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What the Booker prize really excludesChina Miéville has conjured a new way of construing the over-
familiar SF vs literary fiction debate
Sarah Crownguardian.co.uk, Monday 1 7 October 201 1 1 7 .56 BST
Estranger … China Miév ille. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
I was up in Cheltenham this weekend at the Literature festival, where I chaired several
events – including one with SF legend Brian Aldiss, still going strong at 86, and calling to
mind in voice and appearance a benign, left-wing John Cleese. When asked by an
audience member why he'd tackled the subject of state-endorsed torture in his 2007
novel, Harm, he explained the novel's political charge on the grounds that "I really do
believe that the people in charge at the minute are - well, shits". Amen to that.
Anyway, my final event on Saturday was with SF-legend-in-the-making China Miéville,
to discuss his latest novel, Embassytown. We talked about the novel for about half an
hour (read it: it's excellent) before the conversation veered onto the evergreen territory
of the Booker prize's wilful neglect of science fiction. It's a well-rehearsed argument (I
went to an event at Cheltenham last year in which Miéville and John Mullan squared off
entertainingly over it), but we ran down the familiar points: SF novels are generally sold
not on their literary credentials but on the ideas they explore; the Booker is a genre
(litfic) award itself, but just doesn't admit it; SF novels DO make it onto Booker shortlists
(Never Let Me Go, Oryx and Crake) but once shortlisted they're not called science
fiction any more (cf Kingsley Amis's oft-quoted distich: "'SF's no good!' they bellow till
we're deaf./ 'But this looks good … ' 'Well, then, it's not SF!'").
It's an endlessly fascinating subject, and the conversation was particularly timely, given
the widely-acknowledged paucity of this year's Booker shortlist - but we didn't really
break new ground until a few minutes before the end of the event, when Miéville made a
point that I found so interesting I wanted to disseminate it further. The real schism, he
suggested, lies not between "litfic" and fantasy/SF, but between "the literature of
recognition versus that of estrangement". The Booker, he said,
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Comments45 comments, displaying Oldest first
and the tradition of, if you like, 'mainstream literary fiction' of which it's the
most celebrated local jamboree, has tended strongly to celebrate the former
over the latter. There's an obvious relation with realist versus non-realist
work (thinking on these lines might help map links between the pulpiest SF
and more celebrated Surrealist and avant-garde work), though the
distinction maps only imperfectly across the generic divide. All fiction
contains elements of both drives (to different degrees, and variably skilfully).
That very fact might be one way of getting at the drab disappointment of, on
the one hand, the cliches of some fantasy and the twee and clunking
allegories of middlebrow 'literary' magic realism (faux estrangement, none-
more-mollycoddling recognition), and on the other at those utterly
fascinating texts which contain not a single impossible element, and yet which
read as if they were, somehow, fantastic (Jane Eyre, Moby-Dick, etc). Great
stuff can doubtless be written from both perspectives. But I won't duck the
fact that at its best, I think there is something more powerful, ambitious,
intriguing and radical about the road recently less feted. I'd rather be
estranged than recognise.
It's a fascinating distinction, and one that also has the neat effect of moving the debate
on from the contentious territory of the SF/litfic turfwar into that of value-neutral
literary theory. As Miéville says, there is nothing inherently superior about recognition
or estrangement, but given that the literature which the Booker traditionally rewards
tends to be of the "ah, yes!" variety rather than what we might term the "oh, my" sort,
does it not seem reasonable that we give long-overdue space to the latter?
ItsAnOutrage2
17 October 2011 7:30PM
I enjoyed this article. It left me with the though that most (all?)
good SF contains points of recognition within a strange
environment. That's how it works. In the same way that many
(most?) works of literary fiction have points of strangeness set
within a recognisable environment.
PaulBowes01
17 October 2011 8:09PM
The trouble with Miéville's distinction is that, as with all attempts
to reduce a complex reality to a simple binary opposition, it starts
to fall apart as soon as we think about it. One of the defining
characteristics of genre writing historically has been that it
departs very rapidly from initial innovation and novelty to
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predictability and formula. The striking similarity of products
within a genre is, after all, what makes a genre recognisable as
such.
Literary fiction, far from being a 'literature of recognition', was
supposed to be a form of avant-gardism, the genre that resisted
generification in favour of continual revolution, permanent
estrangement. It's hard to remember that nineteenth century
realism was once a radical technique, but that was the case.
The problem with the Booker is that the pseudo-literary novel it
claims to champion is a usurper; a complacent, conservative form
that mimics enough of the stylistic tics that people have learned
to associate with literary fiction to pass for it. This is why so
many people argue that 'Booker novel' and even 'literary novel' is
now a generic label: as a matter of practical fact, it is.
I don't think that it's an accident that the rise to prominence of
the Booker in the '80s coincided with the advent of the celebrity
writer and the mega-advance and the effective disappearance of
genuinely exploratory fiction from the British scene. (And before
anybody mentions Mr. Josipovici, or Christine Brooke-Rose, or
even Iain Sinclair - the existence of a few people struggling on the
margins is no substitute for their presence at the centre of debate
and as a living influence on younger writers.)
The Booker moved into the vacant centre in those years and
quietly redefined for the mass audience what constitutes
worthwhile writing. Now it appears that it can't even identify the
best products of the genre it defines. What use does it serve?
And how does Miéville's distinction help us? Science fiction and
fantasy occasionally offer some interesting writing, but in general
they are formally conservative.
