Science Fiction Gets No Respect
Posted by Jose on Saturday, 29 of July , 2006 at 9:00 am
I already had this Brain Parade in the works when Lou Anders at Bowing to the Future posted “>The State of Science Fiction, Part II but this could very well be a response to Lou’s musings about how other’s see SF. I wish I could whip up Brain Parades in a timely enough fashion to respond to other people’s blog posts immediately but that’s just not possible.
Today’s Brain Parade question deals with that old chestnut of SF’s image. This has been talked about in the past but I think its worth a look in the light of relatively recent blogosphere hubub on the subject.
Science Fiction often gets a bad rap. Do you agree with this statement? And if so, who or what is to blame?
MT: This issue has been on a number of people’s minds lately largely due to a few remarks by a certain book reviewer and the ocassional hollywood type repeating the old “the show/movie I star on isn’t really science fiction, its about feelings/people/care bears/etc.” rubbish. It’s worth noting that these remarks wouldn’t reach our ears or eyeballs if they weren’t being diligently redistributed by SF fans. So I think there’s a certain amount of proportion blowing going on here but is there anything underlying these statements that we should be concerned about anyways?
In my opinion it’s a complete non issue. Actors make all kinds of flaky comments, getting in a twist over the odd one lobbed in our direction seems like a waste of time and emotion to me. And as to literary critics, they save their sharpest knives for each other taking only ocassional dismissive swipes at the genre we love. I can’t get into a twist over that either. What really matters to me is wether or not I can admit to non-sf fans that I blog about science fiction obsessively without getting viewed as some kind of freak. I may be deluded but I believe I’m in the clear on that one. But I have to attach a very hearty Your Mileage May Vary sticker on this one as Brighton, England is something of an anything goes kind of town.
The same didn’t hold true about ten years back when I was a roleplaying and collectable card game publisher. I attended Dragoncon and Worldcon and a few of my fellow science fiction fans looked down their noses at us gaming types (even though we’re SF fans too). It reminds me of the colliseum scene in Life of Brain where the anti-roman rebels reserved their harshest feelings for subfactions within their own movement. So even though I’m an obssesive SF fan I take the umbrage of other fans with a fistful of salt based on past experience.
Bring on the commentary:
Paul Levinson:
Yes, science fiction does often get a bad rap – ranging from people whose souls don’t sing to establishment newspapers like the New York Times, which still reviews science fiction rarely (in comparison to novels about dysfunctional Southern families, which are a cinch to make the front page of the Sunday book review section). What’s science fiction’s crime? It’s popular. Like mysteries and romance. So the Times snubs them. But maybe that’s to the good: science fiction has always derived an energy from being counter-culture. Too much praise and recognition might spoil us.
Paul Levinson is a science fiction writer and a former president of the SFWA
John Scalzi:
What science fiction are you talking about? Movies? Last year the top five science fiction(y) movies (Star Wars III, War of the Worlds, Fantastic Four, Chicken Little and Robots) grossed a billion dollars domestically, or about 11% of the total domestic box office for the year. TV? Lost won the Emmy for Best Drama and Time called Battlestar Galactica the best show on TV. Video games? I suspect one game out of three is SF-derived, including several of the medium’s recent classics, including Halo 2 and Half-Life 2, both of which sold millions of copies. The image of science fiction is just fine in the public’s mind. The public digs the science fiction, in fact.
Science fiction *literature* gets crapped upon for two reasons. One, it was the geeks and losers who read science fiction in junior high and high school, so that makes the genre radioactive to anyone who was cool (or who wanted to be cool), and that sort of fear association is hard to get over. Yes, we geeks and losers went on to rule the world. Nice for us. Even so, for the majority of people, reading a book with the Mona Lisa or a jet fighter on the cover is socially acceptable; reading one with an exploding space ship, not so much. I sympathize; there are SF books I leave on the shelf because I don’t want to be seen in public because of their cover art. The good news is today’s SF art directors have figured this out and are making some gorgeous covers that are both SFnal and non-embarrassing; the bad news is these covers are still shelved in the SF section, where the non-geeks fear to tread.
