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.

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?

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.

Sad to say… But people suck.