I was definitely extrapolating from the letter. I felt justified in doing so because, in contrast to some of your commenters who were incredulous at Fred's point, it seemed intuitively obvious to me once he made it. I'm part of his community; I have that background and see (so far as I can tell) the same way.
What made Weil's comment so silly was both that he had no idea that Orwell and Huxley could be classified as SF, and that he had no idea Ballard actually belonged to the SF milieu that he was looking down on.
Two side points:
1) While Ballard remained, all his life, pleased to acknowledge his membership in the SF community, and the same is true of most authors who came from it and acquired mainstream-lit reputations, there are some exceptions - authors who tried to pretend they never had any connection with that yukky stuff. Kurt Vonnegut was one.
2) A similar mistaken differentiation exists within the SF community itself. There was shock and dismay in some SF-reading quarters when highly-regarded "lit'ry" SF author Vonda N. McIntyre (the kind of author that Robert Weil has no idea exist) undertook Star Trek novels. How declasse! What they didn't know was that Vonda had been a Trekkie since before she ever published any fiction.
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Date: 2009-06-07 02:46 pm (UTC)What made Weil's comment so silly was both that he had no idea that Orwell and Huxley could be classified as SF, and that he had no idea Ballard actually belonged to the SF milieu that he was looking down on.
Two side points:
1) While Ballard remained, all his life, pleased to acknowledge his membership in the SF community, and the same is true of most authors who came from it and acquired mainstream-lit reputations, there are some exceptions - authors who tried to pretend they never had any connection with that yukky stuff. Kurt Vonnegut was one.
2) A similar mistaken differentiation exists within the SF community itself. There was shock and dismay in some SF-reading quarters when highly-regarded "lit'ry" SF author Vonda N. McIntyre (the kind of author that Robert Weil has no idea exist) undertook Star Trek novels. How declasse! What they didn't know was that Vonda had been a Trekkie since before she ever published any fiction.