Margaret Atwood’s wide stance on S.F.
(Margaret Atwood: Not a science fiction writer…)
Among those who follow these things it is well known that Canadian author Margaret Atwood doesn’t like it when people call her science fiction novels science fiction.
She prefers the term ’speculative fiction.’
Of course, that is just the kind of Ivory Tower bullshit we have come to expect and loathe from both critics and writers with literary pretensions.
It led, for instance, to one of those critics saying, à propos the Booker prize, that the current economic situation made it unavoidable that the Booker jury had gone for books that were comfortable to read.
He just avoided the term ‘dumbing down’ – but made no effort disguising his opinion that, though ‘well written’, Hillary Mantel’s winning novel ‘Wolf Hall’ was no more than a historical novel; a genre novel, in effect, and as such not deserving of any serious literary prizes.
Again, the term ’slumming’ wasn’t actually used but that was what this critic so obviously thought the Booker jury had been doing.
This, of course, is hardly a new phenomenon. The critic Harold Bloom once said that it would be better for children not to read at all than to read a J.K. Rowling book.
Bloom also went ballistic when Stephen King won the National Book Foundation’s Medal – forgetting that his own idol, Shakespeare, like King, had been a fast-writing, commercial writer with a penchant for the supernatural, who was also not very good at the plotting end of business.
So, of course, it is unfair to pick on Margaret Atwood. She’s just part of a literary herd that thinks that the sparse grass growing in the shadow of those Ivory Towers is superior to the more luscious varieties of grasses & herbs that are allowed to grow as wildly and as freely as they want, outside literature’s gated community.
Still, to hear Atwood proclaim, again and again, that she is not a science fiction writer is like seeing a Republican politician, on CNN, protest that, despite a few unfortunate incidents in public toilets, he is not a homosexual.
(Larry Craig: Not a homosexual…)
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