Genre fictions have some of the most aesthetically conservative
readers in the literary world. Most genre writers are perfectly
well aware that they risk disappointing their readers'
expectations at their peril, and write their variant of one of the
approved formulas. Generally speaking, genre is not so much a
literature of estrangement as a literature of reassurance. Nobody
should look to it for help.
translated
17 October 2011 8:39PM
Subtle article, and I'm definitely going to read Embassytown. On
another recent consideration of the literary merits (or otherwise)
of SF I'd highly recommend David Lodge's "A Man of Parts". One
of the minor themes running through the book is the somewhat
tortured relationship between H.G. Wells and Henry James.
Lodge knows the work of both writers inside out and at one point
has Wells satirically imagining a Jamesian book called "The Spoils
of Miss Blandish with a plot that didn't begin for 150 pages and
concerned the hero's search for the perfect butler." This
contrasts with Well's own self-consciousness as having a
reputation as the author of not-particularly-literary work.
What Lodge is doing doesn't exactly intersect with the argument
Sarah is making because the contrast he is pointing to is between
a kind of realist writing of Wells and the formalism of James, but
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for my money Wells was very definitely an "oh, my" kind of
writer - despite his lick of interest in formal invention and
because of his politics. After reading Lodge's book I find it
impossible to separate Wells' interest science fiction from his
progressive politics - in particular his early support of women's
suffrage and his attitude to marriage.
In fact, I find it hard to imagine "oh, my" science fiction writing
that doesn't simultaneously imagine a radically different political
future.
translated
17 October 2011 10:20PM
PaulBowes01
Good post. You write: "Literary fiction, far from being a
'literature of recognition', was supposed to be a form of avant-
gardism", which is quite correct, but it's not just literary fiction
that's fallen on hard times - so has the very idea of a political
avant-garde.
It's interesting that the Booker Prize began in 1968, which is one
of the dates often invoked as representing the final death of the
idea of the avant-garde as a co-articulation of art and
politics...maybe there's something to that coincidence.
jareds
18 October 2011 7:53AM
The most telling point to me is Mr. Miéville's reiteration that "lit-
fic" is a "genre" - and, moreover, all these distinctions are as frail
and as theoretical as one wants them to be.
As far as I'm concerned - that's totally fine. The main issue isn't
that the Man Booker ignores other genres, it is that it does so
while claiming to represent the best in all fiction. That's always
going to be a controversial statement and making it while
standing on a (very) narrow platform is bound to earn some
derision.
As to Mr. Bowes statement above:
Science fiction and fantasy occasionally offer some
interesting writing, but in general they are formally
conservative.
Genre fictions have some of the most aesthetically
conservative readers in the literary world. Most
genre writers are perfectly well aware that they risk
disappointing their readers' expectations at their
peril, and write their variant of one of the approved
formulas.
I both agree and disagree. There's some amazing work coming
out of science fiction and fantasy and, if some of the hoary old
tropes still seem dominant at its core, I can only suggest looking
further out at the fringes.
Of course, that shouldn't be the reader's responsibility, which is
why awards like The Kitschies (with criteria of "progressive,
intelligent, entertaining") and the Arthur C. Clarke (with a
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tradition of somewhat radical, category-spanning picks) exist.
Like the Man Booker, these awards seek to elevate the best book
of the year, they just draw from a different pool.
PaulBowes01
18 October 2011 9:17AM
@translated
It's interesting that the Booker Prize began in 1968,
which is one of the dates often invoked as
representing the final death of the idea of the avant-
garde as a co-articulation of art and politics...maybe
there's something to that coincidence.
I'm not sure that I would want to pin it down to a specific date,
but certainly there is a feeling of creative exhaustion in British
experimental or exploratory writing building slowly from the
mid-60s and running through to c.1980 when the whole thing
falls off a cliff in terms of cultural attention. The change in the
culture that began in the Thatcher/Reagan years was horribly
obvious to people who lived through them.
For me the Booker is simply one instance of the astonishing
ability of capitalist institutions to co-opt and de-fang troublesome
elements in a culture - and, where co-optation proves impossible,
to marginalise by ignoring them. And it isn't just a matter of one
prize: as James English has pointed out (The Economy of
Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value),
there has been a massive proliferation of prizes since 1945 that
constitutes an awards regime, with its own momentum and
agenda, that has distorted the creative process.
What is unforgivable is the way that the literary media -
gatekeepers in theory, handmaidens in practice - have been
content to go along with the whole charade. But that's where the
money and the celebrity are.
@jareds
There's some amazing work coming out of science
fiction and fantasy and, if some of the hoary old tropes
still seem dominant at its core, I can only suggest
looking further out at the fringes.
I don't disagree. But note that you yourself suggest that such
work is to be found only at the margins. If even mainstream
SF/Fantasy can't get a look in, what hope for the more radical
work? The Booker is not interested in work that will only ever
have a small audience.
I stand by my contention that most genre writing is formally
conservative. When people talk about the radical aspect of SF
they are usually referring to the content - the ideas - not to the
way in which that content is conveyed. Genuinely radical
experimentation in SF only very briefly surfaced to general
attention in the late '60s and early '70s with writers like J. G.
Ballard, Thomas Disch and Angela Carter, and even then was in
most cases clearly dependent for its innovations on the existing
literary avant-garde. And SF is the most potentially radical
genre: the others are far more formally conservative, as a glance
through the ranks of crime novels will confirm.
