There's a strong status separation between SF and literary fiction. If you get someone to read SF that has literary merit, they'll try to tell you afterwards that it wasn't SF.
> If authors who have the choice overwhelmingly prefer to position their works as "literary" rather than "genre" when they could fit into either category, doesn't that say there's something asymmetric about how we treat the two?
Well, as the article says, "literary fiction is one of the larger chunks of the popular adult fiction pie." "Literary" fiction can reach a larger audience. Anecdotally, it's pretty common for me to hear an SF novel recommendation given with the proviso, "it's not like other science fiction." There's a larger audience for "fiction in general" than for speculative fiction, so it makes sense that authors would reach for that larger piece of the pie.
Why does so little science fiction rise to the standards of literary fiction?
Because the standards of "literary fiction" are, at best, orthogonal to the factors which make a book sell well?
"Science fiction" and "literary fiction" are modern marketing labels. When a publisher labels a work "science fiction", they're trying to say "if you like stuff by Heinlein, Clarke, Bujold, Cherryh, Dick, Stross, or Stephenson, you might like this. It might or might not be literature, but we think it's a good read". Whereas a publisher who labels a work "literary fiction" is trying to say "if you drop quotes from this at a party full of literature professors they won't laugh at you. It might or might not be a good read, but it's literature".
Naturally, one of these genres sells more books than the other.
The situation is complicated by the lingering death of the novel as a popular art form. Guys like Nabokov or Fitzgerald or Thurber or Joseph Conrad wrote in an era where everybody bought and read novels of one kind or another -- TV didn't exist, you couldn't watch movies except in a theatre, radios weren't portable. In that world, the novel was at its peak. There were more marketing channels for books, and a larger population of people who were highly print-literate and appreciative of subtle literary gestures. So publishers were that much more willing to print stuff regardless of whether it could be sequelized, or sold to Hollywood, or stamped with a genre label. Life today is harder. It might well be true that nobody [1] would buy Heart of Darkness if it were published today... unless it were in the form of a movie, or an HBO miniseries, or a video game, or a series of Youtube shorts [2] -- you know, a living genre. Or unless it could conform to the restrictions of one of the remaining established marketing channels for books, like the SF market, or the fantasy market, or the "Harry Potteresque" market, or the "will get recommended by Oprah" market.
[1] Where "nobody" is defined as "not enough people to make it a profitable use of the publisher's limited resources".
[2] Incidentally, the first person to turn Heart of Darkness into an awesome series of Youtube shorts will win my admiration. And the videogame version would be fascinating.
But what is the "genre" of literary fiction? It's far too broad compared recognized genres like science fiction. That being said, there is an annoying trend of literary authors writing science fiction books (McCarthy's "The Road", most of Margaret Atwood's books) and they and the literary establishment vocally denying that they are SF because they are Very Serious Works by Important Authors.
I think it's pretty clear what happens when literary novelists experiment with SF, to wit, it is not defined as SF and is shelved with the literature.
This is devoutly desired by most authors as being tarnished with the "SF Author" label is a ticket to lower pay and guilt-by-association-with-trash. Margaret Atwood furiously resists the idea that her stuff is Science Fiction because "SF is talking squids in outer space".
What often feels irritating about literary adventures into SF is that they allow themselves to loot the treasury of SF ideas and present them under respectable covers to readers who would never venture into the SF section (I view Atwood as a repeat offender in this department).
This is considerably less irritating than the bulk of the F/SF section, of course, which is 90% extruded paint-by-numbers escape literature. The average page count should be the first clue that 'we're not here for the ideas'. Thank goodness for the "Masterworks" series (and a few other lines) which do the admirable job of keeping something other than the Escape Lit du Jour in print.
