What is 'literature' and what SF qualifies?

[Swank]

This has been an ongoing problem for some time and I'm afraid I have no solution to it. I suspect the issue is that there are so many people subscribed to so many thread that it's causing a flood of emails that end up bottlenecked in the server as it limits the number of outgoing emails, but whenever I try to increase that limit the flood of email notifications causes the emails to be black listed as spam and not delivered anyway!

Have you considered turning off instant email notifications for posts? I personally don't use them and just refresh the site to see the Alerts. I'm sure people would adapt.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

That one is probably not a good example of his hard SF. However when he does any kind of space opera he pretty much always stays within the limits of the speed of light. House of Suns is an excellent and intriguing example. Also most of the Revelation Space books in which the people operating interstellar spaceships have their own culture as the relativistic effects essentially put them outside normal society. A subject I find particularly interesting.

Yup!

 

[Toby Frost]

Another branch of this discussion which might elucidate on what informs our take on literary/non etc, is asking oneself why it’s important to define a difference?

I agree entirely. I don't see why it matters so much. I'm wary of literary "canons" and the like, which seem to usually be the view of a group of critics of the time, and tend to get reassessed an awful lot. I feel the same about the old "only hard SF is real SF" argument, where my main thought is "Why does this matter to you so much? Why do you need to exclude all this stuff?" (I'm not asking those questions here, by the way.)

My personal bugbear (which I won’t go into here and take the thread OT) is the definition of ‘horror’ which is probably the most imprecise and over-generalised genre we have (and is an emotion, not a ‘thing’).

I agree. SF, Westerns, Fantasy etc are genres defined by setting and items included in the story. Crime is defined by an activity. Horror, erotica and perhaps Romance are defined by seeking to elicit an emotion in the reader. It's overlapping and imprecise.

 

[Vertigo]

His spaceships are powered by wormholes connected to the past and cooled by calculations:

Cryo-arithmetic engine

A cryo-arithmetic engine is a type of quantum computer employed by the Conjoiners. When certain algorithms are executed on processors of this architecture, it leads to a local violation of the Second law of thermodynamics -- the computer gets colder instead of hotter. Such engines were utilized...

revelationspace.fandom.com

Conjoiner drive

Conjoiner drives were starship engines built by the Conjoiners that used quantum mechanics to propel starships up to relativistic speeds, giving such ships the name "lighthuggers". It should be noted that the Conjoiners did not actually invent the drive themselves, but received the instructions...

revelationspace.fandom.com

How is this also not wildly fictional?

Fair enough - your original comment merged the two 'technologies' into one. I suppose the point is that he doesn't actually break any known physics - most importantly he doesn't allow the lighthuggers to exceed the speed of light. If you're going to set SF in the far future, whether you are aiming for hard or not, you have to allow some advances in the knowledge of physics. It would be even more unreasonable to do otherwise. The violation of the 2nd Low of Thermodynamics is pushing it and he does acknowledge that with the word 'violation.' The other was based on current theories of wormholes which, though predicted by physics, have yet to be discovered or understood. If you are going to apply such strict measures to hard SF then there simply is no such thing and all SF is inevitably fantasy or must be set in the present day within no science other than current science which rather defeats the object of SF.

So prove to me that his ideas are completely denied by known physics and I will concede. On the other hand anything that has faster than light travel is ultimately and explicitly denied by our current knowledge of physics due to the paradoxes it inevitably creates.

 

[paeng]

Try this essay from Eagleton:

Eagleton Essay

 

[Extollager]

Toby, for myself, at least, perhaps for others too, the discussion of where we might place a given piece of writing on a spectrum with subliterature at one end and literature at the other enables talk about our reading in a way that goes beyond simply saying "I liked it," "I didn't like it."

If you're my personal friend, I might be interested in knowing what you like or don't like because you're my friend. But none of the people writing at Chrons is a personal acquaintance of mine, and I imagine that many of us here do not know anyone else here. Thus, why should I bother to read what Ansible posts (I'm making up a name for an imaginary Chronster) unless Ansible seems to have some understanding of creative writing, etc., etc. I don't mean that Ansible or someone else has to spell out a series of principles -- but I do think it might make some of the postings here more interesting if people tried to be more conscious and forthright about them, if they have them; and if they don't, why, they might think about that.

