encyclopedist Dave Langford's Ansible site, for posting under the headline: "As Others See Us".
But if popular success comes to an SF author... Suddenly she's outside the tent pissing in.
The stench of pulp is no longer upon her pages, and people who wouldn't touch a squalid paperback with an alien's pedipalp are lapping up her uber-trendy Speculative Fiction.
It's so cool, it's mentholated! These days you may be reading old-fashioned trash without knowing it, in the form of lahnee "SpecFic".
Also pissing in are the practitioners of "Slipstream". These authors use off-the-peg worlds or situations invented by someone else.
An outworn postapocalyptic trope imagined in detail during the 1940s is hailed as "achingly beautiful" and original – when dressed up in portentous, steroid-pumped King James-approved prose by Cormac McCarthy.
Slipstreamers of note are Mesdames Jeanette (The Stone Gods)Winterson and Margaret (Oryx and Crake) Atwood. Despite accepting an SF award, Ms Atwood insists that she doesn't write about "talking squids in outer space".
As for Hollywood, it adds bells and whistles to slipstream. Avatar is highly original – to anyone who has never read Call me Joe by Poul Anderson, or The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin.
One theft is plagiarism – two is research!
Now let's throw out some more chaff and get down to the real goodness. I use an acid test for true SF, akin to the “erection of the small dorsal hairs” by which Nabokov recognised great writing.
Here's a quote from a well-respected lady who had just experienced a buzz from a good book: “I don't suppose that I have understood more than a small part – all the same, I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you – as one does those who reach what one has aimed at."
Virginia Woolf wrote that to the philosopher Olaf Stapledon after grappling with his scientific romance Star Maker; she was elated by the mental perspectives the book had unveiled.
What she was feeling was the SF "sense of wonder" – of a new world opening up in the head, a discovery, an expanded view of an intoxicating universe and humankind's place in it. For me, the sense of wonder is what makes a true SF story, and that's the tightest definition of the genre I can find.
Nabokov (a scientist who dabbled in SF) said that writers can be storytellers and teachers, but the best are also enchanters. Sturgeon's top 10 per cent of authors can do all of that; entertain, educate – and hold the reader spellbound, caught up in the wonder.
Tom Learmont is a newspaperman by day. His first SF was published in a school magazine in 1954, after teachers had censored the part about a trisexual creature from the planet Ysprot. In later years his Afro-socio-politico-sexual fantasy After the Eclipse (Discobolus 2004) won the Sanlam Literary Award. Light Across Time (Kwela 2011) continues to evoke a sense of wonder in some readers, and a blank expression in others. In the pipeline is the fabulous Radium Tales, which is mainly about drinking Tassenberg in Orange Grove down on Louis Botha Avenue while telling wicked lies.
The SF "sense of wonder" - of a new world opening up in the head, a discovery, an expanded view of an intoxicating universe and humankind's place in it.
Reviewers and award juries often cast this wide net over works that do not qualify for the SF label . . .
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