Had a conversation today about why people are put off by sci fi books.

My friend argued the point that most people aren't interested in science and therefore don't want to read stories about it. Fantasy seems to be in the ascendant whereas the opposite seems to be true of sci fi. Why is this?

I countered this with the fact that most sci fi involves very little science and mostly it's just fantasy that uses machines and computers instead of wands and books of magic, which is one thing that puts me off (though I quite like fantasy in some respects)

One of my bugbears is the overuse of made up technical jargon and silly names (the silly names being one of my pet hates with fantasy too). Most of the most successful sci fi these days seems to distance itself from science fiction altogether, Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro etc I could be wrong but it seems that much of the bestselling sci fi these days is passed off as literary fiction, how does that and why does that arise? How does something go from being firmly in the sci fi genre to being something primarily marketed as literary? And why do people buy this when they would normally shun it if it was classified as genre fiction?

I don't see sci fi and literary fiction as two separate and distinct genres: 'literary' is a style of writing, surely, and can therefore cover all types of stories. I suspect people who read the sci-fi fiction of literary writers do so because they enjoy that writer's style of writing rather than because they specifically want to read a sci-fi novel.

I'm not a fan of sci-fi but I have read Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell. I wouldn't classify either of them as sci-fi writers, though, and I wouldn't say that a novel set in the future is necessarily sci-fi.

This might interest:

http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=20355

Emma

There's an awful lot to say on this and not much time (for me at any rate) to say it in.

It's difficult to compare fantasy with science fiction because they are very different genres with very different histories and current circumstances. Fantasy is doing much better than SF in terms of books sales, for example. Possibly, this is because much of printed fantasy is escapist, whereas escapist SF tends to be supplied more by the TV and movie industry.

I wouldn't agree that most SF involves very little science. If you get hold of the Year's Best Science Fiction 2007, for example, you'll see that the opening five or six stories are all 'hard' SF, i.e. heavy on astronomy and physics details. Also, the authors you quote are really literary writers who sometimes write SF, so you can't really say their stuff is 'successful SF' - it's successful fiction with some SF elements.

And I don't think a lot of SF is passed off as literary fiction these days. Just take a look at Locus - the book summaries and covers will show you that most SF on sale is promoted very much as SF. There are of course SF writers who write in what might be called a literary way - Ian MacLeod and Stephen Baxter for example - but they are still marketed very much as SF, and see themselves that way.

However, there's no doubt SF fiction is in a difficult position these days. The SFWA recently debated the problem (as such) of the effect that so much space opera and super-hero based SF in TV/film is having on SF written fiction. Many publishers and magazines are chasing this market and therefore looking for writers who ape the visual media. Which is not only ironic, in that TV/film has always mined the rich legacy of written SF, but also probably misguided, in that there is a valid question about whether or not the SF film/TV market is the same anyway. Traditionally, SF questions current culture and the human condition; film adaptations tend to strip out this element for the sake of entertainment. So to produce fiction which in turn apes the films is, many believe, to further diminish the core values of SF (at least the more thoughtful kind - there has of course always been space opera nonsense in SF fiction).

Terry

One thing must be understood is that SF endures. The great novels are still reprinted, so the market, albeit maybe not as bouyant as previous years, is living and breathing. What I do think is that possibly the need to explore the human conditon through the prism of SF is not as strong as it once was.
David

I thought it was to do with the death of secular optimism - we aren't in the space age any more, no-one believes we'll still settle the planets, the problems on Earth seem more pressing. Science doesn't seem like a solution any more; people turn inwards towards fantasy. That's what I understood about it, anyway.

Leila,

The fact that I agree with you makes me want to go live on Mars!

Good answer, Leila. Yes, that's how I felt while reading tons of Sci-Fi in the 70s. Then computers and the internet took off and superceeded most things that the SF writers could think up. Ever since they've been playing catch-up, and SF seems to have morphed into the likes of Star-Trek, Star Wars and Stargate TV series.


- NaomiM