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SarahCrown
18 October 2011 9:40AM
thanks for all the comments - fascinating discussion.
@PaulBowes01 I broadly agree. You say
Literary fiction, far from being a 'literature of
recognition', was supposed to be a form of avant-
gardism, the genre that resisted generification in
favour of continual revolution, permanent
estrangement.
and I think you're right - but as you go on to point out later, the
origins of the genre (if we're all agreed we can call it that) have
little to do with what it is now. Experimentalism in litfic is largely
confined to the margins now (though to be fair, perhaps that's
inevitable - the margins are always where change happens).
You then say
Generally speaking, genre is not so much a literature
of estrangement as a literature of reassurance.
Nobody should look to it for help.
And I'd say, again, I can absolutely see your point - but I'd single
out crime fiction rather than SF in relation to it. In crime fiction,
form is central, whereas in SF it isn't - anything, as they say, can
happen.
In my view, the distinction is a helpful one because it redefines
the battleground - we're no longer looking at a straight-up genre
fight, because recognition and estrangement can exist in any
genre (though estrangement may be more likely to be found in
SF). And that I think frees us up to examine the Booker and
where/what it lacks without having first to pick a corner.
@translated
I find it hard to imagine "oh, my" science fiction
writing that doesn't simultaneously imagine a
radically different political future.
I think the best SF - the really premium stuff - does this - pace
Embassytown and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy ...
PaulBowes01
18 October 2011 10:13AM
@SarahCrown
In my view, the distinction is a helpful one because it
redefines the battleground - we're no longer looking
at a straight-up genre fight, because recognition and
estrangement can exist in any genre (though
estrangement may be more likely to be found in SF).
And that I think frees us up to examine the Booker
and where/what it lacks without having first to pick a
corner.
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I've never been much interested in the genre / litfic distinction,
but it appears that others are. The machinery of the book
industry seems designed to perpetuate the distinction, and I'm
afraid some of this comes down to simple snobbishness - a group
of people people elevating one kind of literature above the others,
defending its boundaries and then using their enthusiasm for it as
a badge of superior social status (Bourdieu pretty well wrote the
book on this).
I have a horrible feeling that China Miéville may have reinvented
the critical wheel here - something to do with Rabelais and the
carnivalesque... And there's a strong echo of Brecht and the
Verfremdungseffekt.
But I agree that if these opposed forces are to be seen as real
they have to be seen as being tendencies within a genre rather
than simply a way of redescribing existing genre divisions. I'm
not sure, however, that that takes us further forward, because
it's still a binary opposition, and one term in a binary is typically
validated and the other abjected. China Miéville seems to think
'estrangement' is a value in itself, whereas one of the things I find
tiresome about much fiction is the way in which apparent
estrangement merely delays a final recognition: a mock-
radicality that confirms an underlying conservatism.
Real books are more complicated than this. In fact, the binary
tension usually exists within each book - hence Derrida's insight
about the way that texts contain their own refutations. (Perhaps
the Booker judges might be persuaded to award some fraction of
the prize for 'best estrangement' and withhold the rest on
grounds of 'excessive recognisability'?)
The estrangement / recognition binary also sounds less
interesting if one redescribes it as novelty / familiarity or anxiety
/ reassurance (or even unheimlich / heimlich).
b00le
18 October 2011 10:27AM
Mieville (sorry about the accent) - along with Amis, and
everyone else who has made these points – is quite right. And his
point about 'estrangement' is well taken, if not well-made. For he
overlooks the important truth that much of even the best SF is
often very badly written. It's not just snobbery that makes
mainstream writers and critics look down on us. Mieville's own
books are a case in point: while bursting with ideas, they are also
weighed down by leaden prose full of schoolboy howlers
(danglers, mangled tenses and syntax) as well as perfunctory
plots and wafer-thin characterisation. And many of the SF greats
from the past show the same vices (Asimov, anyone?). They at
least had the excuse that they were writing for a penny a word.
I don't care if I never read another novel about growing up
sensitive, or the breakdown of a love affair or many of the other
'genres' populating the review pages and prize lists, But bad
prose actually hurts, as Tom Stoppard put it in The Real Thing
and much as I love SF, it is rare to find a book that passes the
test of "do I want to read this again?"
Bless the Guardian, at least, for trying to break down the ghetto
walls, even if SF writers have built some of those walls
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themselves.
frustratedartist
18 October 2011 10:36AM
Would be interested to hear more about what Brian Aldiss had to
say, Sarah- he
along with Mike Moorcock are our main surviving veretans from
that maverick period of experimental SF, the 1960s. This quote
from Aldiss to me ties in to Mielville's idea of the 'recognition'
versus 'estrangement' continuum:
“If you want to make money, you don't attempt anything new.
You start a series that can go on and on, whereupon the
publishers don't have any crisis of decision to resolve. I don't
want to work like that. It always seemed to me that one of the
principles of writing is you should enjoy the actual writing, the
feel of something evolving under your fingers, under your keys.
You must try to please yourself, to be your own judge. Often you
fall flat on your face. But there's such pleasure in trying
something that is new, or passes for new.”
Source:
http://www.locusmag.com/2008/Issue01_Aldiss.html
R042
18 October 2011 10:43AM
the very idea of a political avant-garde.
What is a political avant-garde?
Surely once representational democracy has been achieved with
universal franchise, government is ideal?
That's not very avant-garde, the idea has been about for
centuries if not millennia.
