The tendonitis in my hand and wrist is getting better. Yay! Thanks for all the well wishes from everyone. Hopefully with a bit more rest, in a few days all will be completely better. Between resting and the horrible heatwave that has settled down upon my fair city making even normally non-strenuous activity seem just too much, and the Independence Day holiday on Wednesday, posting might be spotty this week.
Today though, I want to toss out some tantalizing tidbits from the “Science Fiction” issue of the New Yorker magazine (June 4 & 11). I wasn’t really interested in the fiction pieces, what I found most interesting were the nonfiction essays both long and short. Here we had Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin singing the same songs: Atwood still insisting that she doesn’t write SF and Le Guin complaining about those who write SF who refuse to accept the label. No names were named but it seems these two are never going to agree on a definition of SF. Not that they have to, but while a small childish part of me wants to stand around the two combatants on the playground chanting, “fight! fight! fight!” the grown up part of rolls her eyes and mumbles, “really? Still gnawing on the same bone?”
I very much enjoyed William Gibson’s short piece in which he reminisces about his father’s Oldsmobile Rocket 88 in the 1950s and how he’d imagine blasting off into space. Then there is Colson Whitehead’s longer essay talking about all the horror films he watched as a kid in the 1970s and how they influenced him. Karen Russell has a short but sad piece about being in 5th grade and participating in a reading program sponsored by Pizza Hut in which she’d win a coupon for free pizza for every ten books she read. She devoured Terry Brook’s “Sword of Shannara” series and was so proud that she was going to be taking her family out to dinner until her mother, upon seeing the list of books she read, made a belittling remark about them. After that, Russell kept reading fantasy but on her list of books she read would write titles like Little Women instead.
China Mieville’s short essay is the one that really got me thinking though. His is written as a letter to a young SF fan, to himself as a kid. He says he is often asked by people how he got into “this stuff” and explains:
Of course, the stories that got you all to hush, in kindergarten, were the ones that contained exactly those elements which you still seek out. In that class full of six-year-olds, everyone was into dinosaurs and/ or magic and/ or Saturday-morning monsters, just like you. By your teens, though, you are indeed in the minority. Sure, some readers, especially after the hip discover Dick, Butler, Gibson, will come to the field later. But they’re rarities. Mostly those, ‘into this’ are those who simply never leave. So you can answer your interlocutors’ question with another, How did you get out of it?
He goes on to talk about how SF and fantasy led him later to other books with fantastic elements in them, books by Charlotte Bronte, Ionesco, Orlando by Virginia Woolf, as well as the writing of Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen.
What interested me most though was that passage. How, as kids we love stories of the fantastic. I continued to love those kinds of stories in my teens and still love them today. I get a charge from books that are squarely SF and fantasy but also books that are mostly realistic but then get “weird” like Murakami weird or Raw Shark Texts weird, the kind of books in which reality shifts just enough to make one question one’s perception and the nature of things. As a kid books like The Wizard of Oz and Willie Wonka scared me not because they were weird but because there were adults in them that were unpredictable (the Wizard and Willie Wonka) and cruel. The weird worlds, Oz and the chocolate factory (ok, the oompa loompas scared me and still creep me out) were magical technicolor places. And I still love magical places and animals that talk and worlds turned upside down, and spaceships and aliens and witches and dragons. As William Gibson remarks in his essay,
I was drawn to science fiction for the evidence it offered of manifold possibilities of otherness.
Yes, oh yes, that is definitely a huge part of it. That and imagining myself piloting a spaceship or flying on the back of a dragon or even saving the world. These things I have always loved and will continue to love. And to anyone who wonders how I got into that stuff, to you I ask, How did you get out if it?
Hi Stefanie…look after yourselves through the heatwave. A very interesting post about the New Yorker pieces. The Atwood/Le Guin spat does seem silly… surely SF, even “hard” SF, is simply an important branch of the fantasy tree. My brother was more into SF than I have ever really been (remember paperbacks of Asimov, Heinlen, Arthur C Clarke). My sisters were more into fantasy than I ever was ( remember their love of the books of Tolkein and Alan Garner of The Owl Service and Elidor fame). So I never got completely into either genre but managed to dabble in both and have continued to do so. I’m not immersed but would be sad to never read SF or fantasy.
I have never really got off the fantasy genre perhaps closest to realism…Ghost stories… MR James; Sheridan Le Fanu; EF Benson; Edith Wharton; Walter De La Mare…all just so brilliant!
Ian, thanks we will. We are very grateful for air conditioning right now! I am neither wholly dedicated to SF or fantasy either, I enjoy both quite a lot. i don’t care what genre it does or doesn’t belong to as long as it is a good, thought-provoking and well-written story. So you have a soft spot for classic ghost stories I see. I’ve not read Benson or De La Mare but I have read the others. Have you read Turn of the Screw by Henry James? I love the psychological ghost stories when you can’t quite tell where the truth is.
The Turn Of the Screw is the best of those “uneasy” ghost stories. De La Mare is very much in this tradition and I’m sure some of his stories must be online. I recommend Crewe and Seaton’s Aunt in particular.
Ian, Thanks for the recommendation! I love reading this kind of stuff in the fall and will add them to my list.
I actually thought Margaret Atwood have come around. It doesn’t sound like it will ever happen, though. Like you said, they don’t HAVE to agree, but yeah, there are more interesting conversations to have about SF than definitions.
I love Miéville’s point. The issue sounds worth it for his piece alone!
Nymeth, Atwood loves SF, she herself just doesn’t write it. It’s all very fine hairsplitting that makes me a little crazy. And as you say, we could be having more interesting conversations than definitions. Mieville’s was my favorite article out of the bunch. I think one I finish George R. R. Martin’s Clash of Kings, I will finally get around to reading one of Mieville’s books.
