Re:Where is science fiction leading us and what does it conc...
by mechanical_fish on Monday June 09, 2008 @01:45PM
(#212966)
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.
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.