what the booker prize really excludes _ books _ guardian.co

1/21www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/oct/17/science-fiction-china-mieville

What the Booker prize really excludesChina Miéville has conjured a new way of construing the over-

familiar SF vs literary fiction debate

Sarah Crownguardian.co.uk, Monday 1 7 October 201 1 1 7 .56 BST

Estranger … China Miév ille. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

I was up in Cheltenham this weekend at the Literature festival, where I chaired several

events – including one with SF legend Brian Aldiss, still going strong at 86, and calling to

mind in voice and appearance a benign, left-wing John Cleese. When asked by an

audience member why he'd tackled the subject of state-endorsed torture in his 2007

novel, Harm, he explained the novel's political charge on the grounds that "I really do

believe that the people in charge at the minute are - well, shits". Amen to that.

Anyway, my final event on Saturday was with SF-legend-in-the-making China Miéville,

to discuss his latest novel, Embassytown. We talked about the novel for about half an

hour (read it: it's excellent) before the conversation veered onto the evergreen territory

of the Booker prize's wilful neglect of science fiction. It's a well-rehearsed argument (I

went to an event at Cheltenham last year in which Miéville and John Mullan squared off

entertainingly over it), but we ran down the familiar points: SF novels are generally sold

not on their literary credentials but on the ideas they explore; the Booker is a genre

(litfic) award itself, but just doesn't admit it; SF novels DO make it onto Booker shortlists

(Never Let Me Go, Oryx and Crake) but once shortlisted they're not called science

fiction any more (cf Kingsley Amis's oft-quoted distich: "'SF's no good!' they bellow till

we're deaf./ 'But this looks good … ' 'Well, then, it's not SF!'").

It's an endlessly fascinating subject, and the conversation was particularly timely, given

the widely-acknowledged paucity of this year's Booker shortlist - but we didn't really

break new ground until a few minutes before the end of the event, when Miéville made a

point that I found so interesting I wanted to disseminate it further. The real schism, he

suggested, lies not between "litfic" and fantasy/SF, but between "the literature of

recognition versus that of estrangement". The Booker, he said,


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Comments45 comments, displaying Oldest first

and the tradition of, if you like, 'mainstream literary fiction' of which it's the

most celebrated local jamboree, has tended strongly to celebrate the former

over the latter. There's an obvious relation with realist versus non-realist

work (thinking on these lines might help map links between the pulpiest SF

and more celebrated Surrealist and avant-garde work), though the

distinction maps only imperfectly across the generic divide. All fiction

contains elements of both drives (to different degrees, and variably skilfully).

That very fact might be one way of getting at the drab disappointment of, on

the one hand, the cliches of some fantasy and the twee and clunking

allegories of middlebrow 'literary' magic realism (faux estrangement, none-

more-mollycoddling recognition), and on the other at those utterly

fascinating texts which contain not a single impossible element, and yet which

read as if they were, somehow, fantastic (Jane Eyre, Moby-Dick, etc). Great

stuff can doubtless be written from both perspectives. But I won't duck the

fact that at its best, I think there is something more powerful, ambitious,

intriguing and radical about the road recently less feted. I'd rather be

estranged than recognise.

It's a fascinating distinction, and one that also has the neat effect of moving the debate

on from the contentious territory of the SF/litfic turfwar into that of value-neutral

literary theory. As Miéville says, there is nothing inherently superior about recognition

or estrangement, but given that the literature which the Booker traditionally rewards

tends to be of the "ah, yes!" variety rather than what we might term the "oh, my" sort,

does it not seem reasonable that we give long-overdue space to the latter?

ItsAnOutrage2

17 October 2011 7:30PM

I enjoyed this article. It left me with the though that most (all?)

good SF contains points of recognition within a strange

environment. That's how it works. In the same way that many

(most?) works of literary fiction have points of strangeness set

within a recognisable environment.

PaulBowes01


The trouble with Miéville's distinction is that, as with all attempts

to reduce a complex reality to a simple binary opposition, it starts

to fall apart as soon as we think about it. One of the defining

characteristics of genre writing historically has been that it

departs very rapidly from initial innovation and novelty to


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predictability and formula. The striking similarity of products

within a genre is, after all, what makes a genre recognisable as

such.

Literary fiction, far from being a 'literature of recognition', was

supposed to be a form of avant-gardism, the genre that resisted

generification in favour of continual revolution, permanent

estrangement. It's hard to remember that nineteenth century

realism was once a radical technique, but that was the case.

The problem with the Booker is that the pseudo-literary novel it

claims to champion is a usurper; a complacent, conservative form

that mimics enough of the stylistic tics that people have learned

to associate with literary fiction to pass for it. This is why so

many people argue that 'Booker novel' and even 'literary novel' is

now a generic label: as a matter of practical fact, it is.

I don't think that it's an accident that the rise to prominence of

the Booker in the '80s coincided with the advent of the celebrity

writer and the mega-advance and the effective disappearance of

genuinely exploratory fiction from the British scene. (And before

anybody mentions Mr. Josipovici, or Christine Brooke-Rose, or

even Iain Sinclair - the existence of a few people struggling on the

margins is no substitute for their presence at the centre of debate

and as a living influence on younger writers.)

The Booker moved into the vacant centre in those years and

quietly redefined for the mass audience what constitutes

worthwhile writing. Now it appears that it can't even identify the

best products of the genre it defines. What use does it serve?

