Derb on science fiction:
If a great novel is written in the sci-fi idiom, it is at once de-categorized as “sci fi” and re-categorized as “mainstream.” What is “Brave New World,” if not sci-fi? You don’t see it in sci-fi catalogs, though. Even Vonnegut’s sci-fi isn’t sci-fi (mostly) — it’s too well thought of (though not by me).
Sci fi is by definition a low category of literature. A really good novel is by definition mainstream… even if it’s sci-fi.
And in a way, this is right and just. After all, sci-fi readers aren’t looking for high literary merit, and don’t want it, or at any rate don’t much care whether it’s present or not. (Though it is NOT the case that they wouldn’t know it if they saw it. Lots of them — of us — would. It’s just that we don’t always want it.) What a sci-fi reader, in sci-fi-reading mode, wants, is, to quote Isaac Asimov, “those crazy ideas.” At the heart of every sci-fi story is a really cool idea. “Wow! Just imagine! What if…” If it comes attached to literary excellence, as it occasionally does, that’s really neither here not there.
Greatest sci-fi writer of the 20C: Robert A. Heinlein, by a mile.
I have a few theories of my own with regards to why science fiction and fantasy are, deservedly, literary ghettos. Here’s a selection from my essay entitled C.S. LEWIS AND THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION IN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY which will appear in Ben Bella’s forthcoming Narnia anthology.
While character development in science fiction has improved dramatically of late, it is still only the exceptional work that manages to transcend the genre and break out of the ghetto. The disdain for character left a mark on the genre which lasts to this day. Almost to a man, the writers of the Golden Age were secular humanists, and they felt as strongly about the deleterious effects of religion on collective human development as did Sigmund Freud with regards to the individual. Their antipathy towards all forms of traditional religion in favor of a dogmatic faith in the scientific method cast science fiction into an artistic ghetto from which it has not yet even begun to escape….
While sufficient evidence exists to reject the idea that only a true believer is capable of writing accurately about his faith, it is true that presenting a reasonable and believable image of a religious individual presents a greater challenge to one who has no experience of such strange beings and therefore lacks even the most basic information about them. One would not expect one who knows nothing of math beyond addition and subtraction to write a convincing portrayal of calculus, after all. And while one may no more believe in aliens than in Jesus Christ, a survey of the current literature suggests that far more thought typically goes into depictions of the former than into those who profess to believe in the latter.
Compare, for example, the vast difference between the guilt-racked seducer of Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” and the foam-flecked fundamentalists that haunt mediocre short stories in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine like clockwork cartoon bogeymen. Is it any wonder that the science fiction and fantasy writer’s pretense to literary status is scoffed at by those familiar with Dostoevsky, Goethe, and Tolstoy?
I write this, of course, as one quite content to be playing on the dirt floor of one of the ghetto’s less palatial residences. And speaking of which, this is apparently going to be that upon which the book should not be judged.
