How the world changes!
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Oct 032009
I think this is the first time I have ever seen someone claim that science fiction used to be mainstream and isn’t anymore!
John Mullan, Naughtie’s fellow judge for this year’s prize and professor of English at University College London, said that he “was not aware of science fiction,” arguing that science fiction has become a “self-enclosed world”.
“When I was 18 it was a genre as accepted as other genres,” he said, but now “it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.”
via Science fiction author hits out at Booker judges | Books | guardian.co.uk.
27 Responses to “How the world changes!”
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Mullan has a point. While it’s true that SF tropes have been imported wholesale into the mainstream, U.K. bookshops do now tend to isolate SF in physically separate spaces, and general bookshop customers are nervous of entering them. Maybe that’s not so in the U.S., but it happens in the bookshop I work in and I have seen it in plenty of others.
He’s also entirely correct in saying that publishers don’t submit S.F. for the Booker. They don’t submit many other genres either, because the Booker is almost universally seen as a “Mainstream” prize. Also, “Mainstream”, in U.K. publishing terms, is just as much a genre as S.F. or Crime. It’s nothing like America, where the mainstream is just general fiction. In the U.K., “Mainstream” is pretty much limited to what used to be called “the Hampstead Novel”, plus that segment of current fiction produced by ex-British Colonies that conform to certain expectations of a “Hampstead” readership.
I suspect there’s a subtext there if you read between the lines, but I honestly can’t directly see it. On the other hand, it is also possible that he’s just an idiot, but who knows?
Damn, I need to run back to my 90’s High School classroom and explain to the 5 students in our Sci Fi Lit class that we were mainstream! Screw all those jerks taking Sports Lit just so they could take field trips to Brewers baseball games!
British University English professors are eclectic in their tastes to the point of irrationality.
My professor at Liverpool University was openly scathing of anything “modern”. He defined modern as after about 1500.
Science fiction wasn’t even considered literature by most of them when I did my degree. There was no scope to study it as part of an English Lit course at all.
“Literary” has become a genre of its own with some good books and some bad books but all of them written in a style approved as literary where a work of genuine human insight that fits into another category is dismissed: graphic novel, horror, romance, sci fi.
To some extent it’s a money-go-round. People judging “literature” are usually either writing, teaching or publishing in what is a very narrow sub-category of human written thought.
[facepalms] I cannot ever remember a time when English professors as a class thought SF was mainstream. They’ve *always* looked down their noses at it, in my experience.
Whoa.
So Raph,
Is your objection to the statement that SF was once mainstream, or the statement that it isn’t any longer? I don’t know anything about book sales figures.
Clearly, an expert in a language is not necessarily an expert in communication.
Man, that’s pretty crazy, considering that Science Fiction is relatively young in terms of mainstream acceptance. I wonder how old that guy is, as there’s only a narrow band in which it’d even make sense to say that, accuracy aside.
My reading of what he said is this: he was making the same-old stereotypical claim about SF (closed society of obsessive nerds), but, being a clever academic, he knew that this was the same-old stereotypical claim, so he dressed it up to sound like a new development.
This way he gets to sound insightful rather than merely prejudiced. 😉
To be fair to him though, the stereotype is probably just what he found himself blurting out under the duress of having a journalist’s microphone stuck in his face, and he recovered the best he could. (Anyone who has been interviewed probably knows what that feels like…)
Either way, I would guess there isn’t a deeply-reasoned argument to support this version of literary history, so probably we are making too much of it. 😉
The odd thing is that the direct opposite holds true with regard to the dozen or so bookstores that I frequent. All of the ones I go to now are general bookstores which have a sci-fi section that’s just another row or two of shelves. There used to be a specialty sci-fi bookstore here, but Amazon killed it off.
Maybe it’s different in England, or maybe he thinks Barnes & Noble is the hall of the devil or something.