And how does Miéville's distinction help us? Science fiction and

fantasy occasionally offer some interesting writing, but in general

they are formally conservative.

Genre fictions have some of the most aesthetically conservative

readers in the literary world. Most genre writers are perfectly

well aware that they risk disappointing their readers'

expectations at their peril, and write their variant of one of the

approved formulas. Generally speaking, genre is not so much a

literature of estrangement as a literature of reassurance. Nobody

should look to it for help.

translated


Subtle article, and I'm definitely going to read Embassytown. On

another recent consideration of the literary merits (or otherwise)

of SF I'd highly recommend David Lodge's "A Man of Parts". One

of the minor themes running through the book is the somewhat

tortured relationship between H.G. Wells and Henry James.

Lodge knows the work of both writers inside out and at one point

has Wells satirically imagining a Jamesian book called "The Spoils

of Miss Blandish with a plot that didn't begin for 150 pages and

concerned the hero's search for the perfect butler." This

contrasts with Well's own self-consciousness as having a

reputation as the author of not-particularly-literary work.

What Lodge is doing doesn't exactly intersect with the argument

Sarah is making because the contrast he is pointing to is between

a kind of realist writing of Wells and the formalism of James, but


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for my money Wells was very definitely an "oh, my" kind of

writer - despite his lick of interest in formal invention and

because of his politics. After reading Lodge's book I find it

impossible to separate Wells' interest science fiction from his

progressive politics - in particular his early support of women's

suffrage and his attitude to marriage.

In fact, I find it hard to imagine "oh, my" science fiction writing

that doesn't simultaneously imagine a radically different political

future.

translated

17 October 2011 10:20PM

PaulBowes01

Good post. You write: "Literary fiction, far from being a

'literature of recognition', was supposed to be a form of avant-

gardism", which is quite correct, but it's not just literary fiction

that's fallen on hard times - so has the very idea of a political

avant-garde.

It's interesting that the Booker Prize began in 1968, which is one

of the dates often invoked as representing the final death of the

idea of the avant-garde as a co-articulation of art and

politics...maybe there's something to that coincidence.

jareds

18 October 2011 7:53AM

The most telling point to me is Mr. Miéville's reiteration that "lit-

fic" is a "genre" - and, moreover, all these distinctions are as frail

and as theoretical as one wants them to be.

As far as I'm concerned - that's totally fine. The main issue isn't

that the Man Booker ignores other genres, it is that it does so

while claiming to represent the best in all fiction. That's always

going to be a controversial statement and making it while

standing on a (very) narrow platform is bound to earn some

derision.

As to Mr. Bowes statement above:

Science fiction and fantasy occasionally offer some

interesting writing, but in general they are formally

conservative.

Genre fictions have some of the most aesthetically

conservative readers in the literary world. Most

genre writers are perfectly well aware that they risk

disappointing their readers' expectations at their

peril, and write their variant of one of the approved

formulas.

I both agree and disagree. There's some amazing work coming

out of science fiction and fantasy and, if some of the hoary old

tropes still seem dominant at its core, I can only suggest looking

further out at the fringes.

Of course, that shouldn't be the reader's responsibility, which is

why awards like The Kitschies (with criteria of "progressive,

intelligent, entertaining") and the Arthur C. Clarke (with a


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tradition of somewhat radical, category-spanning picks) exist.

Like the Man Booker, these awards seek to elevate the best book

of the year, they just draw from a different pool.

PaulBowes01


@translated

It's interesting that the Booker Prize began in 1968,

which is one of the dates often invoked as

representing the final death of the idea of the avant-

garde as a co-articulation of art and politics...maybe

there's something to that coincidence.

I'm not sure that I would want to pin it down to a specific date,

but certainly there is a feeling of creative exhaustion in British

experimental or exploratory writing building slowly from the

mid-60s and running through to c.1980 when the whole thing

falls off a cliff in terms of cultural attention. The change in the

culture that began in the Thatcher/Reagan years was horribly

obvious to people who lived through them.

For me the Booker is simply one instance of the astonishing

ability of capitalist institutions to co-opt and de-fang troublesome

elements in a culture - and, where co-optation proves impossible,

to marginalise by ignoring them. And it isn't just a matter of one

prize: as James English has pointed out (The Economy of

Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value),

there has been a massive proliferation of prizes since 1945 that

constitutes an awards regime, with its own momentum and

agenda, that has distorted the creative process.

What is unforgivable is the way that the literary media -

gatekeepers in theory, handmaidens in practice - have been

content to go along with the whole charade. But that's where the

money and the celebrity are.

@jareds

There's some amazing work coming out of science

fiction and fantasy and, if some of the hoary old tropes

still seem dominant at its core, I can only suggest

looking further out at the fringes.

I don't disagree. But note that you yourself suggest that such

work is to be found only at the margins. If even mainstream

SF/Fantasy can't get a look in, what hope for the more radical

work? The Booker is not interested in work that will only ever

have a small audience.

I stand by my contention that most genre writing is formally

conservative. When people talk about the radical aspect of SF

they are usually referring to the content - the ideas - not to the

way in which that content is conveyed. Genuinely radical

experimentation in SF only very briefly surfaced to general

attention in the late '60s and early '70s with writers like J. G.

Ballard, Thomas Disch and Angela Carter, and even then was in

most cases clearly dependent for its innovations on the existing

literary avant-garde. And SF is the most potentially radical

genre: the others are far more formally conservative, as a glance

through the ranks of crime novels will confirm.


