The quick and easy answer is: I have no idea.
(And on that note I’ll be off.)
Should, however, anyone be rash enough to really wanna ask this question, I fear you’ll find that the discussion becomes long, complicated and ultimately, not very satisfying. It’s a dilemma I’m currently having with a book whose title, and indeed whose fate, I’m afraid, must remain secret until this thorny question is itself answered. Is the book science fiction, or is it ‘literature’? Whatever that means.
In many ways, it’s easier to define what science fiction is, than literature. You can look at SF and say that on most occasions, there’s an imaginative element which pushes the boundary of what is currently possible, or what is currently the place, often through the use of technology which, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out, can itself frequently be indistinguishable from magic. Okay, fair enough. But what about literature? Is that simply a ‘genre’ where the above statement is not true? In which case, should George Orwell’s 1984 be reclaimed from the literature shelves and given a new shiny cover, perhaps featuring a glowing rat and an embossed silver font? Is Cloud Atlas waiting to be placed in its rightful place between McCaffrey and Moorcock, or the Time Traveller’s Wife crying out for a tag line beginning ‘Temporal causality can be a bitch when you’re in love…’? Does ‘literature’ preclude the insertion of those imaginative elements which make fantasy and science fiction so powerful? Are all wacky dreams of writhing deities out of the question, flights of fancy about invading aliens, great hypotheses about things which have been and are yet to come – is there a quantitative cut off point at which we, the reader turn round and say, ‘whoa there, tiger, you’ve now had five pages of a flight of fancy, this book is science fiction, get thee hence!’
If you expand the question beyond simply science fiction vs. literature, the waters get even more muddied. Are you forbidden, for example, from having grisly murders in works of literature, in case that pushes the matter into ‘crime’? The appearance of a spy for more than 400 prescribed words is out of the question, because that may make it a thriller, perhaps? And any kiss which lasts for more than five chaste, carefully constructed lines is enough to term the thing ‘romance’?
No, of course not. The idea that you can quantify a book and say ‘ah-ha, you had ten pages of snogging therefore you are erotica’ is ridiculous. All books, from all genres, include ideas from everywhere. Fantasy books are full of hard bitten detectives and grisly murderers, high politics and thwarted loves; crime novels are soggy with romances won and lost, romance wades through tortured mazes of thriller-esque tension and fear, and ‘literature’ is nothing without the ideas and momentum of these ideas. Because, frankly, once you remove love, death, fear, wonder and imagination, what’s really left?
Occasionally – and it still makes me angry to this day – the theory is offered that ‘literature is for grown ups’. As it is almost entirely spoken by people who haven’t read a word of science fiction, it’s guaranteed to make me angry. The idea that imagination is childish, is itself a truly childish notion. Science fiction, at its best, pushes at the boundaries of the very biggest, very oldest questions – what are we doing to our planet, to each other, what is it to even be human? If to be ‘grown up’ is to only prod and probe at people like us, with problems like ours then frankly, literature has a lot to answer for, as the horizons of mankind are so much bigger.
I suspect the problem we have is this – that in the good old days, fantasy was purely folktale, and the genres of crime, science fiction, romance and thriller were enacted only through cliches of big space ships, embittered detectives, love-torn couples and hunky rogue spies. Whereas the reality now is that lines have blurred, and the classification of books into genres is as much about comforting familiar readers with familiar things, as it is an apt reflection on ‘genre’. And this is no bad thing, in the sense that I don’t want to have to waste hours every time I go into a bookshop, trying to find my way through a single, unsorted shelf in search of good stories and big ideas, while all around romance, erotica and, my personal pet-hate, vampire porn, all offer themselves for my attention. In this sense, thank god for genre! However, if publishers don’t – or event can’t – help push the boundaries of our reading habits and proclaim that this is both science fiction and literature, and that is both crime and romance, and that actually genre is dead, long live the story, then I guess we, the readers, have to take the plunge, and do it for ourselves…
2 comments
Jeff Lowrey says:
October 5, 2012 at 4:24 am (UTC 1 )
I’d consider the main point of an SF book to involve the “sf” bits, and the main point of ‘literature’ to involve the “human” bits.
To further illustrate… Star Wars Episode IV was about the blowing up of a space station and gee whiz laser swords and space ships. Star Wars Episode III was about the descent of a human being into selfishness and sociopathy.
Both were also really poorly written.
So neither are technically “good” sf or literature. But A New Hope is more SF than anything else and Revenge of the Sith is more literature (albeit *bad* literature) than anything else.
So, alas, as long as books have central overarching themes that they are trying to illustrate, and thus act as the main focus of the story, genre is not dead. Crime books are about the process of committing, detecting, and revealing crime. Erotica is about the process of committing, detecting, and revealing lustful experiences.
And etc.
And if you really have a book that is firmly committed to two separate over arching themes, you’ll always find disagreement that the book is actually equal in it’s devotion to both.
Mike Brooks says:
October 6, 2012 at 11:39 am (UTC 1 )
This sort of thing always infuriates me. The fact that The Lord Of The Rings is a high fantasy novel with elves and dwarves and wizards and magic, set in a world with links to our own but which is in every real sense imaginary, and which has in some way influenced pretty much every ‘fantasy’ novel written since, is time and time again voted as everyone’s favourite book of everything, everywhere, everywhen (usually known as ‘of all time’, but I felt I needed another ‘every’ to round things out)… SURELY that makes it ‘literature’? But how is it so different from all the other fantasy and sci-fi books around? Or is ‘literature’ merely a mark of success for such ventures, a way of the ‘community’ (whatever that is) saying “well done, work of genre fiction, you have become so successful that we cannot properly ignore you anymore – as a result, instead of acknowledging your own merits we will co-opt you into something we can accept as being successful”?
I believe I once defined literature as ‘stories written by people who lack the imagination to write anything else’, and I think I’m going to stick with that.