ItsAnOutrage2
18 October 2011 10:46AM
PaulBowes01
Genre fictions have some of the most aesthetically
conservative readers in the literary world.
Ouch!
PaulBowes01
18 October 2011 10:59AM
@ItsAnOutrage2
It's an observation, not a criticism as such. There's no obligation
on anyone to seek out challenging work, and reading purely for
entertainment is fine by me. But genre readers, once they've
worked out what they like, do tend to want more of the same:
hence the greater success of writers who produce series of books
rather than stand-alone novels. It would be interesting to see
what proportion of sales attributed to SF, for example, is
contributed by Star Wars / Star Trek / Dr. Who books. Take
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those out and SF might well look like a very minority sport.
As Sarah Crown points out above, conservatism of form is built
into certain genres, crime being the most obvious but romantic
fiction being another. But for every SF writer who chooses the
real freedom that is theoretically available to him/her, there are
a thousand content to harness the same old nag of nineteenth-
century realism to the spaceship of their twenty-first century
ideas.
DamienGWalter
18 October 2011 11:00AM
Science Fiction and Fantasy ask questions about reality. Literary
readers - largely middle class, relatively wealthy, assured in their
social status and cultural identity - don't have much desire to
question the reality around them. Literary fiction is implicitly
about reinforcing the reality of its readers. Fantasy, from our
oldest myths onwards, has always been the bolt hole of those who
are pushed out or under constructed reality.
MCCC
18 October 2011 11:18AM
Going to veer slight OT with my comment as not a SF reader
(unless a couple of Iain M Banks, Christopher Priests and a JG
Ballard can afford me out of town membership?) But it was the
recognition bit I wanted to pick up on. Just that I remember see
the sublime Rose Tremain and Jim Crace talking at Chelters
maybe 10 years ago and it was that point of familiar recognition
(what we're not allowed to call chick lit, thrillers, where there are
rules and stock characters) cf taking you somewhere else
mentally, around which they based their session. In their case
they were applying it to their own work, and neither author can
be accused of writing the same book twice, spanning continents
and centuries as they do. It struck me then as an important
distinction between basically the books I admire and don't mind
been seen out and about with, and the ones I read inside in a
woolly jumper or slap on the kindle. Snob? Maybe but while
genre books continue to be marketed as product rather than as
individual items for consideration they'll never escape a
downgrading by categorisation.
DanHolloway
18 October 2011 11:27AM
@PaulBowes
"the existence of a few people struggling on the margins is no
substitute for their presence at the centre of debate and as a
living influence on younger writers."
Whatever one thinks of the artists in question, this is one aspect
in which the art world has succeeded in a way the literary world
hasn't. With its structure of exhibitions, patrons, and curators, it
has shown itself better able to accommodate without overly-
diluting new waves into the mainstream. True, there will always
be those on both sides who are unhappy (on one edge, those who
say artists have sold out, on the other those who say they have
no place at High Table), but the art world seems able to reach an
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accommodation with itself over these matters ina way the
literary one does not, so that each generation is able to benefit
from the ground-breakers of the generation before.
I don't know why this is - the two things that seem most likely, in
combination, are 1. that art has for centuries run on the master-
school/apprenticeship model so the generational transfer is
somehow hardwired into it and 2. that it is prima facie easier for
the lay ritic to tell when a school of art is new - everyone, even
with no formal training, can see, for example, that there is
something different and vaguely homogenous about Futurism or
Abstract Expressionism, Pre-Raphaelitism or Fauvism. Which
raises the further point that art much more readily organises
itself into schools and movements. There is currently a
fascinating discussion elsewhere on Guardian Books about Oulipo,
and many commentators here will be very familiar with
Brutalism, and aware of Tom McCarthy's International
Necronautical Society, many of whose ideas have shaped his
work, but writers are often embarrassed to be put into groups in
a way thatartists embrace them
PaulBowes01
18 October 2011 11:53AM
@DanHolloway
Whatever one thinks of the artists in question, this is
one aspect in which the art world has succeeded in a
way the literary world hasn't. With its structure of
exhibitions, patrons, and curators, it has shown itself
better able to accommodate without overly-diluting
new waves into the mainstream.
I favour a simple, brutal explanation of this. Artists produce a
limited number of unique works. In a commoditised world,
unique works potentially command a high value, and their
circulation can be organised as a market. Possession of such
artworks conveys high status on the owner: to be a serious art
collector is to be visibly both extremely wealthy and socially
consequent.
The rewards in financial and cultural capital for those who can
succeed in identifying the coming generation of cutting-edge
artists are consequently huge. This process of identification may
involve lending support at the early stage when artists typically
cannot command their own resources (expensive or inaccessible
to the artist, but cheap to the patron): studio space, exhibition
space, tools and materials, publicity, contacts. Galleries and
exhibition spaces afford an opportunity to the patron for public
display.
No such rewards await anyone involved in the production of
avant-garde literary works. A copy of a book is cheap to acquire
and is not a unique artefact, so possession conveys no particular
status. No market analogous to the art market exists for books.
Pen and paper can be acquired without patronage. There is no
large public audience for avant-garde literary art, and never will
be: it's too hard, and the consumption of literature is essentially a
private activity with no opportunity to display. As an investment
proposition, it's a bust.
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DanHolloway
18 October 2011 12:10PM
"The rewards in financial and cultural capital for those who can
succeed in identifying the coming generation of cutting-edge
artists are consequently huge."
