Comment from Simon Haynes
Time: May 12, 2008, 3:58 pm

I guess we have our own SF conventions, but they don’t tend to attract mainstream media coverage, apart from the stale old ‘look at the funny trekkies’ articles.

Therefore, they remain largely invisible to the general book-buying public.

I’d be interested to see what percentage spec fic makes up of fiction sales (vs combined). I don’t think any genre comes up well against non-fic, barring romance.

Cheers
Simon

— It’s a pity that that’s the way things are though, cause that’s not how how things started out for fantasy. You look at the great epics that have been handed down to us through the ages — Gilgamesh, Mahabarata, The Bible — and while they are very much cultural records, they’re also pure fantasy: heroic tales and speculations on the nature of our world. That a craft with such lofty origins is relegated to the sidelines is a shame.

— Jeremy

Comment from Kathleen
Time: May 12, 2008, 4:28 pm

This made me laugh: “Excuse me, Citizen, are you aware of how fast you were reading?”

It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Comment from seanwilliams
Time: May 12, 2008, 5:53 pm

Nice one, Jeremy. You might feel the same way about Adelaide Writer’s Week. If so, write a letter of telling them what you’d like to see instead the usual programming. Festivals can never get enough of those!

— Crap, you’ve called my bluff! That’s quite hefty gauntlet you’ve thrown at a rookie, Sean! Tell you what, I’ll take on Sydney if you take on Adelaide. Home turf advantage.

— Jeremy

Comment from Buddles
Time: May 15, 2008, 2:11 am

Hi Jeremy,

I’m afraid that you’re up against a number of factors here. Australian literature, and the marketplace to which it caters, is really quite conservative from a literary perspective. Colleen MCulloch and Geraldine Brooks are probably the most significant authors of recent years to do produce famous Australian novels not about Australian colonial culture or set during wartime history.

We have one Australian Nobel Prize for literature (Patrick White 1973) and one Pulitzer Winner (Geraldine Brooks) to date. The Booker has gone to Peter Carey twice, and Thomas Keneally once. Sorry - no Sci Fi. Nothing even a bit speculative. Just some historical fiction. It’s all very safe ‘literary’ stuff. God, King, Commonwealth and Country or Oscar and Lucinda type fare. Exceptional if you like that kind of thing. However, if you like to curl up under your George Lucas Star Wars trademarked dooner next to your lava lamp with a copy of Splinter of the Minds Eye, Dune, or A Fire Upon the Deep (or even one of many Anne McAffrey tales,) then the pickings are a little bit slim as far as Australian speculative fiction is concerned.

The literary credentials of Fantasy writing in Britain were more or less secured beyond any real doubt by Tolkien and Lewis (The Hobbit - 1937) which drew on a rich heritage including the oldest known secular British text - Beowulf. Both Tolkien and Lewis were Oxford Dons and leading literary theorists and essayists in their own right. Lewis produced some of the earliest serious attempts at speculative and Fantasy literary theory. British Sci Fi has had a tougher road - as per your allusion to the creeping literary status of Orwell’s 1984 (1949.) Speculative fiction is perhaps a more respectable term in the literary establishment (whatever that is) nowadays, but science fiction is probably just as apt a label. Contemporary literary theorists credit such luminaries as Thomas More (Utopia) and Francis Bacon (New Atlantis 1617) with setting the foundations of science fiction in Britain (1).

Verne and De Bergerac carried the speculative banner on the Continent, and in Catholic France this required more courage than in a Protestant England slightly more tolerant of free thought. However, even Bacon experienced a religiously inspired backlash against his speculative flights of fancy that a lesser dignitary (or someone not a convener of the Royal Society) may not have withstood. New Atlantis was seen in as a secular positivistic work that threatened Christian values and promoted technologically inspired materialism (1.) One wonders if much has changed. Not too long ago I had the privilege of being told by a cleric of a popular contemporary denomination that science fiction was demonic and promoted occult values. He said that he had known a science fiction ‘nut’ who had built an array of antennae on his roof to try and receive signals from extra terrestrial intelligences. The SETI enthusiast in question would be surprised I am sure to learn that these antennae, in the words of said cleric, had “summoned an evil demon into his home”. In the same conversation I was assured that there was an ‘evil presence’ in my own house. This was 2006 - no fiction at all (regrettably.)