If only we had access to historical sales data divided by genre we might be able to figure out whether Mullan’s statement holds any water. Without that, it seems to me that each of us have only our own preferences to guide us. We each see the world through the filter of our preferences and those of the people we know (or know about). Without access to statistical data, it is dangerous to draw conclusions about general phenomena based on our personal experiences. To Mullan, SF was once mainstream and is no longer; to Koster, it is a different story. Which of them is right cannot be determined through their personal experiences. We are missing data and can therefore only arrive at the truth by guessing.
“it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.”
At DragonCon, Worldcon, ComicCon, etc. – where a professor of English is not necessarily treated like the preeminent authority. To say it’s a “self-enclosed world” is for Mullan to admit that he’s ill-equipped to pass judgment on a genre that’s passed him by. Sci-fi, more than any other genre, has it’s own literary establishment and really doesn’t need the Booker Prize. We just have to loose the inferiority complex because the emperor has no clothes.
Maybe he means that it’s become sort of sort of self-contained buzz word genre and that it used to be any sort of creativity was possible and didn’t have to belong to one particular category or another? Or maybe he’s just talking rubbish 🙂
John Mullan, MA, PhD
Professor of English
Research interests: eighteenth-century fiction, particularly Defoe, Richardson and Sterne; literature and commerce in the eighteenth century; the history of reading.
Being a professor does not make one worldly wise in all subjects… this guy is stuck in the Eighteenth Century.
T.
I always have a hell of a time tracking down Kurt Vonnegut in the bookstore. I always look in the Science Fiction section, because Kurt Vonnegut wrote science fiction. But apparently he surpassed some sort of genre boundry, because he’s always shelved with literature or generic fiction rather than where he belongs. I have similar issues with Gregory Maguire’s post-modern deconstruction of Oz, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, even Michael Crichton (before he, like Orson Scott Card, descended into weird political delusions and I stopped reading him).
Genre is an arbitrary distinction, and it seems supremely silly to me to predefine science fiction as being bad fiction, unless it’s good fiction, in which case it’s reclassified as literature (or it gets to be a hundred years old and they move it to “classics”).
You know, it may be that we’re taking him out of context, and the point he’s trying to make really is only that the genre has become more isolated in recent years (in his perceptions). Without the tone of voice, we don’t know if he was sounding aloof or genuinely concerned.
I think SF has been largely been “replaced” by fantasy, i.e. there’s a certain market for “speculative” fiction and SF’s market share has been steadily eroding.
Just look at the phenomenon of Harry Potter … HP has effectively replaced Star Wars as the big “speculative” franchise. I’m not sure if the trend will continue for the next thirty years, though.
Riftstalker: Star Wars is not science fiction, it is fantasy in an interstellar setting.
Star Wars falls under the sci-fi category because that’s the label of the shelf on which stores place the product, the genre used for recordkeeping and in promotions, and the phrase consumers associate with space travel, spaceships, robots, hovercraft, lasers, psionics, aliens, etc. Star Wars has all of that and more. Claiming that Star Wars is not sci-fi is similar to asserting that certain Christians are not real Christians; it’s a preferential argument, one which really has no meaningful, factual validity. Labels are tools that facilitate communication; they should not be points of pride.
“Hovercrafts exist” and “robots are common” are issues of setting/environment, not genre style.
“Because it has space ships it must be science fiction” is just too much over-simplification for my taste, but yes I understand that things have to stay somewhat limited in wider discussions to avoid losing most people (begrudgingly :9).
I just see more differences between Ringworld and Star Wars than Star Wars and Harry Potter. My point in saying so is that HP replacing SW as the big IP of interest doesn’t show a shift from science fiction to fantasy, its just one flavor of fantasy giving way to another. Science fiction, that is fiction within the boundaries of scientific understanding*, does not have and has not had mainstream appeal under that definition.
*(i.e. no “magic” powers like waving your fingers to make people agree with you, seeing into the future, etc.)