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SarahCrown


thanks for all the comments - fascinating discussion.

@PaulBowes01 I broadly agree. You say

Literary fiction, far from being a 'literature of

recognition', was supposed to be a form of avant-

gardism, the genre that resisted generification in

favour of continual revolution, permanent

estrangement.

and I think you're right - but as you go on to point out later, the

origins of the genre (if we're all agreed we can call it that) have

little to do with what it is now. Experimentalism in litfic is largely

confined to the margins now (though to be fair, perhaps that's

inevitable - the margins are always where change happens).

You then say

Generally speaking, genre is not so much a literature

of estrangement as a literature of reassurance.

Nobody should look to it for help.

And I'd say, again, I can absolutely see your point - but I'd single

out crime fiction rather than SF in relation to it. In crime fiction,

form is central, whereas in SF it isn't - anything, as they say, can

happen.

In my view, the distinction is a helpful one because it redefines

the battleground - we're no longer looking at a straight-up genre

fight, because recognition and estrangement can exist in any

genre (though estrangement may be more likely to be found in

SF). And that I think frees us up to examine the Booker and

where/what it lacks without having first to pick a corner.

@translated

I find it hard to imagine "oh, my" science fiction

writing that doesn't simultaneously imagine a

radically different political future.

I think the best SF - the really premium stuff - does this - pace

Embassytown and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy ...

PaulBowes01

18 October 2011 10:13AM

@SarahCrown

In my view, the distinction is a helpful one because it

redefines the battleground - we're no longer looking

at a straight-up genre fight, because recognition and

estrangement can exist in any genre (though

estrangement may be more likely to be found in SF).

And that I think frees us up to examine the Booker

and where/what it lacks without having first to pick a

corner.


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I've never been much interested in the genre / litfic distinction,

but it appears that others are. The machinery of the book

industry seems designed to perpetuate the distinction, and I'm

afraid some of this comes down to simple snobbishness - a group

of people people elevating one kind of literature above the others,

defending its boundaries and then using their enthusiasm for it as

a badge of superior social status (Bourdieu pretty well wrote the

book on this).

I have a horrible feeling that China Miéville may have reinvented

the critical wheel here - something to do with Rabelais and the

carnivalesque... And there's a strong echo of Brecht and the

Verfremdungseffekt.

But I agree that if these opposed forces are to be seen as real

they have to be seen as being tendencies within a genre rather

than simply a way of redescribing existing genre divisions. I'm

not sure, however, that that takes us further forward, because

it's still a binary opposition, and one term in a binary is typically

validated and the other abjected. China Miéville seems to think

'estrangement' is a value in itself, whereas one of the things I find

tiresome about much fiction is the way in which apparent

estrangement merely delays a final recognition: a mock-

radicality that confirms an underlying conservatism.

Real books are more complicated than this. In fact, the binary

tension usually exists within each book - hence Derrida's insight

about the way that texts contain their own refutations. (Perhaps

the Booker judges might be persuaded to award some fraction of

the prize for 'best estrangement' and withhold the rest on

grounds of 'excessive recognisability'?)

The estrangement / recognition binary also sounds less

interesting if one redescribes it as novelty / familiarity or anxiety

/ reassurance (or even unheimlich / heimlich).

b00le

18 October 2011 10:27AM

Mieville (sorry about the accent) - along with Amis, and

everyone else who has made these points – is quite right. And his

point about 'estrangement' is well taken, if not well-made. For he

overlooks the important truth that much of even the best SF is

often very badly written. It's not just snobbery that makes

mainstream writers and critics look down on us. Mieville's own

books are a case in point: while bursting with ideas, they are also

weighed down by leaden prose full of schoolboy howlers

(danglers, mangled tenses and syntax) as well as perfunctory

plots and wafer-thin characterisation. And many of the SF greats

from the past show the same vices (Asimov, anyone?). They at

least had the excuse that they were writing for a penny a word.

I don't care if I never read another novel about growing up

sensitive, or the breakdown of a love affair or many of the other

'genres' populating the review pages and prize lists, But bad

prose actually hurts, as Tom Stoppard put it in The Real Thing

and much as I love SF, it is rare to find a book that passes the

test of "do I want to read this again?"

Bless the Guardian, at least, for trying to break down the ghetto

walls, even if SF writers have built some of those walls


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themselves.

frustratedartist

18 October 2011 10:36AM

Would be interested to hear more about what Brian Aldiss had to

say, Sarah- he

along with Mike Moorcock are our main surviving veretans from

that maverick period of experimental SF, the 1960s. This quote

from Aldiss to me ties in to Mielville's idea of the 'recognition'

versus 'estrangement' continuum:

“If you want to make money, you don't attempt anything new.

You start a series that can go on and on, whereupon the

publishers don't have any crisis of decision to resolve. I don't

want to work like that. It always seemed to me that one of the

principles of writing is you should enjoy the actual writing, the

feel of something evolving under your fingers, under your keys.

You must try to please yourself, to be your own judge. Often you

fall flat on your face. But there's such pleasure in trying

something that is new, or passes for new.”

Source:

http://www.locusmag.com/2008/Issue01_Aldiss.html

R042

18 October 2011 10:43AM

the very idea of a political avant-garde.

What is a political avant-garde?

Surely once representational democracy has been achieved with

universal franchise, government is ideal?