That's certainly true. And I'm sure it goes a long way to
explaining why artistic impresarios of the Jopling/Serota kind are
taste-makers, whilst we view editors and publishers as taste-
reflectors.
"There is no large public audience for avant-garde literary art,
and never will be: it's too hard, and the consumption of literature
is essentially a private activity with no opportunity to display. As
an investment proposition, it's a bust."
certainly it is impossible to conceive how the single collector
model could work with literature, and the thing with avant-garde
art as you suggest is that it only needs one person to love
something for the artist to make a living - and the fact of that sale
alone will often be enough to create a wider interest in talking
about the work.
I can't see an answer, but it's a question I think about, and I'd
like to think there are plenty of people in the position to do
something about it who are putting serious thinking hours into it.
And until someone cracks the nut, boundary-exploring literature
will remain on the periphery, whcih might make for an
interesting foray for diehard enthusiasts and commentators, but
like you say doesn't answer the practical issue of generational
transfer and keeping the whole artform fluid - if the part of the
art that is in that transmission stream remains the same, it will
not only stagnate the mainstream, but there's a danger it will
stagnate the avant-garde, as each generation will have the same
thing to react against. The alternative is that you end up with
completely separate streams where successive avant-gardes
react only to each other and before long the mainstream and the
periphery have absolutely no shared vocabulary with which to
speak to each other - which would be to the detriment of both
DamienGWalter
18 October 2011 12:18PM
@paulbowes @danholloway - You're confusing the art with the
object. Writers are rewarded by the extent top which the engage
the minds of readers - be it in an escapist fantasy or a new
philosophical concept. 'boundary-exploring' literature is a
conceptual prototyping process. By its nature, most of it fails.
ItsAnOutrage2
18 October 2011 12:19PM
PaulBowes01
...genre readers, once they've worked out what they
like, do tend to want more of the same: hence the
greater success of writers who produce series of
books rather than stand-alone novels...
Of course, that's true. I'm a genre reader and yes, if I like a book
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(for whatever reason) I'm happy to experience more of the same.
When I was twelve I was a Biggles fan. Brilliant!
Nowadays I read Patrick O'Brian, whose often poetic writing uses
the the 'same old nag' to great advantage. Minute observation
within the small, claustrophobic frame of a ship at sea.
And Iain M Banks. His unrelated tales separated by hundreds of
years, glued together only by a close but vaguely symbiotic
relationship between men and machines. Interestingly, and this
has only just occurred to me, both Banks and O'Brian also use
good running jokes, from book to book, to great advantage.
I'm a simple soul, and things like that hook me and, I suppose,
millions of others.
Star Wars / Star Trek / Dr. Who books. Take those
out and SF might well look like a very minority sport.
I think there are probably otherwise intelligent critics who are so
biased against SF that thay can't tell the difference. And that's
the problem.
turingCop
18 October 2011 1:14PM
@b00le
I take your point about prose quality in some genre fiction. But
there are some very distinguished prose writers in SF - take M
John Harrison, Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delany, Thomas M Disch and
J G Ballard, for example - while the writing of some oft-feted
lions of the mainstream world is often workmanlike by
comparison. I recall opened Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake
with the expectation of reading a beautifully crafted literary SF
tale ... but that is another story.
PaulBowes01
18 October 2011 1:19PM
@DamienGWalter
@paulbowes @danholloway - You're confusing the art
with the object.
I can't speak for Mr. Holloway, but I'm perfectly capable of
separating process from result. Unfortunately, as readers aren't
normally privy to the process, the result - the literary object - is
what we have to engage with. I'm really not interested in some
theoretical art without objects or audience that only exists in the
'author''s head. The social and institutional context of art
reception exists prior to the artist's intention and will go on
existing regardless of his wishes.
A great deal of critical nonsense stems from critics' unreflective
habit of identifying with writers rather than more modestly with
readers. Critics have no more access to process than other
readers; they just pay a little more attention to the resulting
objects.
And of course most experiments fail. 'A conceptual prototyping
process'? Oh yes - trial and error, as we used to call it.
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translated
18 October 2011 1:35PM
DamienGWalter
'boundary-exploring' literature is a conceptual
prototyping process. By its nature, most of it fails.
That's an interesting observation. I'd also want to add the fairly
obvious point that the boundaries available for exploration are
not just limited by the imagination of a writer, but the culture in
which she writes.
Margaret Attwood makes a distinction between "science fiction"
(things that could not possibly happen) and "speculative fiction"
(things that really could happen but just hadn't completely
happened when the authors wrote).
Clearly what can't happen and what could happen changes
through time because it is subject to technological and political
constraint. So, for example, someone writing in 1910 had a
radically expanded sense of what could happen because at that
time it was possible to sustain hope for the total transformation
of society. There has been a great loss of political hope since the
days of the pre-WW1 avant-garde, but technologically we
probably take for granted things that, at that time, couldn't
happen.
Nina Power had a great article the other day about OWS. In her
discussion of the protests she references Ray Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 451. Who knows, maybe OWS is a kind of political
prototyping process that might point to a future that once again
blurs the difference between what can and can't happen and so
establishes the conditions for a new 'boundary-exploring'
literature that fails less often.
