Speculative Fiction vs Science Fiction
September 04 2009 — JA
Margaret Atwood’s latest novel Year of the Flood is about to be released in Australia and I will probably be one of the first through the door at Readings when it hits stores on October 1. I have long admired Atwood’s writing, particularly The Handmaid’s Tale, which was utterly devastating and utterly beautiful in its totality. Yet while reading through the latest press, I was reminded of a rather prickly debate that has followed Atwood throughout much of her career – namely the fact that she has always maintained she writes ‘speculative fiction’ rather than SF. The difference, she claims, is that ‘science fiction has monsters and spaceships’ while speculative fictions deals with things that could really happen.
Year of the Flood will continue the ravaged, dystopian world of Oryx and Crake, a novel that imagined a civilisation brought to its knees by the desires of science and commerce and genetic engineering. Atwood maintains that both books are not SF: ‘Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians.’
Such comments have offended many loyal SF fans, who have accused Atwood of being a literary snob. They claim that the only reason she wants to maintain these delineations is so that she can sell to a wide mass market (as opposed to a genre-based one) and so that she can win prizes. Interestingly, both Oryx and Crake and The Handmaid’s Tale were shortlisted for the Booker, a rare feat for an SF-themed novel. In a recent review of Year of the Flood, Ursula Le Guin also weighed into the debate:
To my mind, The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that's half prediction, half satire… This arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.
In 2005, Atwood admitted that she does dabble in science fiction occasionally. However it is evident that she still prefers to see speculative fiction and SF as almost separate or parallel genres. Others in the blogosphere seem to use the terms interchangeably, and China Mieville likes to say that he writes ‘weird fiction’ for different reasons altogether (but that’s another kettle of fish). So where then do all these labels leave us? Are they a help or a hindrance? Does the term speculative fiction provide a useful bracket with which to classify more ‘literary’ works or does it damage the reputation of SF, which has long struggled to prove that it is more than just a mire of aliens and robots?
I am not an avid SF reader, but I have noticed lately that some of my favourite books hark from that tradition, such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Steven Amsterdam’s The Things We Didn’t See Coming, and Cormac McCathy’s The Road (I love that these works lure you into a world you think you know, only to underscore it disturbingly with darker, futuristic themes). All these novels borrow from SF to varying extents – organ donation, apocalyptic futures, violent pandemics, clones – yet they are not really science fiction in the classical sense. Never Let Me Go has shades of the English boarding school narrative, the childhood memoir, and The Road echoes stories of the desperado, the journey narrative. China Mieville’s The City and The City, which I have no yet read but want to, opens almost like a detective or crime novel. In my mind, I still see these books coming under the broad umbrella of science fiction. It’s just that some are more deeply embedded in traditional SF culture, whereas others overlap with other genres and work as hybrid forms (the ‘literary SF novel’ if you like).
I’m curious to know what others think – where for example would you place the work of Atwood, Mieville, J.G. Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut, James Bradley’s The Deep Field or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four?
Comments
I'm with Atwood: genre science fiction can be an unlovely backwater of nerd-escapism, gadgetgasmic gunbattles fought by fourmulaic ciphers. Literary SF – whatever the "S" means - Le Guin, Atwood, Ballard, David Mitchell – is a very different thing. There's a lot more to write about when you free yourself from the constraints of the here and now, and whether you're South American and magical or transatlantic and speculative, it's more interesting than tenured academics writing about their boring affairs.
However, I also share Le Guin's irritation at the attention given to Cormac McCarthy's discovery of intelligent apocalyptic SF in The Road.
"Atwood maintains that both books are not SF: ‘Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians.’" Yes, she's either being a snob or she's just silly. The implication is that all SF consists of crass space opera. Obviously, that's not the case. The problem with Michael's argument above is that it's entirely circular. If you argue the difference between science fiction and literary SF in terms of the first being formulaic, well, by definition, the latter will be more interesting. So what do you say about someone like Gene Wolfe? Philip K. Dick? HP Lovecraft?
Handmaid's Tale is one of the most straightforward works of genre dystopian science fiction I've ever read. Those who think that science fiction is about space monsters have read very very little - probably the bulk, or at least a very large percentage, of the genre is dystopia. In fact many critics claim that all science fiction is dystopia, some just have monsters for effect. And if Atwood escapes the ghetto due to the technicality, then it is only a technicality. (Need I also mention Iain M Banks who actually does write dystopias about space monsters, while being intelligent, thoughtful, and literary).
Claiming that her work is based around what could happen and therefore not science fiction is bizarre, as this is exactly what the core of science fiction is about. I can think of dozens of science fiction novels that have a better chance of happening than anything written by Atwood.