That's not very avant-garde, the idea has been about for

centuries if not millennia.

ItsAnOutrage2

18 October 2011 10:46AM

PaulBowes01

Genre fictions have some of the most aesthetically

conservative readers in the literary world.

Ouch!

PaulBowes01

18 October 2011 10:59AM

@ItsAnOutrage2

It's an observation, not a criticism as such. There's no obligation

on anyone to seek out challenging work, and reading purely for

entertainment is fine by me. But genre readers, once they've

worked out what they like, do tend to want more of the same:

hence the greater success of writers who produce series of books

rather than stand-alone novels. It would be interesting to see

what proportion of sales attributed to SF, for example, is

contributed by Star Wars / Star Trek / Dr. Who books. Take


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those out and SF might well look like a very minority sport.

As Sarah Crown points out above, conservatism of form is built

into certain genres, crime being the most obvious but romantic

fiction being another. But for every SF writer who chooses the

real freedom that is theoretically available to him/her, there are

a thousand content to harness the same old nag of nineteenth-

century realism to the spaceship of their twenty-first century

ideas.

DamienGWalter

18 October 2011 11:00AM

Science Fiction and Fantasy ask questions about reality. Literary

readers - largely middle class, relatively wealthy, assured in their

social status and cultural identity - don't have much desire to

question the reality around them. Literary fiction is implicitly

about reinforcing the reality of its readers. Fantasy, from our

oldest myths onwards, has always been the bolt hole of those who

are pushed out or under constructed reality.

MCCC

18 October 2011 11:18AM

Going to veer slight OT with my comment as not a SF reader

(unless a couple of Iain M Banks, Christopher Priests and a JG

Ballard can afford me out of town membership?) But it was the

recognition bit I wanted to pick up on. Just that I remember see

the sublime Rose Tremain and Jim Crace talking at Chelters

maybe 10 years ago and it was that point of familiar recognition

(what we're not allowed to call chick lit, thrillers, where there are

rules and stock characters) cf taking you somewhere else

mentally, around which they based their session. In their case

they were applying it to their own work, and neither author can

be accused of writing the same book twice, spanning continents

and centuries as they do. It struck me then as an important

distinction between basically the books I admire and don't mind

been seen out and about with, and the ones I read inside in a

woolly jumper or slap on the kindle. Snob? Maybe but while

genre books continue to be marketed as product rather than as

individual items for consideration they'll never escape a

downgrading by categorisation.

DanHolloway

18 October 2011 11:27AM

@PaulBowes

"the existence of a few people struggling on the margins is no

substitute for their presence at the centre of debate and as a

living influence on younger writers."

Whatever one thinks of the artists in question, this is one aspect

in which the art world has succeeded in a way the literary world

hasn't. With its structure of exhibitions, patrons, and curators, it

has shown itself better able to accommodate without overly-

diluting new waves into the mainstream. True, there will always

be those on both sides who are unhappy (on one edge, those who

say artists have sold out, on the other those who say they have

no place at High Table), but the art world seems able to reach an


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accommodation with itself over these matters ina way the

literary one does not, so that each generation is able to benefit

from the ground-breakers of the generation before.

I don't know why this is - the two things that seem most likely, in

combination, are 1. that art has for centuries run on the master-

school/apprenticeship model so the generational transfer is

somehow hardwired into it and 2. that it is prima facie easier for

the lay ritic to tell when a school of art is new - everyone, even

with no formal training, can see, for example, that there is

something different and vaguely homogenous about Futurism or

Abstract Expressionism, Pre-Raphaelitism or Fauvism. Which

raises the further point that art much more readily organises

itself into schools and movements. There is currently a

fascinating discussion elsewhere on Guardian Books about Oulipo,

and many commentators here will be very familiar with

Brutalism, and aware of Tom McCarthy's International

Necronautical Society, many of whose ideas have shaped his

work, but writers are often embarrassed to be put into groups in

a way thatartists embrace them

PaulBowes01

18 October 2011 11:53AM

@DanHolloway

Whatever one thinks of the artists in question, this is

one aspect in which the art world has succeeded in a

way the literary world hasn't. With its structure of

exhibitions, patrons, and curators, it has shown itself

better able to accommodate without overly-diluting

new waves into the mainstream.

I favour a simple, brutal explanation of this. Artists produce a

limited number of unique works. In a commoditised world,

unique works potentially command a high value, and their

circulation can be organised as a market. Possession of such

artworks conveys high status on the owner: to be a serious art

collector is to be visibly both extremely wealthy and socially

consequent.

The rewards in financial and cultural capital for those who can

succeed in identifying the coming generation of cutting-edge

artists are consequently huge. This process of identification may

involve lending support at the early stage when artists typically

cannot command their own resources (expensive or inaccessible

to the artist, but cheap to the patron): studio space, exhibition

space, tools and materials, publicity, contacts. Galleries and

exhibition spaces afford an opportunity to the patron for public

display.

No such rewards await anyone involved in the production of

avant-garde literary works. A copy of a book is cheap to acquire

and is not a unique artefact, so possession conveys no particular

status. No market analogous to the art market exists for books.

Pen and paper can be acquired without patronage. There is no

large public audience for avant-garde literary art, and never will

be: it's too hard, and the consumption of literature is essentially a

private activity with no opportunity to display. As an investment

proposition, it's a bust.


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DanHolloway

18 October 2011 12:10PM

"The rewards in financial and cultural capital for those who can

succeed in identifying the coming generation of cutting-edge

artists are consequently huge."