SarahCrown
18 October 2011 3:29PM
Hey everyone, thanks so much for this. Really thought-provoking
discussion, and you've hugely furthered/interrogated the initial
point. Sorry I've been awol - running around in mad pursuit of
the Booker, and going into a meeting in two mins, but will try to
get back on later when there's a lull.
translated
18 October 2011 4:22PM
@saracrown
Thank you - you got the ball rolling with a really thought-
provoking article.
elfwyn
18 October 2011 7:22PM
@ b00le
Mieville (sorry about the accent) - along with Amis,
and everyone else who has made these points – is
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quite right. And his point about 'estrangement' is well
taken, if not well-made. For he overlooks the
important truth that much of even the best SF is
often very badly written.
I can think of two big exceptions - Ursula Le Guin and Iain M.
Banks. I'm sure people can suggest plenty of others.
msmlee
19 October 2011 7:06AM
Science Fiction and Fantasy ask questions about
reality. Literary readers - largely middle class,
relatively wealthy, assured in their social status and
cultural identity - don't have much desire to question
the reality around them. Literary fiction is implicitly
about reinforcing the reality of its readers.
That is really a very ignorant comment about what motivates
literary fiction readers and who they are as a group -- I certainly
read lit fic for it always challenges my cultural identity, amongst
other things (from Rushdie to Pamuk to Lahiri to Roy to Smith,
their works are always challenging from social, cultural and
political perspectives). And it basically is a demonstration of the
point Paul Bowes made above about certain groups of readers
wanting to establish clear genre boundaries and elevate one type
of literature over another.
I'm beginning to see why Margaret Atwood doesn't necessarily
like to be labelled SF -- not because her works aren't SF in the
social scientific sense, but because she wants to avoid the cultish
defenses and reverse snobbery of the genre's readers.
msmlee
19 October 2011 7:10AM
@PaulBowes
Real books are more complicated than this. In fact,
the binary tension usually exists within each book -
hence Derrida's insight about the way that texts
contain their own refutations.
My mind just after exploded when you use Derrida's critique to
argue what "real" books should be about. Does. Not. Compute.
msmlee
19 October 2011 7:11AM
@PaulBowes
Real books are more complicated than this. In fact, the binary
tension usually exists within each book - hence Derrida's insight
about the way that texts contain their own refutations.
My mind just after exploded when you uses Derrida's critique to
argue what "Real" books should be about. And with a capital R,
no less ;-)
Does. Not. Compute.
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msmlee
19 October 2011 7:12AM
Arrgh, messed up my formatting the second time, but you get
the gist.
DanHolloway
19 October 2011 8:29AM
@damiengwalter
as I understand it the point you're making is that the debate over
literary innovation is in danger of fetishising "the new" at the
expense of authors who are genuinely pushing the boundaries in
less obvious ways - in other words it is in danger of seeing the
battle of the boundary at the level of form/format/medium
rather than what is evolving between reader and writer. If that is
what you're saying I think I'd largely agree with you (and I'd
certainly agree with your subtext that such fetishisation leads to
the exclusion of genuine innovation taking place within such
existing genres as SF). I wrote a couple of years ago about people
being too eager to claim digital changes as innovation. My main
thrust there was that digital hasn't brought us new forms of
storytelling only new forms of delivery (having played around
more with the form of the cellphone novel, I think I'd qualify that
now. a little), but I think you're right that we need to go further
and look behind the form itself to what's going on between artist
and audience.
On the other hand, the primary point I was making about the
need for the literary mainstream to be more intellectually open,
and the need for patron/curator/champions like those of the art
world remains. But again, I was looking only at the relatively
narrow spectrum that could be called "literary fiction" and that's
exactly the kind of mistake I accuse others of, so I will gladly
acknowledge my narrow approach unmasked
UnpublishedWriter
19 October 2011 8:48AM
Is the “literary” novel simply an attempt to forecast the
“classics” of tomorrow? If so, perhaps a good starting point would
be to ask why novels become classics? Certainly they must be
beautifully written and even perhaps quotable, but what makes
them classics is surely that they capture something of the
essence of what it is to be human in a particular set of
circumstances, that they capture the zeitgeist of the day – and
perhaps the lessons learned.
The classics were beautifully written but their inclusion in the
cannon has as much to do with the strength of the characters and
plot as with the beauty of the writing. In a sense the plot and
characters have become part of some oral tradition – a tale worth
telling and re-telling because we learn something from it about
our own humanity – though perhaps now the oral tradition is
mediated by TV, Cinema, Theatre etc. Dickens, Dumas, Austen,
and the Brontes – tales told and re-told - Everyone knows the
stories but how many have read the books?
Perhaps in the future readers will be discussing the beautiful
irony of “Bridget Jones’ Diary” or “Diary of Shopaholic”? (Sorry
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haven’t read the latter) because they capture the zeitgeist of the
day – an era of acceptance – an era when the Market knows
best. If so it is the genres that will provide the classics of
tomorrow rather than the “literary” angst novels.
Perhaps we should be asking which character, which plot, in a
literary novel is strong enough to translate into folklore?
DanHolloway
19 October 2011 9:28AM
@unpublishedwriter
Perhaps we should be asking which character, which
plot, in a literary novel is strong enough to translate
into folklore?
it's very easy to wheel out an aphorism to the effect that classics
become classics for an accretion of reasons few if any of which can
be predicted at the time of writing, but you may be onto
something. Thinking that way, the one "literary" novel from the
US/UK of the past 25 years that comes instantly to mind is
American Psycho (Martin Amis' Money from slightly earlier).