Having said that -- Sure, there's a place for just casual conversation about our reading, such as you might have if you were stuck in an airport with a long layover and were talking with some other traveler to pass the time -- neither of you invested in the conversation. But there's a place too for something more like a seminar or symposium. By "symposium" I'm thinking not of a wretched careerist academic affair, a Babel of jargon, but of Plato's Symposium, which was a banquet at which people engaged in genial but thoughtful discussion.

On a related matter, by the way, I think it would be nice if people starting a thread would sometimes be a little more thoughtful about begging the question. I mean the kind of thread that starts out along these lines: "Why Were Women SF Authors Suppressed in the 1990s?" or the like. The original posting just assumes something without offering much if anything in the way of evidence. And yet people jump in and the chin-wagging begins. I'd say we see threads of this type started just about every week. No big deal -- and yet I think we could do better.

 

[Orcadian]

This has been an ongoing problem for some time and I'm afraid I have no solution to it. I suspect the issue is that there are so many people subscribed to so many thread that it's causing a flood of emails that end up bottlenecked in the server as it limits the number of outgoing emails, but whenever I try to increase that limit the flood of email notifications causes the emails to be black listed as spam and not delivered anyway!

Thanks, @Brian G Turner. But I am not talking about emails or push notifs, almost all of which I have switched off. I am talking about the Notifications you get on a PC. The icon is at top right. That is what's not working for me. It's the only method I have of knowing what's new on the threads I 'watch'.

 

[Orcadian]

But not all SF is spaceships and aliens, Swank. Ballard's beautifully-written SF explored climate-driven dystopia and population pressure, Silverberg looked at the tragedy of lost potential in Dying Inside and Bradbury wrote heartbreakingly about the perils of nuclear war in There Will Come Soft Rains. I would say one could make a strong claim for any of these works to be considered 'literature', or at the very least closer to literature than sub-literature, on Extollager's spectrum.

It's interesting how subjective each book is, Bick. Perhaps this is why 'Literature' is no hard to define? Here's a (brief) review I wrote on The Drowned World: It isn't often that I cannot finish a book, even if I find it dull, hokey or lacking deep questions. But a book that is disrespectful of known physics or biology is not going to get my vote. Add to that poorly-drawn characters, sexism and an inane or meandering plot, and I am reaching for the charity shop bin. This novel violates all my criteria and Out It Must Go. Other 1* and 2* reviewers have covered its failings more eloquently (and amusingly) than I can and I urge you to listen to them.

 

[Brian G Turner]

But I am not talking about emails or push notifs, almost all of which I have switched off. I am talking about the Notifications you get on a PC. The icon is at top right. That is what's not working for me.

Does it show when I quote you?

 

[Toby Frost]

I don't think I'm trying to reduce the question of quality down to "I like/don't like this". There's got to be something more than that to qualify as exceptional, some objective method of assessing quality. However, I don't think the "Is it literature?" question helps much with that assessment. What I'm thinking of is a way of defining excellence without a sort of two-tier division into literature and "pulp", "genre", "pleasure reads" or any similar term. My question is why is something especially good, rather than deserving of being elevated into an entirely new category.

For example, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is full of interesting ideas and has several scenes that resonate very strongly (the Luba Luft episode in particular). But I just don't think it's well-written enough to be "exceptionally good" or "top tier" or whatever phrase I'd use. Is it literature? I just can't say. But I can say with conviction that it's very interesting and not quite top notch. On the other hand, Clive Barker's collection The Books of Blood succeeds on my test: not only is it effective, gory horror, but the writing is exceedingly good and many of the stories touch on issues of greater meaning.

So The Books of Blood becomes exceptional. I'm fine with that, but it seems strange to lump it in with Oliver Twist and Of Mice and Men in a new genre called "Literature". Maybe that's because, apart from passing the test of "quality plus", those books would have so little in common that it would feel meaningless to say that they were anything other than just really good.