Science fiction also gets crapped upon on a regular basis by certain writers,critics and literary theorists (and, I suspect, some booksellers) who once read an Issac Asimov novel to try to “get” SF, and decided they’d seen all they needed to see. I’m not entirely sure that SF writers need to feel singled out here, since every genre gets crapped upon by certain writers, critics and literary theorists; SF is just one of the crowd. Everything is crap-on-able unless it reeks of Breadloaf, Iowa and Pushcart Prizes. I’ve got nothing against Breadloaf, Iowa and the Pushcart Prize — I’m sure they’re all very nice — but I’m not entirely sure how meticulous little novels about quiet life moments experienced *just so* is any less programmed and hack-tastic than a book with spaceships is assumed to be. The only real differenc is that the reader for one works in IT, and the reader for the other is grinding away toward an MFA. But it’s the latter type who eventually end up as professors, critics and lit-fic writers. What are you going to do.
I suppose SF lit could try an outreach program for the critics and lit-fic writers and try to bring them around, but I question the utility of that. Let them sneer; I could give a shit. What I would love to see is SF lit make a play for mainstream readers, by any means necessary. Put the books in covers the mundanes can grok; give them some stories they don’t feel like they’re missing the joke on; fight to get stories where people are instead of where we wish they would go. Of course, it’s easy to say this and more difficult to do. But the fact is: SF has a fine image. It’s up to SF literature to get a piece of it.
John Scalzi is a science fiction writer who blogs at Whatever
Jeff Patterson:
Yes, SF gets a bad rap, but it is generated almost exclusively by profoundly ignorant people, so it is effectively irrelevant.
Whenever I read the latest installment of Ansible, the inane “How Others See Us” quotes are almost always out of Hollywood. Let’s face it, the “bad rap” usually comes in the form of stereotypical whiz-bang mindless tripe taking itself seriously, whether it be movies, video games, or whatever faux SF music video is currently in rotation. Hollywood’s fevered insistence on “adapting” SF classics into weapons-grade feces is simply appalling. I anticipate that we’ll one day see a Canticle for Leibowitz movie where martial arts monks defend their monastery from desert monsters.
Beneath that, there’s the assumed truth fostered by the sensation-hungry news industry that SF fans have something wrong with them. There was a story a while back about police joking that every time they go through the belongings of a captured serial killer, he always has Star Trek memorabilia. I’m willing to bet there are also sports-related items present as well, but somehow those don’t get mentioned. The “mainstream” never deride mystery fans for fetishizing murder, or romance readers for mainlining saccharine emotional fantasies, but pick up a book with a spaceship on the cover and it’s assumed you spend your weekends dressed as a Klingon.
I’d also add that in a world where we’ve seen Heinlein blamed for the Manson murders and Foundation linked to Al Queda and Aum Shinrikyo, I’m wondering how Dune (where terrorists violently campaign to disrupt the supply of society’s most valuable commodity and bend culture to their religious beliefs) never came under political fire.
Jeff Patterson is the blogger behind Gravity Lens
Susan Marie Groppi:
I definitely agree that science fiction gets a bad rap, but I can’t quite figure out why. The criticisms come from many different angles, and they all seem undeserved. For instance, I know a lot of people who claim to be completely disinterested in “all that science fiction crap”, but who are big fans of the new Battlestar Galactica television show, or loved _The Time-Traveller’s Wife_ and want to find more books like it, that kind of thing. On the other side of things, you have all of the people who are deeply embedded in the science fiction community and insist that the genre is dying or becoming irrelevant. As far as I can tell, science fiction is not just still relevant, it’s enormously commercially viable, as long as
you’re willing to step back a little and accept a definition of “science fiction” that encompasses a broader range of media forms.
Susan Marie Groppi is Editor-in-Chief at Strange Horizons
Jonathan Strahan
I think it’s a fairly meaningless notion. People who love science fiction tend to overvalue it, and people who don’t tend to excoriate it. Quite often the criticisms the people who dislike science fiction make are reasonable, if you accept their starting point. For example, on purely literary grounds a lot of the most famous science fiction ever written fails markedly. Most of it, on a line-by-line basis, isn’t beautiful prose, and a lot of it features either poor characterisation or characters that are purely archetypal. If you’re writing a modern literary novel, these are bad things. In science fiction, where there are other things we value - extrapolation, world building and so on - these aren’t necessarily flaws at all.
Jonathan Strahan is a freelance editor and anthologist
Update July 31st: Armchair Anarchist at Velcro City Tourist Board kicks this meme around with an interesting comparison to musical tastes (link)
Update August 1st: DeepGenre: Genre Don’t Get No Respect
Robert J Sawyer’s has recently blogged his thoughts on this subject
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Category: Science fiction Brain Parades, Musings, Brain Parades, Science Fiction
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2006-07-29 17:23:00
…as Brighton, England is something of an anything goes kind of town.
