anton (04/15/83)
Here's my tanner's worth:
SF books are still books.
Harlan Ellison writes some superb literature. I will not insult him
or stirr his wrath by calling it SF, but there is little else(ion)
it can be shoe-horned into if you want to categorise it. It is not
(with a couple of exceptions) Gadget-SF, Space {war, opera, travel},
"Ain't the future {awful, wonderful}. At worst I would call it an
enlightened insight into human {nature, feeling, suffering, aspirations}.
Sure, he is prostituting his experience, but boy has he had a lot of
experience to work with. Maybe one day he will write about myopia.
David Gerrold's "When Harlie Was One" is one of the "SF" books
that seems to have stired this debate. I question whether it is SF ?
If you want to make that into SF I fear you have to include
Orwell's "1984" for the two-way viewscreens, "Brave New Worlds" for
all the technology, much of the fictional work of Shaw, Dunsany,
and what about the creation of life in Mary Shelly's novel ?
While I will grant you the pure gadgetry and opera that made the pulps
of the 30's is still with us today in Analog, every once in a while
there is a novel which merely uses technology as a backdrop for
social/psychological insight. I would contend that "When Harlie Was One"
is in this class.
Now, if you choses to read SF as S{cience, peculative} F{iction, anatasy}
you can shoe-horn almost anything from Shakespear to Swift in, not to
mention Plato, Aristotle, The Bible and The UNIX(tm) Programmer's
Handbook. Face up to it, you're damned if you do and you're damned if
you don't. (There is a SF book recently re-published. It won an award when
it was originally published as two novellas (?maybe I'm wrong about that,
My old Astoundings are still crated) Anyone know what its new title is?)
Books are still books even if they are published as SF. Some books
which are expanded from stories in Analog have NEVER appeared in
publishers' lists as SF. Much of SF is good literature and will
survive as such.
Questions:
In view of the Manson trials can "SIASL" be viewed as SF ?
If Josephine Tey's "The Daughter of Time" is not SF then why
is the "Lord D'Arcy" series viewed as such ?
What Category does James Branch Cabell's 50 novels fit into ?
If its is magic and alternative worlds that make if Fantasy,
what about Shakespeare's "Mid Summer Night's Dream" and
Poul Anderson's "A Midsummer Tempest" ? Both are set in the
same "world" of "fantasy", one is English Literature, the other
is SF.
If God does not exist, is the Bible SF ?
and finally, for Anderson pundits who know greek,
If Harlie (you decide which one) had a daughter, could she
be called "Kyria Ellison" ?
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The above is standard response. I handed out all the books I mentioned
above to various Eng. Lit. students I associated with when I was a UG
at Canterbury. Response was mixed. Many had already been brainwashed
into some funny ideas of what Literature is. T. S. Eliot wrote English
Lit, not American Lit. Cabell was unheard of, even by those doing
E&A. The parallel outcomes of "The French Lt's Woman" bore no connection
to the parallel worlds of SF, or in particular Niven's short story
"All the Myriad Ways" or Anderson's "Midsummer Tempest". No-one
saw the parallels between the Foundation Trilogy and "The Rise and Fall...".
"Gilgamesh" and "Conan", along with all of their ilk, were unconnected
in either symbolism, structure or underlying 'message'. Heinlien's
"Farnham's Freehold" could never be a social comment. "The Posiedon
Adventure" is a novel, but "A Fall of Moondust" is SF.
All of which is strange, because while Joan Vinge's "The Snow Queen"
uses names, places and charecters from The Mabinogion, the cannon
of Welsh mythology, it is classed as Science Fiction, whereas
the equally liberal rewrites of the story done by Watson, Morris,
and Lloyd Alexander's award-winning (Newbury Medal for Juvenile Literature)
`Pydain' series ("The Book of Three" ..... "The High King") are
viewed as literture. There are numerous other examples relating to
Merlin, Norse, Greek, Damn-it-all ! Just about every Mythos.
I don't have to list them all; its easy enough to look on the
shelves.
Which leads me to one conclusion. If you don't read SF, or if your do
read SF and precious little else, and you posit and enforce categories
about what you read or chose to read on this basis rather than on the
quality and merit of the piece concerned you are a jerk and a functional
illiterate. You may as well spend your time reading WW2 or suprehero
comic books. If you care enough about literature as such you won't be
enforcing such stupid categories. However, if you are one of the
numerous psychophants who have had some idea of what Literature IS
indoctrinate into them, and decide that "Because Asimov Wrote It, It must
Be SF.." (sigh. I seem to recall SF is about 10% of his output to date
and MUCH less than that in terms of royalty rates.) I can surely
come up with a reading list that would bust open such notions - unless
you have a closed mind !
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I am using NEWSEC and 'n' to turn off my reception of this debate
on the net. If anyone wants to pursue it with me sensibly they can
mail
/anton aylward HCRC TO
..decvax!hcr!hcrvax!anton