Putative occultist science-fiction writers (possibly real) and clerics living in permanent constructed fictions (verifiably real) aside - some respectable scientists, hard realists, and empiricists also see limited value in science fiction that plays fast and loose with pseudo-scientific ideas. However, Carl Sagan (who wrote Cosmos), Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov certainly saw it differently.

But still, who, I wonder, would earn the badge of literary recommendation first from the ‘literati’ - Jane Austen, or her contemporary Mary Shelley - who many credit (probably not without significant warrant) as the Matriarch of science fiction. Wouldn’t the ‘Jane’s’ have it?

Some of the most significant science fiction subgenres of recent decades have included Cyberpunk and more recently Fantasy Science fiction. The former has been seen largely as a postmodern literary movement (Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, William Gibson - Neuromancer) whilst the latter was probably inevitable based on market forces. Postmodernism, of course, is not universally popular in conventional literary circles either. This could be partly blamed on postmodernism itself for actually becoming easily recognisable and developing a de-facto canon – all of which of course is supposed to be antithetical to – well - postmodernism. Correspondingly, science fiction has a significantly spotted history which may well be blamed on many of its writers (or readers – depending on what you think about ‘the death of the author’). The twentieth century saw myriads of space operas so badly written that they could send the most hardened enthusiast into an unrecoverable fit or a coma, and pulp sci-fi magazines crammed to the gunnels with purile, positivistic, scientism-before-storycraft tales written for an audience with an apparent permanent reading age of twelve. Perhaps this is the audience that stopped reading altogether and and now go to watch Alien at the cinema, whilst completely missing the deeper implications of the semiotics of the vagina dentata and feminist iconography. Such stuff provides the anti-speculative literary establishment (whoever they are) with ammunition – or at least a perceived reason to turn up their noses a little bit more. In America, people’s enthusiasm for science and technology provided ample scope for a myriad of offences to even the most underdeveloped literary sensibility. Perhaps Australian audiences, and therefore writers, don’t care about any of this. Perhaps it’s just that the audience is generally so small. Personally – I think that science fiction is one of the hardest formats/genres in which to write well – perhaps much harder than other kinds of literature – and that many English majors (of which I am one) would rather take what they perceive to be an easier – or perhaps more romantic - road. After all – Twain, Orwell, Shelley and Lewis are a hard act to follow.

That’s right – C.S. Lewis. One wonders at the motivation and scope of vision the apparent bias of the ‘literary establishment.’ After all, C.S. Lewis had a solid go at Science Fiction – and it was science fiction proper too. You really couldn’t get away with referring to it with the namby-pamby pathetic wanna-be-respectable refrain of ‘speculative’ fiction – which term has been devised I am sure to placate those whom we should not bother trying to placate. I don’t personally regard that Lewis was as good at it as he was at fantasy writing (which I enjoyed as a boy but wouldn’t bother skimming now.) However, That Hideous Strength is a rollicking genre-bending tale of embodying a somewhat confused mix of positivism, scientism and post WWII anti-scientistic anxiety, all mixed with bits of Arthurian fable. The third in a trilogy, it drops the pretense and clumsy anxiety of influence apparent in the first two books (Perelandra and Out of The Silent Planet) in which he recycles tropes from the likes of Verne, Bacon, Kepler (Somnium - 1684) and De Bergerac. That Hideous Strength, although it echoes Hawthorne’s mad-scientifically rendered anti-scientism and exhibits some anti-positivistic medieval longings, is nevertheless ahead of its time and prefigures just the kind of story arcs and period merging that one sees in Dr. Who. Lewis threw in brains in vats (long before Putnam went to school), a maximum blood and gore scene where animals trample an auditorium of people into their constituent organs, and powerful time-warp type phenomena – all wrapped around a pre-figuring of Dr. Who in the invocation of the character Merlin, who wanders the dozy countryside glowing in the dark and repelling evil. Picture the love-child of Catweasel and Princess Leia. Did someone say fantasy science-fiction was a new genre? Oh how we forget. Oh – hang on – we didn’t know! No one says anything about THS. Rendered faithfully as a movie it would earn at least an MA 15+. Lewis wrote That Hideous Strength after his conversion. As a science fiction enthusiast I think it is his best book. Next time someone says that only respectable literature is allowed through the gate – and that anything science fiction isn’t it – ask them if they have read C.S. Lewis. When they start to rabbit on about Narnia and Aslan and all of the enchanting wonderful metaphors for God and heaven and so on (or start telling you that science fiction is of the devil) – stop them and tell them that you were referring to the really grown-up stuff, and give them the ISBN for That Hideous Strength.