Well, that’s one way of putting it!
To approach the subject at hand, though, I side with you on the ‘who gives a crap’ response. So what if people think the stuff I read sucks? I love it, it fulfils something in me that needs fulfilling - I don’t care if they don’t want to read it (though I’m always pleased and helpful when they do).
To refer to Adam Roberts’ ‘History…’ yet again, he had some good points to make on this very subject. I cannot quote (because the book is back at the library), but to paraphrase, he was basically saying that, in some ways, SF literature fans are actually their own worst enemies as far as public perceptions of their obsessions go. We don’t get seen as being any less geeky or ghettoised by reacting like geeks in a ghetto every time someone lobs a rock over the fence.
Compare this to the mainstream acceptance of SF film and TV, where one is only castigated for ‘going a bit too far’ by wearing prosthetic ears or learning languages that don’t exist. Most Trek fans I’ve known, for example, are so blase and devil-may-care about their obsession that people find it to be an endearing (if joke-worthy) eccentricity.
I agree with Lou Anders, too, in that there is a greater potential for getting readers to ‘cross over’ at the moment, as so many tropes that have long been the stamping grounds of SF are becoming current in ‘mainstream’ literature. The more our lives become science fictional (which IMHO is an unescapable self-evident truth), the more people will be open to the more subtle and crafty works of SF writers who don’t lay the aliens and ray-guns on with a trowel. I’ve managed to get three other library staff to read Geoff Ryman’s ‘Air’, and the universal response has been for them to say it was excellent, and not at all what they expected it to be.
That’s not to say I prefer the ‘mundane’ school to any other, and I’ll stick to my space opera bombast like glue, TYVM, but I think what we all need to do is stop being so sniffy about SF when we talk about it to non-fans. I nowadays try to extoll the points of something I’m reading that I think will find a connection with the person in question - years of huffing and saying ‘you wouldn’t like it’ only heightened my sense of alienation, and reinforced their view of pathological oddness in SF readers.
I’ve been meaning to do a piece on this subject for ages. I think tomorrow may be the day….thanks, Jose!
2006-07-30 02:36:00
You’re definitely right about sci-fi getting a bad rap .. I think it’s mostly jealousy .. people just can’t handle that geeks rule the world
2006-07-30 12:20:00
When I read Langford’s “As Others See Us” column in ANSIBLE, I increasingly get the feeling Langford’s really enjoying himself. It’s a game that old-fashioned “fans” play with each other, to stoke the “persecuted elite” self-image. “Fans are Slans,” etc.
What are we, masochists? Enough with the “Ooo, look at us, we’re persecuted!” shtick already! It’s bogus. It’s bull****. Cast that chip off your shoulder. You don’t know what REAL persecution is like.
2006-07-30 17:07:00
Nonsense. There is a problem of perception when 8 of the top 10 highest grossing films of last year were SF, 13 of the top 20 and yet the average SF book sells in the low thousands. That perception needs to be addressed and discussions of how to do so are VERY relevant. Period.
2006-07-30 20:13:00
A.R.: To be clear, I do not feel, nor do I posit, that fandom is at all persecuted. But I like your point. I’ve often said that christian fundamentalist who insist there’s a “war” on christianity should suffer a little persecution before they open their mouths again.
I concur that Langford handpicks his quotes, but I think he does it specifically to shed light on the cluelessness of Hollywood. However, this year alone we have seen:
1: a review of Simmon’s Olympos that claims Simmons manufactured a link from the literary classic to modern SF, and suggesting he should stick with funny headed aliens shooting rayguns.
2: Several reviews for Troy praising it for stripping away all the fantastic elements of the tale and focusing on the human story (as you know, classical mythology was ALL ABOUT the human condition).
3: As mentioned by Ms. Groppi, an entire segment of the Galactica fanbase insisting that it isn’t SF.
All of these stem from pure ignorance, of both the genre and drama in general.
As for perception, as much as I’d like to see the genre get a little more respect, I think how others see us is irrelevant. Most SF fans I know are more knowledgable and better-balanced than most sports fans I know. There are times, however, when the perception gets forced and the reaction is pat and dismissive. There’s that bit in Trekkies where the woman on the OJ trial shows up for duty in her TNG Star Trek uniform, claiming she is representing her military and what it stands for. It always struck me as odd that nobody reminds her that military garb from other armies isn’t allowed (due to the whole citizenship thing), or mentions that what her uniform stands for a socialistic government, represented almost exclusively by the military, enforcing their bioconservative (yet anti-capitalist) society and slowly spreading across the cosmos.