Iain Banks (who wrote both scifi and literary fiction) on this very subject:
"An ex-neighbour of ours recalled (in an otherwise entirely kind and welcome comment) me telling him, years ago, that my SF novels effectively subsidised the mainstream works. I think he’s just misremembered, as this has never been the case. Until the last few years or so, when the SF novels started to achieve something approaching parity in sales, the mainstream always out-sold the SF – on average, if my memory isn’t letting me down, by a ratio of about three or four to one. I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff I had to churn out in order to keep a roof over my head while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels. Never been the case, and I can’t imagine that I’d have lied about this sort of thing, least of all as some sort of joke. The SF novels have always mattered deeply to me – the Culture series in particular – and while it might not be what people want to hear (academics especially), the mainstream subsidised the SF, not the other way round. And… rant over."
Why do you consider literary fiction "navel-gazing" and why is SF that important?
As a side note, one of the books they give as an example is The Time Traveller's Wife, which involves "a man with a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel unpredictably", which certainly sounds like an SF-y premise.
A lot has been written about how, for example, the best Science Fiction reflects something from the real world or makes us think about real world issues. It's, in my opinion, what turns good SF into truly great SF. There are even awards specifically made for SF that touches these real world issues (see the James Tiptree, Jr. Award [1], for example. And if you've never read fiction by Tiptree (R.I.P.), I strongly recommend her work!)
So fiction often has meaning related to the real world. In my opinion it is entirely appropriate to worry when groups of people are generally misrepresented in fiction.
Fiction that is completely divorced from reality is uninteresting to me and to a great deal many people.
Well, yeah—that's what it means for something to be "science fiction." SF is fiction that not only feels scientific, but can be expected to hold up to genuine, in-depth scientific inquiry on its concepts and progression. If you didn't write a movie/book/whatever that will stand up to such nerdery, you should really stop calling it sci-fi.
I believe that some of the best "literary" fiction is also science fiction. For example much of George Orwell and Ray Bradbury, also Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula LeGuin. If you allow for the term "speculative fiction," you really start netting a huge catch. And more and more books once dismissed as "mere" genre titles will be considered to have "literary merit", however vague and dissatisfying that term may be. Isaac Asimov might be an example, also Tolkein.
That has got to be the most biased statistical sampling technique ever. If you want to know about "literary culture" among HN readers, asking for replies from people who read non-SF is not going to answer your question. At worst, it'll give you the illusion of knowledge.
(Maybe a more interesting question would be: what's so ontologically distinct about science fiction? Why is it specifically excluded from Literature?)
I didn't mean to insult others' tastes, and I'm sorry if I came across that way - I'm all for enjoying whatever palette of genres you like. But if your primary interest is character, surely you would want books written with that in mind. And if a book is primarily about its characters, why would that book be written as SF?
tldr: ESR argues that mostly only classical Science Fiction is real SF, explains why (historic references as well as references to what the paying audience prefers), and argues why it has tp be that way.
What sets science fiction apart from high literature is that it tends to emphasize the novum, that new idea or technology that distinguished the setting from the real world, at the expense of characterization. It’s any ideas, not people.
Literary fiction is the opposite. It’s about people, their relationships and struggles, situated in reality. It tends not to deal with high concept counterfactuals which are the bread and butter of science fiction.
That does not makes much sense to me. You can be SF fan while demanding that arbitrary aspect of the book is high quality - whether character, action quality, gore, logical consistency or the text itself.
Just because you personally don't care about some aspect of the book does not mean all who do are dabblers.
My position on SF is close to how Philip K Dick put it: in SF the main characters aren't people, they're ideas. SF that purports to be scientifically rigorous in some way, or in some way predicting the future, seems to me to be missing the point. Science fiction is about today; it is about the world right now. SF is interesting in so far as it makes you consider the current condition in a different way. In so far as it is scientifically accurate, then it is speculative prediction, not science fiction.
Completely misses the bit where science fiction doesn't have a unified purpose.
Some SF comments on current society. Some comments on trends. Some is escapist. Some are warnings, and some are dreams. Some are didactic, or moralist, or propaganda.
Some SF, like other kinds of art, is commentary on previous works of art.
SF doesn't have a singular function any more than any other major genre of art has a singular function. And SF clearly transcends form -- is not the Chicago Bean SFnal? So there is SF illustration and painting, poetry and short stories, novellae and novels, epics, short films, feature films, music and sculpture.
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