Kerri: You’re talking about “hard SF.” That’s just one of many subgenres. Most SF fans probably believe their SF genres are the only SF genres, too.
That doesn’t make any sense. A genre is a system of classification, a criteria for categorizing things. Setting, environment, etc. are certainly part of that criteria.
True but trivial. A genre without an authority is a dog walking without a leash. Without the classification rule per authority, it is meaningless.
Take a typical airport bookstore/magRack/candysump. All sci-f* gets lumped into the same shelf. The driver is shelf space over walkthrough of average customers. It’s a pretty good demographic of middle citizenry. Now look at the neighborhood bookstore/comicbook rack. The driver is genre by content. Here sci-fi (say Arthur C. Clark) and sci-fantasy (What Star Trek is) are separated. A reader of Clark may not care to wade through highly sexual and game-oriented content as typically found in science-fantasy. A hard core gamer reader may not like to be slowed down by explanations of L5 orbitals.
Genre is meaningless without the authoritative rules or properties.
If I write a murder mystery thriller that takes place on a space station, what genre is it? If I tell the exact same story replacing “space station” with “airport”, will I find these books halfway across the store from each other?
Where does Spelljammer go when it has fantasy-inspired races flying through space and across dimensions?
I’ve played an MMO with elves and orcs and I’ve played an MMO with blasters and space flight, but they are both MMOs.
I don’t disagree setting is an element in the equation, but the existence of certain technologies or the fact that it takes place in the future weigh far less in my mind than the thematic direction of the story.
All that said, I know my personal criteria for what goes where isn’t going to change the way a system organized to match the culture-at-large’s expectations works…
…I’m used to that by now :9.
On topic, I was simply pointing out that despite the designation of genre, Star Wars becoming less popular and Harry Potter becoming more popular is less of a genre-appeal shift than simply floating from one flavor of fantasy to another. The larger point is not to attempt to extrapolate trends based on (somewhat) arbitrary designations which lack nuance.
Science-fiction as a genre is not classified by setting. It requires the story or plot to rely on aspects of hard science, as in the examples of Arthur C. Clark and the use of parking orbits. This isn’t a cultural expectation. So functionally, the appeal to genre is meaningless unless the classification rule is explicit. Otherwise, it is Spy vs Spy or authority vs authority (the airport bookstore system vs the book editor system).
Most arguments of semantic distinction or clash are system1 vs system2 arguments. That is one reason the semantic web fails to gain more traction than it has and the terms arguments here fail to find common ground. The distinction of virtual world vs MMO fails as long as there is either a) no dominant authority or b) no explicit and distinctive characteristic that competing authorities agree on. OTW, it is a ‘lips flappin’ in the breeze’ exercise.
I can’t recall ever being in a bookstore that made the slightest effort to seperate science fiction from science fantasy/space opera, and most of them lump in pure fantasy in the same section as well.
Series of novels based on games, movies or television are often shelved in their own section by the name of the franchise, which makes sense because they’re usually written by a variety of different authors and might be difficult to locate otherwise. While these are usually not “hard” sci-fi, that’s not a universal rule.
I’m somewhat sympathetic to the view that science fiction ought to be about the science, on some level, and its effects and consequences on the surrounding society and the characters. The Star Trek universe slips in and out of this definition, depending on the writer and episode (Harlan Ellison, anyone?) Star Wars is fantasy with techno trappings (unless you embrace the midichlorian retcon, which either shifts the frame of reference entirely or just puts some new rhinestones on the old MacGuffin).
I’m not sympathetic to any view that a strict definition of science fiction is a legitimate blunt instrument to bash anything that doesn’t qualify. I’m too old to dismiss genuinely great entertainment because it’s not cerebral enough to impress the elite. I’m losing the guilt over my guilty pleasures.
So I love Star Wars, Star Trek, Clarke, Asimov and Niven, and I regard the drawing of lines in the sand to divide them an interesting but ultimately meaningless pursuit.