Which is probably a big tick in the plus box. On further reflection
I'd be tempted to add We Need To Talk About Kevin. Again, I
think that'll prove right, though it'll be a terrible shame
(Veronique Olmi's Beside the Sea is so much better a book). I
can't think of anythnig "literary" from this century that measures
up though time will doubtless surprise us. I think you maybe
onto something from a ruling out perspective, though - Franzen,
Mitchell, Foster Wallace - brilliant authors none of whom has
created a character who haunts our psyche.
VanessaWu
19 October 2011 10:23AM
@frustratedartist
Great quote from Brian Aldiss. Very pertinent to the discussion.
The conservatism, I would argue, comes from the publishers.
Publishing books is a business. Businesses that want to survive in
uncertain times don't take risks. Literary judges who are
hounded by the press if they express a personal preference don't
take risks.
Great writers always take risks. So do great readers, in order to
find them.
With so much on offer now, so many exciting books available
from so many disparate sources, we no longer have to rely on the
ripples stirred up the by the commercial literary establishment
to find the next book to read.
"You must try to please yourself, to be your own judge."
There are great writers in the SF & fantasy genres. There are
great writers in the crime and thriller genres. China's attempt to
blend SF & hardboiled crime in The City And The City didn't
quite work for me and, in my view, was his worst effort to date,
notwithstanding Michael Moorcock's admirably positive review of
it in The Guardian; but I will go on reading his books because he
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is a great writer who takes risks and is sometimes breathtaking
in his audacity.
I would love to see more mainstream literary writers taking
these kind of risks. Until they do, they will, for me, be of marginal
interest. In general I look everywhere but the mainstream for
my next great read. But, hey, you never know until you try.
Everything is worthy of attention for anyone who is passionate
about fiction.
UnpublishedWriter
19 October 2011 10:27AM
@DanHolloway
Funnily enough I had also thought of "Money" in that context -
also "Catch 22" and even possibly "Bridget Jones' Diary."
Some time this week, while driving, I was half-listening to a radio
programme which quoted someone as saying that the worst thing
that ever happened to story-telling was the printed word. It was
based on the thesis that stories should not be immutable, but
were meant evolve in the re-telling as a means of passing on
tradition and life-lessons. It struck me that there was some
validity to the argument and that the classics provided these
sometimes larger than life characters and engaging plots which
encouraged re-telling albeit through different media or spin-offs.
PaulBowes01
19 October 2011 10:56AM
@msmlee
My mind just after exploded when you uses Derrida's
critique to argue what "Real" books should be about.
And with a capital R, no less ;-)
Your 'real' has a capital 'r' because - well, why, exactly? Mine has
a capital because it's at the beginning of a sentence.
My quoting Derrida's views does not constitute an endorsement
of them. I mean 'real' in the obvious, plain-language sense of
'actual', 'physically existing' books as opposed to ideal theoretical
entities used in constructing straw-man arguments. Real books in
the real world. No irony intended.
On a broader point, since you seem to have appointed yourself
my personal critic: do I now have to explain every thing I say
twice? Once for everybody else, and a second time for you?
ItsAnOutrage2
19 October 2011 11:57AM
R042
Surely once representational democracy has been
achieved with universal franchise, government is
ideal?
Not sure that get's my vote.
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homirmunn
19 October 2011 12:46PM
those utterly fascinating texts which contain not a
single impossible element, and yet which read as if
they were, somehow, fantastic (Jane Eyre, Moby-
Dick, etc).
Call me Mr Pedant, but doesn't Jane Eyre contain at least one
"impossible" element when Jane, apparantly telepathically, hears
Rochester's voice calling for her just as she is about to yield to the
missionary St John's pleas to marry him?
Which of course tends to prove China's point more than disprove
it. The fantastic/estranging leaks in and is often not even
recognised as such.
JeffVan
19 October 2011 6:40PM
It's an important point China is making, but while it may be new
to the interviewer, it's not a new concept. It's an argument I've
been making, along with several other writers, for decades. It's
also something John Clute has explored to some extent in his
criticism, and I think literary journals like Conjunctions have also
explored it. The fact is, there are fantasy novelists who read like
realists and supposedly mimetic novelists whose world view and
approach make them read like fabulists. The importance of
stressing this similarity/difference is that it gets us away from
using the terminology of commodificaition of fiction and what are
often just marketing terms that reflect "accidents of birth." If
you're a Kafkaesque writer from Eastern Europe, you're likely to
be published in the mainstream. If you're a US writer like
Michael Cisco, you're likely to be published through genre
imprints. These arbitrary issues and contexts don't really tell us
much about the works themselves, or their complexities and
contradictions...which is why "genre" vs "mainstream" is so
pointless. - Jeff VanderMeer
PaulBowes01
19 October 2011 7:34PM
@JeffVanderMeer
The importance of stressing this similarity/difference
is that it gets us away from using the terminology of
commodificaition of fiction and what are often just
marketing terms that reflect "accidents of birth."
That's fine so long as doing so advances our understanding. My
argument would be that it doesn't, and for two main reasons.
1. The 'terminology of commodification' builds on, rather than
being antecedent to, the language of genre, which was perfectly
comprehensible to the ancient Greeks and represents nothing
more than a set of conceptual categories whose defining
characteristics are derived from perceived similarities between
texts. We can argue with the categories, but the idea that 'drama'
is any way an invalid category because you will find all the
dramatic works grouped together in a bookshop for customer
convenience is not useful.
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When authors who seem to share some characteristics find
themselves assigned to different genre categories and different
shelves in the bookshop - and are reviewed by different critics in
different media - it's usually because they are read by different
audiences, and this facts reflects qualitative differences. Much as
I like him, George R R Martin is not Kafka, and calling them both
'fabulists' won't make him so.