That's certainly true. And I'm sure it goes a long way to

explaining why artistic impresarios of the Jopling/Serota kind are

taste-makers, whilst we view editors and publishers as taste-

reflectors.

"There is no large public audience for avant-garde literary art,

and never will be: it's too hard, and the consumption of literature

is essentially a private activity with no opportunity to display. As

an investment proposition, it's a bust."

certainly it is impossible to conceive how the single collector

model could work with literature, and the thing with avant-garde

art as you suggest is that it only needs one person to love

something for the artist to make a living - and the fact of that sale

alone will often be enough to create a wider interest in talking

about the work.

I can't see an answer, but it's a question I think about, and I'd

like to think there are plenty of people in the position to do

something about it who are putting serious thinking hours into it.

And until someone cracks the nut, boundary-exploring literature

will remain on the periphery, whcih might make for an

interesting foray for diehard enthusiasts and commentators, but

like you say doesn't answer the practical issue of generational

transfer and keeping the whole artform fluid - if the part of the

art that is in that transmission stream remains the same, it will

not only stagnate the mainstream, but there's a danger it will

stagnate the avant-garde, as each generation will have the same

thing to react against. The alternative is that you end up with

completely separate streams where successive avant-gardes

react only to each other and before long the mainstream and the

periphery have absolutely no shared vocabulary with which to

speak to each other - which would be to the detriment of both

DamienGWalter

18 October 2011 12:18PM

@paulbowes @danholloway - You're confusing the art with the

object. Writers are rewarded by the extent top which the engage

the minds of readers - be it in an escapist fantasy or a new

philosophical concept. 'boundary-exploring' literature is a

conceptual prototyping process. By its nature, most of it fails.

ItsAnOutrage2

18 October 2011 12:19PM

PaulBowes01

...genre readers, once they've worked out what they

like, do tend to want more of the same: hence the

greater success of writers who produce series of

books rather than stand-alone novels...

Of course, that's true. I'm a genre reader and yes, if I like a book


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(for whatever reason) I'm happy to experience more of the same.

When I was twelve I was a Biggles fan. Brilliant!

Nowadays I read Patrick O'Brian, whose often poetic writing uses

the the 'same old nag' to great advantage. Minute observation

within the small, claustrophobic frame of a ship at sea.

And Iain M Banks. His unrelated tales separated by hundreds of

years, glued together only by a close but vaguely symbiotic

relationship between men and machines. Interestingly, and this

has only just occurred to me, both Banks and O'Brian also use

good running jokes, from book to book, to great advantage.

I'm a simple soul, and things like that hook me and, I suppose,

millions of others.

Star Wars / Star Trek / Dr. Who books. Take those

out and SF might well look like a very minority sport.

I think there are probably otherwise intelligent critics who are so

biased against SF that thay can't tell the difference. And that's

the problem.

turingCop


@b00le

I take your point about prose quality in some genre fiction. But

there are some very distinguished prose writers in SF - take M

John Harrison, Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delany, Thomas M Disch and

J G Ballard, for example - while the writing of some oft-feted

lions of the mainstream world is often workmanlike by

comparison. I recall opened Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake

with the expectation of reading a beautifully crafted literary SF

tale ... but that is another story.

PaulBowes01


@DamienGWalter

@paulbowes @danholloway - You're confusing the art

with the object.

I can't speak for Mr. Holloway, but I'm perfectly capable of

separating process from result. Unfortunately, as readers aren't

normally privy to the process, the result - the literary object - is

what we have to engage with. I'm really not interested in some

theoretical art without objects or audience that only exists in the

'author''s head. The social and institutional context of art

reception exists prior to the artist's intention and will go on

existing regardless of his wishes.

A great deal of critical nonsense stems from critics' unreflective

habit of identifying with writers rather than more modestly with

readers. Critics have no more access to process than other

readers; they just pay a little more attention to the resulting

objects.

And of course most experiments fail. 'A conceptual prototyping

process'? Oh yes - trial and error, as we used to call it.


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translated


DamienGWalter

'boundary-exploring' literature is a conceptual

prototyping process. By its nature, most of it fails.

That's an interesting observation. I'd also want to add the fairly

obvious point that the boundaries available for exploration are

not just limited by the imagination of a writer, but the culture in

which she writes.

Margaret Attwood makes a distinction between "science fiction"

(things that could not possibly happen) and "speculative fiction"

(things that really could happen but just hadn't completely

happened when the authors wrote).

Clearly what can't happen and what could happen changes

through time because it is subject to technological and political

constraint. So, for example, someone writing in 1910 had a

radically expanded sense of what could happen because at that

time it was possible to sustain hope for the total transformation

of society. There has been a great loss of political hope since the

days of the pre-WW1 avant-garde, but technologically we

probably take for granted things that, at that time, couldn't

happen.

Nina Power had a great article the other day about OWS. In her

discussion of the protests she references Ray Bradbury's

Fahrenheit 451. Who knows, maybe OWS is a kind of political

prototyping process that might point to a future that once again

blurs the difference between what can and can't happen and so

establishes the conditions for a new 'boundary-exploring'

literature that fails less often.

