Borrowing the “From the Oustide Looking In” title used by David Langford in his Ansible zine, I submit this post from Sam Jordison at the Guardian Book Blog. A few choice quotes:

At the risk of sounding like a nerd, I’m beginning to think science fiction’s actually quite good.

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Science fiction doesn’t get a lot of respect – and quite possibly it doesn’t deserve it.

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There’s something about science fiction that just doesn’t appeal. Even though I’ve long recognised that I’m a bit of a geek, I just find much of it too nerdy. I have a strong negative reaction to all the warp-speed jargon, the masturbatory fantasies about alien sex queens and the frequent intrusion of half-baked mathematical theories.

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You see, when it comes to the genre wars, science fiction is at a very curious disadvantage. As soon as someone writes a really good sci-fi book it nearly always seems to get reclassified as something else.

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Does writing brilliantly preclude Vonnegut et al from the sci-fi genre? Or is it just that there’s so much more to their books than spaceships and aliens? Could it be that most sci-fi is just so bad that reasonable people can’t stand to tar literary heroes like Angela Carter with its brush? Conversely, have I been unreasonably depriving myself of other great sci-fi works for years? Or is it simply the case that I’m barking up the wrong tree and that my approach to literature would be far healthier if I just ignored such semantics and the labelling policies of high street chains?

Filed under: Books

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