Posts by Keir Leslie
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It is also a necessary one: for any sub-culture to exist it must be distinct from mainstream culture.
Paul darling, you misunderstand. SF is mainstream. --- you mean I can't indulge in triumphalist boasting? fine then: it certainly isn't any less mainstream than literary fiction.
What about Horror, Romance, Thrillers, Westerns and any other genre? What is so special about SF?
Nothing; if the best novel is a romance novel then by god that should win the best novel prizes. Prizes should be genre blind except where they explicitly aren't.
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Because the Booker claims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or Eire; if it merely rewards the best novel (not-sf) it should change the claims it makes.
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Writers don't have fans, fans have writers.
What I mean by fan-author is author-out-of-organised fandom, tho' of course I shouldn't be too doctrinaire about that because Lessing certainly engaged in fanac [0] and I certainly shouldn't contradict anyone about their own fannish-ness.
As to sf novels that ought have won, I shall just wave at Le Guin, Dick, Delany, Haldeman, Russ and so forth; all very very good writers and completely ignored by the literary establishment [1] at the time. The fact that these days you can't knock over a cup of coffee in an English Department common room without scalding someone working on some form of sf criticism is really quite revealing.
[0] Heh. I'm just being childish now amn't I?
[1] Where by literary establishment I mean the kind of chap who show up in As Others See Us.
(And to Craig, don't worry, I always get confused about who publishes what of Stross', esp. here in NZ; I think I've read books of his from all three of the mentioned publishers, which is why I started paying attention!)
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Ken McLeod and Charlie Stross are both published in the United States by Tor Books, who are specialist genre publishers who have been getting the basics right for nearly thirty years -- publish good books inside and out, know your fluid and fickle market and sell your arse off. (It also doesn't hurt that Tor founder Tom Doherty has been publishing SF/fantasy for a very long time and is highly regarded in the field.)
Stross' sf is published by Ace in the US, and was a runaway success with Ace first. It's his later fantasy series Merchant Princes that's published by Tor. And it's more than just that --- MacLeod wins US awards, as does Stross, and it can't entirely be that Banks is unknown to the con-going fen that hand out the awards.
No sf/f novel has ever won a Booker. (Depending how you reckon some magical realist works, but.) Several sf/f novels have been short listed tho'. And, of course, at least one sf author's won the Nobel. But that doesn't prove much of anything, given that no litfic novel has ever won a Hugo or a Golden Dagger.
In fact it proves too much because one can quite clearly show that there were sf/f novels that should have won but didn't, and there's a rather suspicious pattern about the sf/f novels that turn up in these contexts. They are generally by slumming litfic authors and not fan-authors, which rather makes me suspect a wee bit of bias.
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Oh, I quite liked Dead Air and The Business, personally. I didn't think either was very preachy.
But classically that's Banks' problem. On the one hand he's one of the most important sf authors alive, and basically one of the few sf authors who isn't a waste of ink, but on the other he doesn't sell in America. MacLeod does, as does Stross, so it can't merely be anti-lefty-scot prejudice. And it would be interesting to work out what's going on.
(I wouldn't necessarily expect to sell his mainstream novels in America, any more than I'd expect Kelman or Owen to be big sellers there.)
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Other possible reasons: the space aliens told him so; his sf publisher has a strange fetish for initials; he himself has a strange fetish for initials but the first publisher rode herd pretty hard; etc. etc.
I mean really. It's a bit of nonsense which doesn't explain the problem Banks actually has, viz. he doesn't sell very well in the US*. Sure there's the sad gits who never got over the New Wave and all that, but they are not the kind of people who'd buy Banks' books anyway to be honest.
* Why even Use of Weapons and Player of Games never managed to win a Hugo.
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Nah Gio, that doesn't fly. Most `biological' males are also `social' males; therefore there must be some element of biological determination in there.
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Wells and Orwell may both have been British sensible left-wingers, but their fiction is quite different. Wells writes of scientific possibilities, Orwell of human ones. Speculative Fiction is a useful category for works like 1984.
This only works if you ignore the fact that 1984 is a response to Men Like Gods, and in fact only really makes sense within the genre of British socialist sf. (--- see also Methuselah & Philip George Chadwick. As to Wells writing of scientific possibilities, what on Earth is he doing in War of the Worlds or even First Men on the Moon? Neither of those are at all hard.)
Could it be that People of Sci-Fi are hostile to literary fiction and read books only if they are labelled as part of the Sci-Fi genre?
Where by `people of sci-fi' you mean `literary fiction types who are a couple of decades out of date', `literary fiction' you mean `sf', and `Sci-Fi genre' you mean `literary fiction' yes! it could be.
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It really doesn't matter. All the excitement seems to come from Sci-Fi readers who try to claim literary fiction writers as their own. Atwood and Banks, like Orwell and Wells, are simply good writers. They do not write for a fanbase or within a genre.
Banks is a sf author through and through, and is probably a fan-with-a-capital-f to boot. If you really think Banks doesn't think of himself as an sf author when writing sf you're, er, a bit out of it.
I mean really, Banks?
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`I don't write sci-fi' is a pretty classic line sf authors peddle, either in a `I don't write skiffy crap' way, or as a `I write speculative fiction' line. Sf covers a multitude of generic descriptors.
(Atwood's genre history is laughable by the way, and is pretty much crankery. Orwell out of Verne not Wells? Whut? It's the British Sensible Left-wing SF lineage, one of the finest and noblest genres in literature.)