Stephanie, I have read your book blog with great delight for over a year. My husband and I enjoy reading your entries so much, as we are both book lovers. If you are looking for a great Mieville book to start with, I highly recommend The City and The City. My son, who loves SF, bought it for me at Christmas and I finished it in a weekend. I don’t want to give away anything about the story, but it is a great combination of “noir” fiction and SF. Once you place yourself in (to quote Gibson) the “otherness” of Mieville’s City, you will be completely unable to leave it behind, even after the last page.
I’m so glad you wrote about the New Yorker SF issue. I just picked it up from a stack of unread issues to take as vacation reading. I especially enjoyed Mieville’s and Gibson’s essays. However, to read Bradbury again, so soon after his passing, was bittersweet. He was one of the first SF writers I read as a kid. If you are interested, there’s a great interview he did with Teri Gross on the public radio show Fresh Air, which probably is still archived, that’s worth listening to. Bradbury talks about writing the screenplay for Moby Dick, having not read the book until after taking the job. Fascinating. He says that his connection with Melville was Shakespeare and the Bible, both of which were formative to his writing.
Susan, thank you for your comment and your wonderful kindness! Thank you for the Mieville recommendation too. I will get myself a copy of it and it will be the first Mieville I read, you have made it sound so interesting. Glad you enjoyed the New Yorker SF issue. It was sad reading Bradbury’s piece but I think he will live forever through his words. I do believe I have heard that Terri Gross interview or at least snips of it. I will have to go find it and listen to the whole thing because even if it turns out I have heard all of it before it is worth listening to more than once
I so rarely buy magazines anymore, but I bought this issue when it came out and because of Mieville! I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but another highlight for me was the piece by Ray Bradbury, making it the last thing he ever saw published — it was so poignant and carried a sense of ending in it.
I think Mieville is absolutely right about kids and the fantastic. Such imagination, and kids totally accept twisty logic in their picture books, etc. Most of us grow out of it as we grow up and try to adhere to some kind of normal.
Isabella, oh yes! How could I forget the Bradbury piece? There has been so much about him in the news and here I go an completely forget about his piece! I am so very glad I never “grew out of” fantastic stories and that they still fire up my imagination.
I love love love Willy Wonka and Wizard of Oz and weird Murakami — that’s my favorite sort of weird book. I am going to have to seek out that NYer edition. I hope your wrist feels better! Take it easy this week!
Daphne, it was a lot of fun reading about the childhoods of several well-known genre writers. i think you might enjoy it too.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the first chapter book I read. I was about 7 or 8 and I only remember my approximate age because I remember the library…an old store front …and we had just moved into that neighborhood. I never think of myself as an SF reader but when I think about it, what with my love of Poe, and Washington Irving, and Jules Verne, and any number of other writers who, although not usually thought of as SF authors, wrote of the fantastical and phantasmagorical, I believe I must be one! So, hold that magical lantern higher, please.
Grad, oh yes, you are definitely a SF/ fantasy reader, no doubt about it. That magical lantern shines far and bright
You know, I used to really want to be totally into science fiction novels….they just didn’t work out for me- to say the least!
IQ, well that’s too bad. Perhaps try again sometime with some different authors and maybe you’ll have better luck
The definition of SF is hard to establish, I think. I’d really like to know Atwood’s view about this. Reading your post makes me think of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The story idea is based on a scientific proposition, but the whole book is literary fiction to me. Of course, that just raises another question: How does one define ‘literary fiction’?
Arti, definitions are slippery things. Atwood has a very particular definition, she believes SF is about stuff that can’t possibly happen. She insists all of her books (Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx & Crake, etc) are based in reality and could really happen which means they are not SF but I think she concedes to “speculative.” Because of the scientific proposition, I read Ishiguro’s books as SF. In the end does it matter? I don’t think is does. But you ask a good question, how does one define “literary fiction”?
I am one of those kids who ‘got out’ of science fiction, although not as it happens, fantasy. Recently, I’ve begun to think that I might be missing out here though, so I’ve signed up for an on-line summer course being taught by the University of Michigan and beginning later this month entitled ‘Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World’. I have to say that I’m as interested to see how they handle the teaching as I am in the course but I do hope it’s going to open my mind up to the Sci-Fi world again.
Alex, your summer class sounds like fun! I hope you will be sharing your reading. I’d love to know what the class syllabus is! And of course, I hope you enjoy the class
I just started subscribing to the New Yorker, but alas I didn’t do it soon enough to get this issue–will have to go back into the archives and read this as it sounds interesting. I just put up a display of science fiction books (had to go online to look for a good list to choose from since I don’t really read SF–but am still very intrigued by it), and I have to say I did put a book by Atwood in it! Sorry, Margaret, it just fit–maybe she won’t mind!
Danielle, LOL, don’t be surprised if Atwood shows up at your library demanding to see the person who mistakenly put one of her books on a SF display!
I’m late to this post, I just saw it. I really enjoyed the brief part of Mieville’s article, and completely agree: when do people stop reading sf and fantasy? Maybe when they hit teen years and have to try new things, that’s when things get lost like reading what they loved as children. Just a guess, because it’s such a wonderful field of literature, that I can’t imagine not reading it. And for that reason, I think Atwood saying she’s not writing science fiction is silly, though as someone whom our literary culture also claims, she would not want to lose that status. It’s much higher than any in SF or fantasy circles (Just as Charles de Lint and Guy Gavriel Kay). Which is a shame, because she saying she does write sf would go a long way to showing it has literary value – which we all know! but somehow publishers perceive it as not having any.