When I recently took a spin through the science fiction section at Borders Books in Holyoke, I realized that, almost against my will, my pace quickened. I cast a sidelong glance or two at nearby patrons, tried not to linger too long on the cover with the exploding spaceship and the bright blue princess. I felt like someone casing the video store before plunging into the unsavory closet at the back marked “adult.”
As a longtime reader of science fiction—I never felt the call of fantasy, save for a necessary foray into J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—I’m used to some of the sensationalist trappings of the genre. I didn’t mean to sneak around at Borders, exactly. It’s just that the other writerly context I’m most used to, the world of literary academia, doesn’t really understand the urge to take in row after row of garish covers with futuristic fonts in search of the rare and gleaming gem: a book of speculative fiction that transcends all those robots and rayguns.
When SF (the preferred nomenclature) is good, it’s just as good as the acknowledged classics of the Western canon. Sometimes, it’s even better than some of that canon, as in the case of Stanislaw Lem’s futuristic metafictional escapades.
Don’t look for that to be conventional wisdom among Joyce scholars. My SF twitchiness I chalk up to the intolerance of those who think a clear and shining line demarcates the border between “literature” (worthy) and “genre fiction” (best left unmentioned). Their judgments, in the end, are half-baked.
That’s not just because so many examples of “literature” that clearly qualifies as science fiction can be found—what is Kurt Vonnegut’s work, if not SF?—but also because the divide is a fairly recent invention.
When I spoke to local fantasy (and literary) author Robert V.S. Redick for the feature in this issue called “Sailing Off the Map,” he put a finer point on the genre divide: “For me, fiction is fiction and the fact of its split is artificial, whatever the origin. If you look at the oldest stories, there was no divide between the fantastic and the non-fantastic,” Redick says. “We couldn’t very well throw the Odyssey into the genre category and look down at it.
“I have a strong suspicion that it’s as much about marketing as anything else. Are marketing structures responding to readers’ tastes, or are readers’ tastes responding to marketing?”
Marketing as a large-scale industry is a quintessentially 20th-century invention, and SF is a genre that, in parallel with humanity’s headlong pursuit of space travel, came into its own in that century. It is in large part, I believe, the demands of book marketing and the need for maximizing the dollars squeezed out of the pages of SF that have given rise to what the literati rightly find objectionable about the genre and its cousins: the extremes where plot and cool idea override vital concerns like character development and pursuit of higher-minded questions.
Marketing efforts have found their mark with those extremes: readers who often don’t have an interest in niceties like character. Redick says he defines the difference in readers in terms of a primary interest in language versus a primary interest in the big idea of the story.
Scholars, unsurprisingly, don’t agree on just what brought about the rise of “popular fiction.” Some say the Modernists of the 1920s retreated from the newly educated millions (particularly in Britain) by becoming unreachably esoteric. Whether that broad-brush treatment is fair, those scholars have a point—Ezra Pound, after all, published cantos for English-speaking readers that included Chinese characters. It was a move that undeniably narrowed readership, whether he meant to scare off the uneducated or not.
Others point to the 19th-century “penny dreadful” in Britain and the “dime novel” in America as the antecedents of comic books and of “popular fiction” like SF in the 20th century. It’s an obvious lineage when you peruse a few of their melodramatic and cartoonish covers. It certainly appears true that those early works, published on cheap paper, were aimed at people with less money, which usually meant less education.
Now that the publishing industry has courted or maybe even created categories of writing for a readership with easier demands, those categories are not likely to go away.
Perhaps it’s not too much to hope for, however, that the grocery store end caps full of vampire fiction might sport the odd copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and that the literary section might yield the occasional volume of Philip K. Dick. Both sides of the ginned-up divide could use that kind of energy.