SarahCrown


Hey everyone, thanks so much for this. Really thought-provoking

discussion, and you've hugely furthered/interrogated the initial

point. Sorry I've been awol - running around in mad pursuit of

the Booker, and going into a meeting in two mins, but will try to

get back on later when there's a lull.

translated


@saracrown

Thank you - you got the ball rolling with a really thought-

provoking article.

elfwyn


@ b00le

Mieville (sorry about the accent) - along with Amis,

and everyone else who has made these points – is


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quite right. And his point about 'estrangement' is well

taken, if not well-made. For he overlooks the

important truth that much of even the best SF is

often very badly written.

I can think of two big exceptions - Ursula Le Guin and Iain M.

Banks. I'm sure people can suggest plenty of others.

msmlee


Science Fiction and Fantasy ask questions about

reality. Literary readers - largely middle class,

relatively wealthy, assured in their social status and

cultural identity - don't have much desire to question

the reality around them. Literary fiction is implicitly

about reinforcing the reality of its readers.

That is really a very ignorant comment about what motivates

literary fiction readers and who they are as a group -- I certainly

read lit fic for it always challenges my cultural identity, amongst

other things (from Rushdie to Pamuk to Lahiri to Roy to Smith,

their works are always challenging from social, cultural and

political perspectives). And it basically is a demonstration of the

point Paul Bowes made above about certain groups of readers

wanting to establish clear genre boundaries and elevate one type

of literature over another.

I'm beginning to see why Margaret Atwood doesn't necessarily

like to be labelled SF -- not because her works aren't SF in the

social scientific sense, but because she wants to avoid the cultish

defenses and reverse snobbery of the genre's readers.

msmlee


@PaulBowes

Real books are more complicated than this. In fact,

the binary tension usually exists within each book -

hence Derrida's insight about the way that texts

contain their own refutations.

My mind just after exploded when you use Derrida's critique to

argue what "real" books should be about. Does. Not. Compute.

msmlee


@PaulBowes

Real books are more complicated than this. In fact, the binary

tension usually exists within each book - hence Derrida's insight

about the way that texts contain their own refutations.

My mind just after exploded when you uses Derrida's critique to

argue what "Real" books should be about. And with a capital R,

no less ;-)

Does. Not. Compute.


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msmlee


Arrgh, messed up my formatting the second time, but you get

the gist.

DanHolloway


@damiengwalter

as I understand it the point you're making is that the debate over

literary innovation is in danger of fetishising "the new" at the

expense of authors who are genuinely pushing the boundaries in

less obvious ways - in other words it is in danger of seeing the

battle of the boundary at the level of form/format/medium

rather than what is evolving between reader and writer. If that is

what you're saying I think I'd largely agree with you (and I'd

certainly agree with your subtext that such fetishisation leads to

the exclusion of genuine innovation taking place within such

existing genres as SF). I wrote a couple of years ago about people

being too eager to claim digital changes as innovation. My main

thrust there was that digital hasn't brought us new forms of

storytelling only new forms of delivery (having played around

more with the form of the cellphone novel, I think I'd qualify that

now. a little), but I think you're right that we need to go further

and look behind the form itself to what's going on between artist

and audience.

On the other hand, the primary point I was making about the

need for the literary mainstream to be more intellectually open,

and the need for patron/curator/champions like those of the art

world remains. But again, I was looking only at the relatively

narrow spectrum that could be called "literary fiction" and that's

exactly the kind of mistake I accuse others of, so I will gladly

acknowledge my narrow approach unmasked

UnpublishedWriter


Is the “literary” novel simply an attempt to forecast the

“classics” of tomorrow? If so, perhaps a good starting point would

be to ask why novels become classics? Certainly they must be

beautifully written and even perhaps quotable, but what makes

them classics is surely that they capture something of the

essence of what it is to be human in a particular set of

circumstances, that they capture the zeitgeist of the day – and

perhaps the lessons learned.

The classics were beautifully written but their inclusion in the

cannon has as much to do with the strength of the characters and

plot as with the beauty of the writing. In a sense the plot and

characters have become part of some oral tradition – a tale worth

telling and re-telling because we learn something from it about

our own humanity – though perhaps now the oral tradition is

mediated by TV, Cinema, Theatre etc. Dickens, Dumas, Austen,

and the Brontes – tales told and re-told - Everyone knows the

stories but how many have read the books?

Perhaps in the future readers will be discussing the beautiful

irony of “Bridget Jones’ Diary” or “Diary of Shopaholic”? (Sorry


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haven’t read the latter) because they capture the zeitgeist of the

day – an era of acceptance – an era when the Market knows

best. If so it is the genres that will provide the classics of

tomorrow rather than the “literary” angst novels.

Perhaps we should be asking which character, which plot, in a

literary novel is strong enough to translate into folklore?

DanHolloway


@unpublishedwriter

Perhaps we should be asking which character, which

plot, in a literary novel is strong enough to translate

into folklore?

it's very easy to wheel out an aphorism to the effect that classics

become classics for an accretion of reasons few if any of which can

be predicted at the time of writing, but you may be onto

something. Thinking that way, the one "literary" novel from the

US/UK of the past 25 years that comes instantly to mind is

American Psycho (Martin Amis' Money from slightly earlier).

Which is probably a big tick in the plus box. On further reflection

I'd be tempted to add We Need To Talk About Kevin. Again, I

think that'll prove right, though it'll be a terrible shame

(Veronique Olmi's Beside the Sea is so much better a book). I

can't think of anythnig "literary" from this century that measures

up though time will doubtless surprise us. I think you maybe

onto something from a ruling out perspective, though - Franzen,

Mitchell, Foster Wallace - brilliant authors none of whom has

created a character who haunts our psyche.

