Living in the SF Ghetto

November 18th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

I feel like I’m the subject of one of those movies: you know, small town kid, or ghetto kid dreams of nothing but breaking free of the ghetto, finds the big world outside not what s/he expected, and then returns home wiser and ready to embrace their heritage.

I have known for some time that science fiction/fantasy is a ghetto. That the dream of every SF writer is to be taken as a “serious” writer and move from SF to Literature in the bookstores - like Susannah Clarke and Christopher Moore. And sure, Neil Gaiman and anyone writing a Star Wars book can get readers, but overall, only geeks go to the SF section and browse there, no matter how much of the population enjoys SF or Fantasy without even knowing it. (Heroes, LOTR, anyone?)

But now I’m not ashamed of my genre. I never was ashamed, really, but I was of the impression I’d love to be placed outside of the ghetto. And as for book sales, I’d still like that. But I just came home from the NC Writer’s Network Conference where I spoke about blogging, podcasting and self-publishing, and I am proud of my geekiness, proud of my genre, and proud to be who I am. I was a fish out of water there. The conference organizer (a real sweetheart) assured me that I would be a hit there, as no one was like me there. I would be a breath of fresh air. I had trepidation, as sudden change is not always welcome.

Sad to say, I was right.

So last night there was a reading. Each author had 10 min to read, and there were 7 of us. Content covered: woman nursing a dying, demented mother, older women friends vacationing together and looking back on their lives, poetry, biography of Daniel Boone, an essay on hog farming, and superheroes. (Yes, there was one more reading, but I forgot it utterly) One of these things is not like the other.

The audience did not laugh at my work. They did not smile. An old man fell asleep. I began cutting phrases out of my chapter just to get the damn thing over with faster.

I read - and write - to escape. I do not do it to explore my relationships - especially if they’re bad. I don’t do it to explore how unfulfilling motherhood and marriage are. I don’t do it to dredge up old loves or loves that never happened. I don’t do it to explore my relationship with my girlfriends. Call me crazy. And yes, you can put all of this into science fiction. But at least then my imagination is sparked by the world you’ve created. This kind of literary fiction depresses the hell out of me. Genre fiction makes me think. It makes me excited. It inspires me. It lets me escape my life for a bit.

And i’m not ashamed of it. I’m proud of writing genre fiction, because I hope someday the stuff I write can make others feel the way Connie Willis, James Patrick Kelly, Cory Doctorow and Ursula K. Le Guin make me feel.

I’d hoped I could find like-minded people in a hotel full of writers, but alas, I couldn’t. Ah well. I’ll live. I’m back home where no one blinks at my geekiness, and really, my tribe never left me when I was there. I’m a geek, and proud of it. Geeks remain wide-eyed with that sensawunda when they look at how the world is and then imagine how it could be.

There Are 5 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by TD-0013 on 5 March 2008:

    This is why I’m glad I’m not a writer, and therefore will never have to go through that, Mur. I’ve come to find that a vast majority of SF writers are snobbish anyhow (Not the podcasting types though), especially towards Star Wars. So, if there’s that level of elitism *within* SF, I can only imagine how bad the stigma of being a “light” Sci-Fi author is.

    Sad to say… But people suck.

  2. Comment by Michael Spence on 21 March 2008:

    I cannot help but feel that “serious” writers don’t get SFF because they’ve decided not to.

    I was one of those Creative Writing casualties in college–you’ve talked about them on ISBW–the course was led by a Big Name (though I didn’t know it at the time) Writer, now deceased. When I mentioned science fiction one day, he outlined a thriller-creaturefeature plot and said there, _that’s_ science fiction. And he had no time for it.

    Later I gave him the Ellison-Silverberg story “The Song the Zombie Sang” for examination. I don’t recall anything about his response in class except that it seemed to be void of content.

    Ah well. I’ve recovered, and am satisfied that he not only missed out on some great things I’ve discovered within my preferred genre, he also wasn’t in tune with the majority of the reading public.

    But then, I tell myself, it could be that he knew of the latter point and cherished it as a matter of pride.

  3. Comment by Dov on 7 August 2008:

    Many people do indeed see genre fiction as not “real” literature. Even the most successful SFF authors run into this problem and it’s not limited to how non-genre authors see genre fiction.

    I remember hearing Terry Pratchett speak about a comment some made to him on this subject. While on tour to promote his latest novel, which had made it to the top of the Best Sellers List, he was signing books in a large bookstore where he noticed that they had a display of Best Sellers but his novel was not included there. He asked the manager why his novel wasn’t included on the shelf. After all, it was a Best Seller. The manager replied, “Yes but, Terry, your books aren’t *really* the Best Seller type of book, are they?”

    Your observation that literature is depressing while genre fiction fires the imagination may strike close to the root of the issue. Could it be tangled up in the Puritan ethic that anything that feels good must be bad for you and anything that is good for you must be unpleasant?

  4. Comment by Jason R on 8 August 2008:

    I’ve always found there’s an odd schizophrenia in the literary community when it comes to speculative fiction. It’s mocked, derided, and, yes, ghettoized; and yet, our society holds up works which are undeniably part of the genre as some of its most treasured works.

    I think I’m cribbing a bit from Orson Scott Card here, but it seems that whenever a “mainstream” writer has a particularly important story to tell, they reach for the speculative fiction toolbox. The same people who look down their noses at the genre section of the bookstore genuinely cherish works like _Farenheit 451_, _1984_, _Frankenstein_, _The Handmaid’s Tale_, _Brave New World_, _Slaughterhouse Five_, _The Chronicles of Narnia_… The list could certainly go on. But, they say, those are works by _real_ authors. Huh. Apparently Shakespeare was wrong on that whole rose/name thing.

    Or to come at it from another angle, take Star Trek. Sure, not one of the great literary accomplishments of the field, but even so, look at how visionary it was. People laugh at it as kids’ stuff, what with its communicators and tricorders and voice activated computers and happy humans in space, at the same time as they’re talking on their cellphones, using their PDAs and voice dictation software, and chatting with their multicultural friends.

    The real world we live in every day is boring, and often depressing. I’m much more interested in exploring what the world _could be_, for better or for worse.

  5. Pingback by The SF Ghetto « Experiments in Ontological Relativism on 8 August 2008:

    [...] by Jason on August 8, 2008 This is a response I posted to day on an old entry in Mur’s blog. I figured I’d throw it in here, [...]

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