It's not just you. I haven't read the Clute review because I'd rather poke sticks into my eyes than listen to anyone else in the SF community say one more fucking word about Margaret Atwood. I just don't understand all of the hostility and anger, and I can't handle seeing it aimed at such a brilliant writer. Maybe I just have a low tolerance for childish behavior.

Please don’t poke sticks into your eyes.

No, you're not the only one.

The funny thing is, I would suspect that some genre folk criticizing Atwood feel no qualms about completely misrepresenting "mainstream" literature at every step and turn. Because 99% of literary stories are about wealthy Manhattan divorcees, didn't you know?

Huh. I thought the "fragile world" that Clute was referring to was the world of science fiction. Which is still overstating the case somewhat, but I do keep reading that SF is dead, dying, or at least in the hospital with the doctor out in the hall speaking quietly to the relatives.

And I think Atwood's getting a lot of grief because she's a high profile writer who made her remarks in a high profile forum. I doubt she's heard all the counter-criticism.

Having said, I too, do wish the SF community would move on already.

Thanks, Karen.

Alan, don’t forget the other 99% — English professors contemplating affairs.

Jon, I thought at first that he might mean the SF world, too, but the sentence begins: “Atwood’s utterances, made in public to the world”; and that’s the first use of the word “world” in the article. So if it’s not the world he’s talking about, he needs to tighten up his prose. :) Anyway, I think reports of the death of SF are greatly exaggerated.

Like I said, I think a lot of what Atwood’s been quoted as saying is silly, but yeah, I think folks ought to move on.

Now if only They were writing stories about wealthy Manhattan divorcees contemplating affairs with English professors in outer space, everyone could patch up their differences.

I'd say it's the usual tempest in a teapot; people will move on as soon as there's some new thing to rant about.

On the other hand, it's not like Atwood said something once and then let it drop. Every time she's interviewed -- and she was being interviewed a lot for a while there -- she said something else obnoxious about science fiction. So I think it's understandable that people keep reacting to each new thing she says.

It's certainly true that few sf readers know anything about literary fiction. But one of the reasons I read the Clute review was that he's one of the few people in the sf world who I would expect to know something about literary fiction. I found it interesting that he chose to review the book as science fiction; clearly, for him, it fails as science fiction in a number of ways.

So I think that brings up some interesting questions about how to read books that are written by someone unfamiliar with genre conventions and aren't intended to be part of a genre but nonetheless fit into the genre.

Say I, knowing nothing about Westerns except for having watched a couple of old John Wayne movies, decide to write a novel set in the Old West. Because I want this novel to be respected by the literary establishment, I take great care to explain that it's not a Western, because Westerns invariably involve stagecoach robberies and gunfights at high noon, and my book contains neither of those things. Literary fiction readers unfamiliar with Westerns read the book and praise it. But then Western readers read it and find that it poorly reinvents several longstanding Western tropes, covering ground that was covered to death by Westerns twenty years earlier, and that nobody who reads or writes Westerns has much interest in any more.

The interesting question to me is: how do you judge such a work? Do you judge it as successful literary fiction? Do you judge it as a failed and trite Western? Is there some middle ground?

(As for "why does anyone in the SF world feel compelled to pay attention," it seems obvious to me that Jon's right. A high-profile person repeats something derogatory about something you care deeply about, and gets published saying it all over the world press; it's kind of hard to ignore. It's true that the sf world has a lot of baggage over this issue; sf writers have been trying to get mainstream respectability for decades, and the whole "genre ghetto" thing has been inspiring invective all around since at least the late sixties. (Just read essays and fanzines from the days when Vonnegut was declaring himself a non-sf writer.) So it's a longstanding sore point that gets perhaps a bit more attention than it would if people didn't already feel defensive about it. But I think it's also true that when newspapers all over the world are publishing quotes from a famous person who's saying nasty things about you, it's hard for a lot of people to just ignore that and "move on." Furthermore, there can occasionally be real-world consequences to widely-held misconceptions about a field; see the recent case where a comic-book store lost a court case apparently on the grounds that the judge believed comics were by definition for children.)

I think you should judge a work on its own terms. Undoubtedly it will be helpful to the Western fans in your audience to know that they will probably not like the book, and why, but that in and of itself is no reason to trash the book if the book is not positioned as a Western. And if you’re writing reviews exclusively for die-hard Western fans, why bother to review something you know they won’t like?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with reading an allegedly non-genre work as a genre work, and sometimes you can even get more out of the work that way. But what I’ve seen far too much of in the last few years — probably because I’ve only been paying attention the last few years — is an instinctive attack reaction in the SF community to any successful SFnal work published in the mainstream or by a mainstream writer, usually savaging it for lack of “originality” — as if originality were the distinguishing characteristic of most of the SF that’s published today.

Clute goes farther than that, and plenty of his criticisms of Oryx and Crake are more insightful (the insubstantiality of one of the two title characters, for instance) and likely enough right on, for all I know, not having read it; but it’s only a sense of fairness that kept me reading the review through his trahison des clercs attack to get to them.

And, fundamentally, it’s just not clear to me what an SF reviewer writing an attack review for an SF publication aimed at SF readers is supposed to do to lift SF out of the genre ghetto. If anything, I think it reinforces the boundaries — at least from the point of view of those inside them.

I even think it’s possible to read the success of mainstream works using SF tropes as a sign that it’s possible for SF — for some definition of SF — to achieve the mainstream respectability so many claim to want, or at least complain about not getting. But it never will if SF takes every such work as a signal to build the ghetto walls higher.

I'm thinking a non-genre genre work (or SimGenre work) would be reviewed in a genre forum for the same reason that it'd be reviewed elsewhere: it's got the attention of readers (even if it's just the reviewer) and it bears some similarities to the casual eye to other works in that genre. It's not like Locus is reviewing, say, Jennifer Crusie's Faking It and then whaling on it as a complete failure as a book.

As for the rest, well, I'm reminded of being told not to be so defensive right after someone's criticized me. No matter how you respond, you're screwed.

Only if the criticism and the defensiveness are part of the same conversation.

Naturally.

Atwood is a scrapper -- she can take it.

The problem, in my view, is that people are missing the forest for the trees. The usual view is that SF either needs to import realist tropes, or must be protected from them by ideologues.

Personally, I think it is realism that is dead at things like 0&C, Conjunctions 39, etc. are attempts to save IT by grafting on some SF.

Excellent point.

Sometimes I wonder what “SF” would have been like if the pulps had never come along, given that early last century you had people like Twain and Kipling and Forster writing the stuff. Maybe it’s not the pulps’ fault; maybe WW I killed the future off the way it killed everything else.