Basically, I don't think she can have it both ways - I would be very impressed if she helped to free us from the constraints of genre, but instead she simply denigrates the same genre she is emulating. She is a self-hating science fiction writer.
Her novels do have merit, but I do wish she would shut up about this.
This is why I like and use 'SF' as a pleasantly ambiguous term for all of that fiction which imagines a future or alternate world in a style that's somewhere on the spectrum between rational extrapolation (science) and pragmatic, shrewd, canny specuation. The most interesting non-naturalist writing mixes the rational/inductive thinking with the pragmatic.
I do tend to agree with Atwood (who is neither a snob nor silly!) that science fiction, for all its literary merits, is socially coded in the ways she suggests. I'm sure she's also still conscious that the public idea of reading science fiction is still very much that it's a masculine pursuit. Right now I'm in the middle of teaching a subject on 20th century women writers, to mainly women students, and almost every day I hear a student say 'I'm not interested in science fiction usually, but I really like this Lisa Tuttle / Joanna Russ / Octavia Butler ! (etc.) They've been put off reading science fiction because they think it's not for women.
But don't you think she is actually perpetuating the stereotype that science fiction is a 'masculine pursuit', a stereotype that denies readers some fantastic authors?
PS Most of my friends who are science fiction fans are women - they're just the type of women who wouldn't study a women writers class. As a teacher, I also very often hear men say 'I'm not usually interested in science fiction.' They don't think it's masculine, just stupid. I wonder what the real statistics are here. Male v female readers of science fiction? Does anyone in the blogosphere have an answer to that one?
"But don't you think she is actually perpetuating the stereotype that science fiction is a 'masculine pursuit', a stereotype that denies readers some fantastic authors?"
I think she's taking the very legitimate position that science fiction has an image problem and as an author it's not her job to solve it.
If the gender roles are reversed you can see how this works. Imagine somebody asking Michael Ondaatje if The English Patient is a historical romance. Imagine he says no, those are about carriages and bonnets and heaving bosoms. It's not an unreasonable thing for him to say and he's not 'wrong', although it is hardly a generous or even accurate description & ignores what's good about the genre.
Also, um what "type" of woman would study a women writers class?
Attwood is being ridiculous, and not only in her complete ignorance of the literary science fiction field.
Her Humpty Dumpty-like redefinition of the term "Speculative Fiction" is supremely irritating. It had a useful meaning before she decided it meant science fiction written by Margaret Attwood, that is the whole of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Alternative History and Weird Fiction all together.
Rebadging the term to suit Attwood's snobbery is insulting to people like Ballard and Le Guin who not only proudly stated they wrote Science Fiction (and Fantasy, and all kinds of genres), but also wrote it better.
I would, and do, read anything written by Margaret Atwood in any genre - poetry, lit crit,essays, reviews and fiction across all genres.
I don't usually read Science Fiction because time is limited and most often, I have found the kind of insight, and aesthetic, I seek in literary fiction.
I think Margaret Atwood's entitled to define the genre of her work as she chooses.
I am the 'type' who studies, and just plain old reads, contemporary women writers and MA occupies a special place in my otherwise non-speculatively inhabited firmament.
Thanks for the comments on this post, and their varied opinions. What's interesting seems to be the ongoing cringe factor - the feeling that SF is neither something people want to own up to reading, or to writing.
I love Atwood and will probably continue to love her books, but I do agree that there is a rigid circularity to her logic. If SF is nothing but Martians and space-ships, then ‘literary’ writers will of course try and distance themselves. Yet no one takes the risk in trying to enlarge the genre, the ‘ghetto’ will remain, and so on and so on.
This discussion reminds me of Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquests short poem prefacing one of their erly "Best SF" collections:
"SF's no good," they bellow till we're deaf. "But this looks good." "Well then, it's not sf."
I suspect Margaret Atwood made her comments because she is aware that a very large number of readers, who haven't read sf, think of it in bad tv and movie terms as comprising monsters, space travel and mad scientists.
Anyone who has read in the field knows it is the real literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, which is why so many so-called "mainstream" or literary writers are now embracing it.
Those who have the prejudice against sf are missing out on many, many seminal writers, including Philip K Dick, Brian Aldiss, Ursula le Guin, J G Ballaard and Jack Vance.
We shoud always remember Sturgeon's Law: 90% of sf is crap, but then 90% of all writing is crap.
Atwood's stated difference between speculative fiction and sci-fi seems like a fine line to me. In fact, over at the Specusphere, a free Australian webzine about the genre of spec-fic, we consider sci-fi to be a sub-genre of speculative fiction, along with fantasy, horror, magic realism and others.
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