Do You Really Want Science Fiction Books To Be More Literary?

That's the title of an article I found on io9.com. It brings up issues that I've found myself thinking about at times, especially when it's too quiet and I'm idle. When I'm done thinking about these things I usually end up with a headache, so I'm taking this as a sign that I should avoid being too idle, and that I should avoid places or situations that are too quiet. Or that I should stop thinking altogether.

An excerpt:

When will "the literary establishment" start taking science fiction more seriously? Everybody from Michael Chabon to David Hartwell wants to know. But would most readers really be happy if science fiction actually became more literary? Here's our list of things that might change about science fiction if it took on more literary pretensions.

I actually find myself disagreeing with Michael Chabon, somewhat, when he claims there's no real difference between literary and genre fiction. I've spent enough time in the literary scene (well, a literary scene) to get a sense that there is such a thing as literary writing. It has its own set of clichés, its own expectations, and its own chosen subject matter. You don't pick up the New Yorker, much less a small lit journal whose name ends in "Review," expecting to see the same kind of thing you'd see in Asimov's. You just don't.

At the same time, there's no one "literary establishment," with a single viewpoint. A couple of years ago, the New York Times Book Review polled 125 critics and authors to decide the best novels of the past 25 years. The winner, Toni Morrison's Beloved, got only 15 votes. Most other selections got only a handful of votes, meaning that nobody could agree on the best works. Not only that, but the list of winning books absolutely screams "lowest common denominator," with an over-representation of boring hacks like John Updike. (My hero Donald Hall spends a whole chapter in his seminal writing handbook Writing Well explaining, pitilessly and irrefutably, why John Updike really is a terrible writer, sentence by sentence.)

And that's the thing: the most literary writing from the "literary world" never really attains much prominence outside of a cloistered scene that talks amongst itself. There are tons of writers who are literary superstars in some context, but they'll never get profiled in Entertainment Weekly or reviewed in the NYTBR, any more than any paperback scifi writer will. In fact, the literary world is a lot like science fiction in that respect. There are literary stars who never break out of the lit ghetto, and then there are some who cross over and become "mainstream." There are people who the Quinnipiac Review will fall over itself to publish, whom you'll never in a million years hear of.

Which is the point, sort of — maybe at some point in the past the term "literary" referred to works, from whatever genre, that had stood the test of time and gained classic stauts. But nowadays "literary" refers to a particular type of writing. It's a genre in its own right, just like science fiction.

"Literary" certainly doesn't mean "good." It's a description for one way in which writing can be good. But something can be literary and not particularly good, and writing can be good without being particularly literary.

I find myself always falling back to "a story is a story is a story". If it works, it works, no matter what label you stick on it. When I think of this, my headache usually lifts a little bit.

The full article here: Do You Really Want Science Fiction Books To Be More Literary?