American science fiction, birthed by the likes of Poe and Hawthorne, rode the wave of scientism all the way to Star Trek, and then underwent a postmodern, dystopian, apocalyptic transition in keeping with, and to hold a lens to, the distorted simulacra of the misinformation age and the coming of the proxy for World War Three - The War on Terror. In the early Nineteenth century, Rappacini’s Daughter was an anti-scientistic offering in the literary tradition of the American romance that exemplified Nathaniel Hawthorne’s invention of the mad scientist trope, and anticipated many later works of science fiction. The place of science fiction on the American literary landscape was solidified by the comic speculative offering of Samuel Clemens’ A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. Twain’s work makes a lot of more recent works look a lot less original than they purport to be. The industrial revolution with its technological positivism, the cold war with its nuclear anxiety and high-tech espionage, the birth of the information age at the hands of genius Claude E. Shannon at Bell Labs in 1948, and the onset of the digital age and the war on terror - all have been a catalyst to American science fiction. Recently, Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer prize for his dystopic, apocalyptic tale of societal deconstruction and re-birth ‘The Road’ (http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2007/fiction/ .) I doubt anything like this could happen in Australia right now – we simply don’t have a sci-fi culture. Science fiction threatens conservative, religious, and (probably) egalitarian sensibilities. These are all heavily represented in Australia.
References:

1. Stableford, B. ‘Science Fiction Before the Genre’, The Cambridge Companion to
Science Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (2003), pp 15,20.

Here’s a short bibliography to whet the speculative literary appetite:

Baudrillard, J., ‘Simulacra and Science Fiction’, Science Fiction Studies 18

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

James, E. and Farah Mendlesohn (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Science
Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

McCarthy, C. The Road, Picador: 2006.

Seed, D. A Companion to Science Fiction, Malden: Blackwell, 2005.

Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination (Paperback)
by Raffaella Baccolini (Editor), Tom Moylan (Editor)

Thanks B. for taking the time to put together such an insightful appraisal of the situation, and the origins of the differences in the varying opinions from territory to territory. I’d be interested to know how you think these opinions will change as the borders fall in the global economy, or will we always be bound to our regional prejudices? — Jeremy

Comment from Tom
Time: May 15, 2008, 10:21 am

“‘84 has traded in it’s SF credentials to become a “literary classic”. Nice one George.”

Don’t get me started. There are plenty of spec books that are literary classics, it’s fine to be both. I don’t think you can “trade in” one for t’other.

The Monk, Frankenstein, Dracula, Turn of the Screw, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale - all great literary books, all deserving a place on any list of great SF/fantasy fiction.

Hey Tom! I can hear you saying “Rubbish!” from here : ) I complete agree with you that there are ‘plenty of spec books that are literary classics’ it’s just the manner in which literary establishment refers to the best spec fiction while trying not to use such dirty words as “speculative”, “science fiction” or “fantasy”. — Jeremy

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Time: May 15, 2008, 6:01 pm

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