VanessaWu

19 October 2011 10:23AM

@frustratedartist

Great quote from Brian Aldiss. Very pertinent to the discussion.

The conservatism, I would argue, comes from the publishers.

Publishing books is a business. Businesses that want to survive in

uncertain times don't take risks. Literary judges who are

hounded by the press if they express a personal preference don't

take risks.

Great writers always take risks. So do great readers, in order to

find them.

With so much on offer now, so many exciting books available

from so many disparate sources, we no longer have to rely on the

ripples stirred up the by the commercial literary establishment

to find the next book to read.

"You must try to please yourself, to be your own judge."

There are great writers in the SF & fantasy genres. There are

great writers in the crime and thriller genres. China's attempt to

blend SF & hardboiled crime in The City And The City didn't

quite work for me and, in my view, was his worst effort to date,

notwithstanding Michael Moorcock's admirably positive review of

it in The Guardian; but I will go on reading his books because he


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is a great writer who takes risks and is sometimes breathtaking

in his audacity.

I would love to see more mainstream literary writers taking

these kind of risks. Until they do, they will, for me, be of marginal

interest. In general I look everywhere but the mainstream for

my next great read. But, hey, you never know until you try.

Everything is worthy of attention for anyone who is passionate

about fiction.

UnpublishedWriter

19 October 2011 10:27AM

@DanHolloway

Funnily enough I had also thought of "Money" in that context -

also "Catch 22" and even possibly "Bridget Jones' Diary."

Some time this week, while driving, I was half-listening to a radio

programme which quoted someone as saying that the worst thing

that ever happened to story-telling was the printed word. It was

based on the thesis that stories should not be immutable, but

were meant evolve in the re-telling as a means of passing on

tradition and life-lessons. It struck me that there was some

validity to the argument and that the classics provided these

sometimes larger than life characters and engaging plots which

encouraged re-telling albeit through different media or spin-offs.

PaulBowes01

19 October 2011 10:56AM

@msmlee

My mind just after exploded when you uses Derrida's

critique to argue what "Real" books should be about.

And with a capital R, no less ;-)

Your 'real' has a capital 'r' because - well, why, exactly? Mine has

a capital because it's at the beginning of a sentence.

My quoting Derrida's views does not constitute an endorsement

of them. I mean 'real' in the obvious, plain-language sense of

'actual', 'physically existing' books as opposed to ideal theoretical

entities used in constructing straw-man arguments. Real books in

the real world. No irony intended.

On a broader point, since you seem to have appointed yourself

my personal critic: do I now have to explain every thing I say

twice? Once for everybody else, and a second time for you?

ItsAnOutrage2

19 October 2011 11:57AM

R042

Surely once representational democracy has been

achieved with universal franchise, government is

ideal?

Not sure that get's my vote.


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homirmunn

19 October 2011 12:46PM

those utterly fascinating texts which contain not a

single impossible element, and yet which read as if

they were, somehow, fantastic (Jane Eyre, Moby-

Dick, etc).

Call me Mr Pedant, but doesn't Jane Eyre contain at least one

"impossible" element when Jane, apparantly telepathically, hears

Rochester's voice calling for her just as she is about to yield to the

missionary St John's pleas to marry him?

Which of course tends to prove China's point more than disprove

it. The fantastic/estranging leaks in and is often not even

recognised as such.

JeffVan


It's an important point China is making, but while it may be new

to the interviewer, it's not a new concept. It's an argument I've

been making, along with several other writers, for decades. It's

also something John Clute has explored to some extent in his

criticism, and I think literary journals like Conjunctions have also

explored it. The fact is, there are fantasy novelists who read like

realists and supposedly mimetic novelists whose world view and

approach make them read like fabulists. The importance of

stressing this similarity/difference is that it gets us away from

using the terminology of commodificaition of fiction and what are

often just marketing terms that reflect "accidents of birth." If

you're a Kafkaesque writer from Eastern Europe, you're likely to

be published in the mainstream. If you're a US writer like

Michael Cisco, you're likely to be published through genre

imprints. These arbitrary issues and contexts don't really tell us

much about the works themselves, or their complexities and

contradictions...which is why "genre" vs "mainstream" is so

pointless. - Jeff VanderMeer

PaulBowes01


@JeffVanderMeer

The importance of stressing this similarity/difference

is that it gets us away from using the terminology of

commodificaition of fiction and what are often just

marketing terms that reflect "accidents of birth."

That's fine so long as doing so advances our understanding. My

argument would be that it doesn't, and for two main reasons.

1. The 'terminology of commodification' builds on, rather than

being antecedent to, the language of genre, which was perfectly

comprehensible to the ancient Greeks and represents nothing

more than a set of conceptual categories whose defining

characteristics are derived from perceived similarities between

texts. We can argue with the categories, but the idea that 'drama'

is any way an invalid category because you will find all the

dramatic works grouped together in a bookshop for customer

convenience is not useful.


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When authors who seem to share some characteristics find

themselves assigned to different genre categories and different

shelves in the bookshop - and are reviewed by different critics in

different media - it's usually because they are read by different

audiences, and this facts reflects qualitative differences. Much as

I like him, George R R Martin is not Kafka, and calling them both

'fabulists' won't make him so.

