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“And that’s my last point about the nature of fandom, and the biggest pitfall. It’s not that we want everyone to agree with us on some superficial level, it’s that we want other people to share our fandom with us, to see the world as we see it. Fans have a strange urge to want their niche to become mass market. If only everyone else read comics, watched sci-fi shows, read fantasy novels, played with toy soldiers, the world would be a better place. Possibly it would…

The shame is, the very act of being a niche is what gives many of these things their appeal. Cult movies get their followings because they are not mainstream. The underground music scene appeals because it hasn’t been commercialised by publishing and marketing interests. Mainstream is, on the whole, about the average, the least offensive, the lowest common denominator. Mainstream is risk-adverse, appealing in a shallow way to a lot of people rather than deeply to a few. Being niche, being geeky, being a nerd is something we have to accept about ourselves, and revel in it. Just because a lot of ‘other people’ like or don’t like some thing does not affect our personal experience. As I’ve said before, quantity is not a quality of its own. Is the weirdo who dresses up like Rincewind and pesters Terry Pratchett any more or less pathetic than the fat bloke wearing his Rooney shirt shouting unheard in a crowd of eighty thousand people?

Wear your anorak with pride!”

GAV

Let’s say that

A) fans of romance books came and demanded that SF fans pay proper respect to the romance genre.

Or that

B) Salman Rushdie himself stated: “I deserve more respect from those arrogant science fiction critics.”

To which you’d reply with a smug

A)”Oh yeah? You and what army?”

and

B) “Sucks to be you.”

You can’t nag the world into “respecting” you. It’s a losing attitude.

Confidence generates respect. Talk, move and act with confidence (preferably of the genuine rather than the fake sort) and respect will come without being asked for.

Here’s an article on Iain Banks in the Times Literary Supplement …. that he writes science fiction is taken for granted.  There are no sneers or even bewilderment.

Love, C.

I think in all three cases there is an element of self-identity grown upon a hard kernal of truth.

Science Fiction needs a minimal amount of disdain from the outside, “mainstream” world to hold true to its own traditions and maintain it’s strong sense of self. The cost of that insurance against assimilation isn’t negligible. It sometimes requires holding on too tight to slights real and imagined. It’s also fundamentally backwards looking and maybe even a touch disempowering, which is ironic given the brilliantly capable, future-oriented builders of worlds who dot the speculative fiction landscape (authors and characters both).

Does the SF world court that distance, if only by refusing to take off our spock ears? I think that’s part of it. Do the pros outweigh the cons? I’m not enough of an insider to judge, but, yeah, maybe so.

Thanks for the link.  I’m not sure if the “Golden Age of SF” is today, but I too disagree with her.  I was immediately reminded of Lev Grossman’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, just coming from a more insider angle.  Instead of “difficult”versus “plot,” we get “voice” versus “story.”    And the angry nerd parting shot is very cliche and seems designed to annoy the reader.  But from the comments I think a good discussion is coming out of it.

“For at least ten years, and more like 20 to 25, the great majority of sci fi writers I’ve run across wouldn’t know a good story if it smacked them in the face, and that’s not the problem, really.  The problem is that the people who were charged with buying and offering the material to the public didn’t know, either.  They knew so little, and were so fixated on their single-minded involvement in the hermetic, endless sci fi community “debates,” that they let the bad “voice” creep in.  They promoted “the voice” as good, gave awards to it, and through the combination of low pay, poor treatment and social cooties-by-association drove off anybody with any sense of storytelling, talent or gift.”

http://blog.bookviewcafe.com/2009/10/27/the-voice-that-killed-sci-fi-as-we-knew-it/

I’ll just say I rather strongly disagree.  If there’s a Golden Age of SF its today.

As Adam Roberts said, “mainstream” is an empty category.  It is an aspirational signifier.  I don’t see folks touting the lastest “mainstream” novel or debating what comprises the “mainstream.” They do argue about “the canon”and such, but that is a slightly different conversation, less about the category of a book and more about whether it qualifies as some rareified example of high literary art.  It is honestly a sort of straw creature that discussants use as an oppositional category to reify their own conception of a genre; it is a fairly empty signifier.

But I also think that Sue Lange’s question needs to be reflected upon: if SFF readers do “disallow experimentation,”we need to ponder why that is so.  I have some thoughts, but that sounds like a good point of departure for a column .

If anyone is interested, I wrote about the notion of genre in a recent column at Forces of Geek: http://tinyurl.com/ykhpglk

Back in the mid-1970s, it seemed like one author a month was renouncing science fiction and going off to the mainstream to get rich and famous and accepted by the New York Literary Establishment.

One by one, every one of them came back (except for Dean Koontz, who found an even more lucrative category).

Why? Simple. They confused “mainsream” with “blockbuster”. Stephen King, Stephanie Meyers, and Tom Clancy write blockbusters. Ditto Koontz. They sell millions, and make millions.

But the average “mainstream” book prints 1,500 hardcovers and its sales rarely justify even a low-level paperback reprint.

– Mike Resnick

When I was at school in the 80′s there was a huge backlash against fantasy (some pointless religious mumbo jumbo) I and a number of my peers got into trouble at school for reading fantasy, I was even summoned into see the headmaster with my parents because I (a dyslexic kid no less) read books. Now I could put that down to my personal bad exerpeinces but last weekend I was at a party where I got castigated by a couple of english teachers for reading scifi and fantasy and because I am trying to get my neice and nephew to read…. apparently I am harming their education by getting them to read rubbish….

Novels are novels, some are good and some aren’t, some are fantastic and great literature others are just pot boilers… Its the quality of the writing that sets them apart not the genre they are written in!

*chokes back laughter*

You’ve been misinformed.

Sf — or I’d have to say “sci-fi” — is held in far greater respect today than it ever remotely has before in any past time.  That that’s not very much is also a fact. 

But generally speaking, you don’t, for the most part, have to hide an sf book in public any more. 

Also, what Andy Wheeler and Adam Roberts said.