Not to mention the fact that it’s, y’know, fictional.
No, All we hear is people claiming that she’s a nutjob or that Trek rotted her brain (as many mothers said it would).
And this seems to be an American dilemna. Hell, Dr. Who is a kids show in the U.K., targeted at the same age-bracket as Power Rangers, and it still outstrips most of the adult-oriented SF produced in the US (TV and movies) for sheer use of actual science fiction ideas and storylines.
2006-07-30 20:28:00
And I’d like to see a “kid’s show” get away with two men kissing over here.
2006-07-31 09:52:00
OK, let’s address the perception issue. (That’s something I learned from reading SF: “Reality” is half perception, half reality. :))
1. Other media compete with books (all genres) for the reading public’s attention.
I admit that I read fewer books now than I did 10 years ago… because I read huge amounts of text on the Internet, play videogames, chat online, post on messageboards, weblog, and watch movies on DVD… and all this takes time.
This can be perceived as “People read less of genre X”… but without detailed statistics, I can’t say for sure how true this is.
(Maybe SF publishers should simply print shorter books??)
2. Who does the “dissing”?
Trust me: an overwhelming majority of the reading public doesn’t give a damn what the NY Times Review of Books thinks. The Young and Wired of today don’t read newspapers. They use the Internet, and that’s where we ought to focus our attention. You want to boost the rep of written SF, work on the Web. Forget newspapers. (And broadcast TV. Cable TV might be a venue, though.)
3. Don’t Do As I Say, Do As I Do…
A universal trait of human behavior is that we change attitudes and opinions over time, without openly pretending we ever did — or without consciously noticing it. I see it happen all the time.
Never mind what the outwardly SF-despising person is saying - what is she doing? Margaret Atwood can talk about squids in space as much as she wants, as long as she keeps writing SF novels which are being read. So what if the people who make SF movies, TV shows and books then deny it — we know what they’re really doing, and that’s what matters.
(What if it were the other way around? Everyone saying “We’re producing science fiction” but actually producing fantasy and naturalism — would that be better?)
4. Money talks.
One reason SF-themed movies and games get respect is because they rake in millions and billions of dollars every year. Book publishing, by contrast, has never been profitable on that humungous level.
You want respect? Then make enormous amounts of money.
Speaking of which… if you regard STAR TREK in coldly commercial terms, the brand has been underperforming. Maybe that’s why it’s being ridiculed: because certain fans cling to a brand that’s earning less and less money. It’s like rooting for Betamax.
2006-07-31 09:57:00
Lou,
You make some valid points about the disparity in popularity between SF film and TV and SF books. However I suspect that this disparity isn’t entirely (or even mainly) caused by the “dissing” of Science Fiction that we’re talking about. Having said that though I don’t really have an answer as to why the disparity exsists.
I think a large part of the current popularity of SF is Hollywood’s infatuation for CGI. Science Fiction lends itself very well to the CGI treatment. But the people who go to the cineplex to watch SFnal explosions don’t necessarily want to read what’s on offer on the dead tree side of the fence.
2006-07-31 10:54:00
A.R.Yngve,
I think Star Trek gets dissed for justifiable reasons. The original series was edgey and pioneering for its time but in the past ten years Star Trek has been about as far out as a glass of milk. Episodes of Star Trek:TNG that tackled contemporary issues like terrorism, refugees and peace negotiations were extraordinarily naff. The subject matter was barely a notch above saturday morning childrens programming in its sophistication and depth. At that point it becomes apparent that Star Trek is about spaceships, ray guns and bumpy headed aliens for their own sake at the expense of character, subtlety or drama. And that is probably the main driver behind the perception of SF being immature that a lot of people are complaining about.
I don’t live in the US but I wouldn’t be suprised if Battlestar Galactica might slowly be changing that. We might be in the midst of a creeping up of sophisticated SF on screens. Although if the horror stories about Star Trek: The High School Years is true the progress won’t be without a few embarassing setbacks.
May Science Fiction live long and prosper. Death to Trek!
2006-07-31 17:30:00
Time magazine just called Battlestar Galacticathe best drama on tv.