"Systemised magic and time travel not serious subjects" - discuss

[Ursa major]

I think that's being more than a little harsh, particularly the self-serving accusation. She isn't condemning SF, quite the reverse, as she makes plain, and she certainly isn't using the words "implausible nonsense" or any other pejoratives. A pity I'm not going to Brighton, otherwise I'd have forced the book into your hands and made you read it until you were rather less antipathetic towards her!

Dealing with your last statement first... I haven't read any of her speculative fiction. For that reason alone, I cannot criticise it at all. Besides, the quality of her fiction (which I am going to assume is high) is completely orthogonal to a discussion about the quality of her arguments about genre fiction and its boundaries.

Regarding her comments about science fiction, I'll directly quote what you said she said:

What I mean by "science fiction" is those books which descend from H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds... things that could not possibly happen

First of all, that's a rather harsh thing to say about The War of the Worlds. What science in that book "could not possibly happen"? It has been a couple of years or so since I last read the book, but the following are not only possible, but have been achieved (if that's the correct word for some of them):

• interplanetary travel
• heat rays
• immune systems unable to cope with alien micro-organisms
• poison gas.

What is implausible is a Martian civilisation existing in the present day, but that's as much a plot device as science. As for life on Mars, NASA and others are spending much money and effort to discover whether it ever existed and, presumably, how recently it disappeared from that world.

(It is true that we have not yet encountered an alien civilisation, if only because the galaxy and universe are so very spread out and very old. But then Wells's book didn't require any interstellar travel.)

So, basically, her argument - as she expounds it in the media, not her writings - is somewhat flawed, to say the least.


As to what we are to make of her overall comments on the boundaries between genres, I think we're allowed to make judgements on something she has gone out of her way to say in public over the years. If she makes comments in the forewords (or content) of her novels that offers a rather more nuanced view, it's a shame that these don't make it onto the radio and TV.

To repeat what I said in my previous post, she is free to categorise her own work; but she cannot, as an author, be allowed carte blanche to recategorise the works of others, not without counter arguments.


As an aside, I tend to place time travel towards the space fantasy end of science fiction; that doesn't mean it isn't possible: science is a process, and who knows what that process will uncover in the future?

 

[Mirannan]

Ursa major - One more point about War of the Worlds is that at the time it was written, the science was indeed plausible. The received wisdom at the time was that the canals (which don't actually exist, but that's another subject) were just that - irrigation canals - and the surface of Mars was not only habitable but inhabited.

A writer can hardly be blamed for not knowing that the scientists of his time are wrong! There is another, less well-known, case of this in Niven's work. His short story "The Coldest Place" has as background the accepted dogma of the time; that Mercury was 1:1 tidally locked and therefore the back side of Mercury was the coldest place in the Solar System.

That assumption was proved wrong less than a year after publication. But that's hardly Niven's fault.

 

[Ursa major]

Rats!

That was going to be my ace in the hole when someone pointed out that In Other Worlds is not a collection of fiction but is (as I've now discovered) non-fiction.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

It's like CS Lewis' sci-fi - it has people on the moon, Venus and Mars. But at the time man hadn't landed on the moon and beliefs were very different.

 

[Tyburn]

There's been a sort of science fiction going back as far as ancient Greece, if you believe science fiction to be all about travelling to other planets and seeing alien races. I forget exactly whose tales they were, but one tells of a man lifted to the moon in his boat on a giant waterspout, who met a race of one-eyed bearded people who ate clouds and would often disappear for no reason.

I may be mixing two or three different stories here, by the way.

 

[jastius]

i think it is frowned upon as a literary form because it is 'making things up'.. not reliant upon hard science or actual events..
never mind that shakespeare had a penchant for making things up...
so given that our literary traditions hold with shakespeare and the bible as their primary source of form.. i really don't think they are being exactly fair about the whole matter.

 

[Tyburn]

How many people count Tolkien's work as some of the greatest (not necessarily best) literary works ever written? Going by the snob's view, they should be treated with the same reverence one reserves for Roger Hargreaves' Mister Men books.

Snobbery is a very human fault. It's trying to make oneself feel superior to others by disagreeing with them on petty matters.

 

[prizzley]

Who actually said the thing about time travel and magic? The journalist or Eleanor Catton?

Sorry to be unclear - it was the journalist. Eleanor Catton is a fellow victim of the comment.