So many brilliant comments here, my brain is exploding.
Much of this seems to boil down to the whole question of tradition and originality. Atwood wants to get credit for an original idea; SF readers claim that the ideas she presents in her work are old hat in the SF canon. But what if she's not familiar with the SF canon? (not that I think it's likely that someone of Atwood's intelligence could be unaware of at least the zeitgeist if not works in particular). Maybe that's what that distinction about SF being written by someone in the SF community refers to - being a reader as well as a writer.
We (in the SF/fantasy reader community) tend to value works that engage in a discourse with the tradition, and we get stroppy when we see works that (we think) clearly reflect tropes from the tradition that go unacknowledged - like how tiresome it is that JK Rowling claims she's never read a lot of the children's fantasy that "clearly" informs her work...
And (now my brain is going off on another tack) - isn't there some kind of distinction between those who write purely according to convention - eg the formula romance, "cosy" detective novel, space opera, etc - and those who attempt to elevate the genre, to go beyond it, and focus on elements other than the plot tokens... I think rather than columns, we need a Venn diagram, with one circle being the formula genre works, another the so-called "literary works" and the middle being where they intersect, where you would put genre writers with literary cred (like Ursula Le Guin) and literary writers who slide over into genre (like Atwood, Ishiguro et al).
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Date: 2009-06-05 05:35 pm (UTC)Much of this seems to boil down to the whole question of tradition and originality. Atwood wants to get credit for an original idea; SF readers claim that the ideas she presents in her work are old hat in the SF canon. But what if she's not familiar with the SF canon? (not that I think it's likely that someone of Atwood's intelligence could be unaware of at least the zeitgeist if not works in particular). Maybe that's what that distinction about SF being written by someone in the SF community refers to - being a reader as well as a writer.
We (in the SF/fantasy reader community) tend to value works that engage in a discourse with the tradition, and we get stroppy when we see works that (we think) clearly reflect tropes from the tradition that go unacknowledged - like how tiresome it is that JK Rowling claims she's never read a lot of the children's fantasy that "clearly" informs her work...
And (now my brain is going off on another tack) - isn't there some kind of distinction between those who write purely according to convention - eg the formula romance, "cosy" detective novel, space opera, etc - and those who attempt to elevate the genre, to go beyond it, and focus on elements other than the plot tokens... I think rather than columns, we need a Venn diagram, with one circle being the formula genre works, another the so-called "literary works" and the middle being where they intersect, where you would put genre writers with literary cred (like Ursula Le Guin) and literary writers who slide over into genre (like Atwood, Ishiguro et al).