On Fri, 21 Nov 1997, Honor Wallace wrote:
> Thanks to everyone for the explanations about the SF/sci-fi difference.
> My two cents, as someone who is very interested in working
> with science fiction (in the creatively critical, rather than
> creatively productive sense (wincing grin)): I've always wondered if it weren't the
> academy itself that perpetuated, or at least pushed, the distinction between good,
> literary science fiction and the arguably more pulpy brand. My university's library,
> which is decidedly *not* geared toward the study of genre fiction, stocks a
> significant number of Delaney works (fictional and non) but has only one Nebula
> Awards collection (and that from '86, I believe). I don't at all mean to imply that the
> Nebula awards are not literary. It's just that, if I were forced to rely solely on the
> resources of my own library, I would find a canonized groups of folks but have
> _very_ little idea of what fans are discovering. In other words, I'm "allowed" to
> write on a certain number of authors who have made it into the repected journals.
>
> Moreover, I suspect that the reason a number of "literary" (gosh, I'm using a lot
> of quotes) authors--Delaney, Russ, Piercy, LeGuin, Wittig--are attractive to the academy
> not because of any literary talents they demonstrate within or without the science
> fiction tradition, but because they so readily yield to the most trendy of critical
> inquiries. Delaney's Lacan-fest in the Neveryon series is I think the most deliberate
> example of this, but there are others. None of this I consider a bad thing--I've enjoyed
> reading all of these authors--but I sometimes experience mild paranoia that the
> academy is attempting to co-opt genre fiction, without conceding it its own set of strengths.
>
> Whew. Sorry so long. Any takers?
>
> Honor
This is definitely true, although I might, at least in part, drop the
negatively connotative "trendy" from your statement. Certain writers
have been canonized--the big four from the golden age (Asimov, Clarke,
Heinlein, Bradbury), the prime feminists (Le Guin, Russ, to a lesser
extent Charnas, Wittig, Piercy) the post-modernist precursors (Dick,
Delany), the prime cyberpunks (Gibson, Sterling), the multicultural
giants (Delany again and Butler) a few others (Herbert, Miller, Tolkien
of course), and these writers get an enormous amount of attention.
PLEASE NOTE BEFORE FLAMING--I'm not saying that these writers don't
deserve an enormous amount of attention--but, sadly, they tend to receive
attention to the exclusion of other writers who are as, or nearly as worthy.
To some extent they represent the writers who, as you suggested, happen to
fit the latest in scholarly trends (I prefer that phrase to trendy
scholarship :). To some extent they represent writers who are more obviously
"literary" than most of their peers. To some extent it's simply a matter
of popularity. Academics in science fiction, rather than chasing what's
trendy, tend to write about the writers they like most. The clear
winners, by the way, in the scholarship derby, are Ursula K. Le Guin and
Philip K. Dick. Someone did a study of scholarly essays a couple of years
back and determined that these two writers had been the subject of more
academic essays than anyone else, by a considerable margin as I
remember. On the other hand, there's very little academic writing about such
enormously talented and diverse current writers as C.J.Cherryh, Kim Stanley
Robinson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Sheri Tepper, Pat Cadigan, Michael
Swanwick and Connie Willis and, if you want to go back a few decades, very
little has been written on the work of such golden age giants as Henry
Kuttner, C.L.Moore, Fritz Leiber, Judith Merril, and Theodore Sturgeon.
Mike Levy
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