2. All that China Miéville has done is to replace an older binary

structure - fabulism / mimetic realism - with a new one. The

problem is not the terms used but the structure. The genre /

mainstream division, which really is a commercial categorisation

- derived from perception of the nature of the audience rather

than the book - is so blunt that almost everyone can see its

shortcomings for the purposes of evaluating actual books. The

estrangement / recognition pair looks more subtle, but actually

isn't: it's just another dualism that ends with everybody picking

sides and all the good qualities associated with one term in the

pair and one side of the argument.

It still seems to me that what is being avoided in all this is any

attempt to discriminate between the qualities of actual books,

some of which - whisper it not - are better written than others.

But that would require wide and close reading and some

movement towards common standards of judgement, which have

been lacking for a long time.

DanHolloway


@unpublishedwriter

Money, absolutely - it's almost long enough ago that it *has*

slipped into the canon? I think Catch-22 certainly has.

JeffVan

19 October 2011 10:42PM

Fair points, but the even though they're still binaries,

estrangement/recognition is still less market-driven than

genre/mainstream. I've got too much to do right now to respond

in full, but will later.

MattKH

20 October 2011 10:17AM

@ PaulBowes

"2. All that China Miéville has done is to replace an older binary

structure - fabulism / mimetic realism - with a new one. The

problem is not the terms used but the structure."

I don't think it's quite so inconsequential. Sure there's a new

binarity, but one that acknowledges the undeniable universality

of both sites and their existence to differing degrees in any field

you choose to occupy. It's more insightful into the nature of the

genres, not just a random new terminology, and aims to expose

the arbitrariness of exclusive selection - it's never exclusive

anyway.

But I also think that the marketing categories have the power to

determine to a considerable extent the quality or more generally


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speaking the content of the product, and that therefore they are

still valid, but the new dualism is helpful in not forgetting the

potentials.

PaulBowes01


@MattKH

But I also think that the marketing categories have

the power to determine to a considerable extent the

quality or more generally speaking the content of the

product

This is true only for those authors who choose to tailor their

books to a particular audience identified as such in advance by its

past patterns of consumption, and for readers who are happy to

be part of such an audience because they want more of the same

kind of literary product. I'm afraid don't buy the idea that

consumers are hapless and naive. Consumerism may be an

ideology, but it doesn't impose itself without resistance. There is

certainly no obligation on any author to constrain their writing to

fit existing genre preconceptions: when they do so, they actively

choose to do so in pursuit of sales.

Sure there's a new binarity, but one that

acknowledges the undeniable universality of both

sites and their existence to differing degrees in any

field you choose to occupy.

That's true, but as I suggest above I don't think that that is so

great an advance as appears. Because one term is still validated

and the other abjected, all that happens is that we have a new

hierarchy in which books that are judged to contain the validated

elements to a higher degree are considered superior. What those

elements are, and why they should be considered important,

remains to be explained - it is still being assumed that

estrangement is superior to recognition as a literary value.

There is also a persistent confusion about means and content. It

should be apparent from the history of modernism that it's

perfectly possible for formal avant-gardism to coexist with

reactionary political values. What I see in the estrangement /

recognition binary is an attempt to smuggle an extra-literary

standard of judgement - bluntly, a political agenda - back into

literature. Estrangement good, recognition bad. Orwell would

recognise this. I don't think that this is an acceptable price to pay

if all we are being asked to recognise is that some writers,

publishers and readers are working to a commercial agenda,

particularly if they see and accept that agenda.

Nargri


Interesting discussion. I have read almost no "literary" fiction

written in recent decades. Not sure why. It seems uninteresting

to me. Maybe it's the recognition that Mieville is talking about. If

I want to find out about the real world, I can read the news or

nonfiction or talk to people or simply go outside.


Comments on this page are now closed.

© 2 01 2 Gu a r dia n New s a n d Media Lim ited or its a ffilia ted com pa n ies. A ll r ig h ts r eser v ed.

Is science fiction formally conservative? Often, yes. Delany talks

about this. When reality is uncertain, as it is in science fiction and

fantasy, then an experimental style can make the narrative too

confusing and unclear. Experimental sf can be done, as was

demonstrated in the 1960s and 70s, but it's not easy. I once had

to write a description of someone who was trapped in a half-

hour-long time loop. Since she was inside it, she didn't realize

what was happening. Every turn round the loop was new to her.

And the novel was written from her perspective. So how did she

figure out what was happening, and how did she get out? I nearly

went crazy writing that section, and I have never been happy

with the result. That's as much of a formal problem as I want.

I try to write good, clean language, drawing on the Icelandic

family sagas as examples, and keep most of the weirdness to the

ideas. I tend to think of science fiction as a fiction that takes place

inside metaphors. The craziness, the disjunction, the surprises

happen in the narrative line, rather than in the language.

A lot of science fiction and fantasy is not good, which has to do

with commodification and the needs of people trapped in a not

very pleasant society. You dream of escape, and the market gives

you false and unobtainable and badly written dreams.

But from the beginning, whether you start with Mary Shelley or

H.G. Wells, there has been sf which challenges the status quo

intellectually and morally. The best is well written. Speaking of

awards, I direct you to the Tiptree, science fiction's gender

bending fiction award. Its winners and short list members are

often interesting.

what the booker prize really excludes _ books _ guardian.co

Documents

sf novels

booker shortlistsnever

mainstream literary

years booker shortlist

excludeschina miville

sf legend brian aldiss

novels political charge

literary credentials