2. All that China Miéville has done is to replace an older binary
structure - fabulism / mimetic realism - with a new one. The
problem is not the terms used but the structure. The genre /
mainstream division, which really is a commercial categorisation
- derived from perception of the nature of the audience rather
than the book - is so blunt that almost everyone can see its
shortcomings for the purposes of evaluating actual books. The
estrangement / recognition pair looks more subtle, but actually
isn't: it's just another dualism that ends with everybody picking
sides and all the good qualities associated with one term in the
pair and one side of the argument.
It still seems to me that what is being avoided in all this is any
attempt to discriminate between the qualities of actual books,
some of which - whisper it not - are better written than others.
But that would require wide and close reading and some
movement towards common standards of judgement, which have
been lacking for a long time.
DanHolloway
19 October 2011 7:36PM
@unpublishedwriter
Money, absolutely - it's almost long enough ago that it *has*
slipped into the canon? I think Catch-22 certainly has.
JeffVan
19 October 2011 10:42PM
Fair points, but the even though they're still binaries,
estrangement/recognition is still less market-driven than
genre/mainstream. I've got too much to do right now to respond
in full, but will later.
MattKH
20 October 2011 10:17AM
@ PaulBowes
"2. All that China Miéville has done is to replace an older binary
structure - fabulism / mimetic realism - with a new one. The
problem is not the terms used but the structure."
I don't think it's quite so inconsequential. Sure there's a new
binarity, but one that acknowledges the undeniable universality
of both sites and their existence to differing degrees in any field
you choose to occupy. It's more insightful into the nature of the
genres, not just a random new terminology, and aims to expose
the arbitrariness of exclusive selection - it's never exclusive
anyway.
But I also think that the marketing categories have the power to
determine to a considerable extent the quality or more generally
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speaking the content of the product, and that therefore they are
still valid, but the new dualism is helpful in not forgetting the
potentials.
PaulBowes01
20 October 2011 1:53PM
@MattKH
But I also think that the marketing categories have
the power to determine to a considerable extent the
quality or more generally speaking the content of the
product
This is true only for those authors who choose to tailor their
books to a particular audience identified as such in advance by its
past patterns of consumption, and for readers who are happy to
be part of such an audience because they want more of the same
kind of literary product. I'm afraid don't buy the idea that
consumers are hapless and naive. Consumerism may be an
ideology, but it doesn't impose itself without resistance. There is
certainly no obligation on any author to constrain their writing to
fit existing genre preconceptions: when they do so, they actively
choose to do so in pursuit of sales.
Sure there's a new binarity, but one that
acknowledges the undeniable universality of both
sites and their existence to differing degrees in any
field you choose to occupy.
That's true, but as I suggest above I don't think that that is so
great an advance as appears. Because one term is still validated
and the other abjected, all that happens is that we have a new
hierarchy in which books that are judged to contain the validated
elements to a higher degree are considered superior. What those
elements are, and why they should be considered important,
remains to be explained - it is still being assumed that
estrangement is superior to recognition as a literary value.
There is also a persistent confusion about means and content. It
should be apparent from the history of modernism that it's
perfectly possible for formal avant-gardism to coexist with
reactionary political values. What I see in the estrangement /
recognition binary is an attempt to smuggle an extra-literary
standard of judgement - bluntly, a political agenda - back into
literature. Estrangement good, recognition bad. Orwell would
recognise this. I don't think that this is an acceptable price to pay
if all we are being asked to recognise is that some writers,
publishers and readers are working to a commercial agenda,
particularly if they see and accept that agenda.
Nargri
20 October 2011 3:10PM
Interesting discussion. I have read almost no "literary" fiction
written in recent decades. Not sure why. It seems uninteresting
to me. Maybe it's the recognition that Mieville is talking about. If
I want to find out about the real world, I can read the news or
nonfiction or talk to people or simply go outside.
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© 2 01 2 Gu a r dia n New s a n d Media Lim ited or its a ffilia ted com pa n ies. A ll r ig h ts r eser v ed.
Is science fiction formally conservative? Often, yes. Delany talks
about this. When reality is uncertain, as it is in science fiction and
fantasy, then an experimental style can make the narrative too
confusing and unclear. Experimental sf can be done, as was
demonstrated in the 1960s and 70s, but it's not easy. I once had
to write a description of someone who was trapped in a half-
hour-long time loop. Since she was inside it, she didn't realize
what was happening. Every turn round the loop was new to her.
And the novel was written from her perspective. So how did she
figure out what was happening, and how did she get out? I nearly
went crazy writing that section, and I have never been happy
with the result. That's as much of a formal problem as I want.
I try to write good, clean language, drawing on the Icelandic
family sagas as examples, and keep most of the weirdness to the
ideas. I tend to think of science fiction as a fiction that takes place
inside metaphors. The craziness, the disjunction, the surprises
happen in the narrative line, rather than in the language.
A lot of science fiction and fantasy is not good, which has to do
with commodification and the needs of people trapped in a not
very pleasant society. You dream of escape, and the market gives
you false and unobtainable and badly written dreams.
But from the beginning, whether you start with Mary Shelley or
H.G. Wells, there has been sf which challenges the status quo
intellectually and morally. The best is well written. Speaking of
awards, I direct you to the Tiptree, science fiction's gender
bending fiction award. Its winners and short list members are
often interesting.