Returning to Reflect
After I posted the rant about "the literary establishment", I was away from the internet for a few days, and then I returned to discover it had garnered quite a bit of comments, not just here, but elsewhere. Some of the comments, disagreements, agreements, and discussion interested me quite a bit, and I thank everyone who contributed. (Most people kept a more thoughtful and civil tone than I did in the post, which I'm also grateful for.)
I've spent some time thinking about why it is that I responded so vehemently to the article in NYRSF. A lot of discussion ended up focusing on The Road, but it wasn't really the statements about The Road that sparked my ire -- mostly, I think it was that Sanford's article hit multiple areas of sensitivity for me all at once. What I realized when reading all the commentary about what I and others had said was that there are a number of topics related to the perception of science fiction/fantasy outside of the active community of self-identified readers of SF that I enjoy seeing discussed with an awareness of all the different sorts of complexity involved. When that complexity seems to be ignored, I get annoyed, because what I really want is for somebody to answer questions I don't have answers to, because I lack the knowledge and experience to dig into them.
I don't intend to beat the discussion into the ground -- I've pretty much said what I have to say -- but I want to offer a couple points of clarification. My argument was mostly with the idea of a "literary establishment" and a "literary elite", but I didn't mean to somehow imply I think all books are treated equally by editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers, reviewers, teachers, and readers. That would be an idiotic argument, and though I am fully capable of making idiotic arguments, I hope I didn't make that one. It's the differences that really hold my fascination, in fact, which is why I think I got so testy with an article that I perceived to be simplifying things horribly.
I also think science-fiction-as-science-fiction is in an interesting moment, one where, yes, many topics primarily (but not exclusively) the province of SF over the past sixty or seventy years are often not being identified by writers, marketers, or readers as SF. (Books for teens should also be a part of this discussion.) In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and, especially, Starboard Wine, Samuel Delany posited the idea that the basic difference between science fiction and other types of prose is a difference of subject/object relationship rather than of content -- that SF privileges the object, whereas other types of writing since the 19th century privilege the subject. If this was true, is it still? What are the different forces at play in the careers of such writers as George Saunders, Aimee Bender, and Kelly Link -- or, for that matter, Ursula LeGuin, Nalo Hopkinson, and Lucius Shepard? What are the systems and forces that came together to make such a general success of The Road ... or Harry Potter? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Those of us who feel obsessively drawn to these questions, perhaps against our better judgment, would do well to avoid generalizations and probe carefully into the contradictions, exceptions, surprises, histories, orthodoxies, and assumptions of the topic. That's a reminder as much for myself as for anybody else.
I've spent some time thinking about why it is that I responded so vehemently to the article in NYRSF. A lot of discussion ended up focusing on The Road, but it wasn't really the statements about The Road that sparked my ire -- mostly, I think it was that Sanford's article hit multiple areas of sensitivity for me all at once. What I realized when reading all the commentary about what I and others had said was that there are a number of topics related to the perception of science fiction/fantasy outside of the active community of self-identified readers of SF that I enjoy seeing discussed with an awareness of all the different sorts of complexity involved. When that complexity seems to be ignored, I get annoyed, because what I really want is for somebody to answer questions I don't have answers to, because I lack the knowledge and experience to dig into them.
I don't intend to beat the discussion into the ground -- I've pretty much said what I have to say -- but I want to offer a couple points of clarification. My argument was mostly with the idea of a "literary establishment" and a "literary elite", but I didn't mean to somehow imply I think all books are treated equally by editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers, reviewers, teachers, and readers. That would be an idiotic argument, and though I am fully capable of making idiotic arguments, I hope I didn't make that one. It's the differences that really hold my fascination, in fact, which is why I think I got so testy with an article that I perceived to be simplifying things horribly.
I also think science-fiction-as-science-fiction is in an interesting moment, one where, yes, many topics primarily (but not exclusively) the province of SF over the past sixty or seventy years are often not being identified by writers, marketers, or readers as SF. (Books for teens should also be a part of this discussion.) In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and, especially, Starboard Wine, Samuel Delany posited the idea that the basic difference between science fiction and other types of prose is a difference of subject/object relationship rather than of content -- that SF privileges the object, whereas other types of writing since the 19th century privilege the subject. If this was true, is it still? What are the different forces at play in the careers of such writers as George Saunders, Aimee Bender, and Kelly Link -- or, for that matter, Ursula LeGuin, Nalo Hopkinson, and Lucius Shepard? What are the systems and forces that came together to make such a general success of The Road ... or Harry Potter? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Those of us who feel obsessively drawn to these questions, perhaps against our better judgment, would do well to avoid generalizations and probe carefully into the contradictions, exceptions, surprises, histories, orthodoxies, and assumptions of the topic. That's a reminder as much for myself as for anybody else.