So I suppose my criteria here are (1) It's got to be an extremely good example of its own type and (2) there's got to be something more. However, this doesn't work for The Lord of the Rings and perhaps 1984, which didn't have an "own type" when they were written but would definitely be top-notch. So there would be exceptions for trailblazers. But otherwise, I think this test works for me.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Would William Hazlitt know anything about it?

But science fiction hadn't shown up.

William Hazlitt - New World Encyclopedia

www.newworldencyclopedia.org

 

[Extollager]

Toby, if what I've been saying sounds like I'm advocating a reductive agenda, I'll regret that.

Remember, I suggested a spectrum or continuum. So we'd agree that Do Androids belongs further on the spectrum towards literature than a lot of sf does. Remember too that the spectrum I've suggested is largely about reading. To the extent that a given work invites good reading, it's literature, while the more it seems to depend on things like inattentive reading, self-centered reading, or reading because we want to maintain our status with some clique, etc. it's subliterary.

See what's going on? Working with the spectrum may help us to keep focused on the work, not on extraneous things like the author's biography, whether or not the author was "influential," whether or not the author sold a lot of copies, and so on.

But I should emphasize that the spectrum I've suggested is a tool. It's presumably not the only way to talk about the experience of reading a given work. There might be other ways to do that, that still keep us talking about the work and not the author, not "society," not politics, not sales figures that we probably don't know about anyway, not influence, etc. (Those matters may have their place, but too often around here it seems people are talking about those things when they evidently think they are talking about a piece of writing. It is easy to type away about those things, hardly thinking about what we say but just repeating something we picked up somewhere, and not come to grips with the work itself. We may fool ourselves into thinking we are talking about it when we have been circling around it at a distance, never getting close to it.)

 

[Extollager]

PS To add to my point about trying to focus on the work itself...

When you're about to write about a favorite work, ask yourself how long it's been since you actually read or reread it. Are you always bringing up an old favorite, maybe something you read when you were under 20 -- but haven't read in years? It's possible that when you recommend that book or story, what you're mostly evoking is not really that work, but how you felt about it years ago and how you feel about those feelings now. Make the case for the work itself!

Also, ask yourself if your feeling about a work really has a lot to do with its packaging. I wish fans of Robert E. Howard would do a thought experiment: Suppose that Lancer Books had folded up in the early 1960s rather than ten years or so later, and that the Conan stories had been reprinted by Ace Books instead, with Jack Gaughan being assigned to do the cover art -- not Frazetta. Suppose Frazetta never did a Conan picture. Now ask yourself, would that have changed your feelings about the Conan stories? If so, that suggests that some or even a lot of what you feel about the Conan stories is (without your having realized it) attributable to something extraneous to them.

 

[psikeyhackr]

I would be inclined to suggest There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury as literary science fiction. It is part of Martian Chronicles which as a whole I do not regard as science fiction. The description of Mars is thoroughly inaccurate compared to what was known in the late 40's.

I haven't read it recently but I think we could make that house in Soft Rains now. It would be bad engineering though. The house behaved as though people were there even though it was not occupied. Today the technology would have sensors and not cook food for absent people.

 

[Swank]

Fair enough - your original comment merged the two 'technologies' into one. I suppose the point is that he doesn't actually break any known physics - most importantly he doesn't allow the lighthuggers to exceed the speed of light. If you're going to set SF in the far future, whether you are aiming for hard or not, you have to allow some advances in the knowledge of physics. It would be even more unreasonable to do otherwise. The violation of the 2nd Low of Thermodynamics is pushing it and he does acknowledge that with the word 'violation.' The other was based on current theories of wormholes which, though predicted by physics, have yet to be discovered or understood. If you are going to apply such strict measures to hard SF then there simply is no such thing and all SF is inevitably fantasy or must be set in the present day within no science other than current science which rather defeats the object of SF.

So prove to me that his ideas are completely denied by known physics and I will concede. On the other hand anything that has faster than light travel is ultimately and explicitly denied by our current knowledge of physics due to the paradoxes it inevitably creates.

Nothing is really denied by known physics, including paradox. Several writers like Ken MacLeod and Alastair Reynolds have dealt with FTL paradox by suggesting ways the universe might be structured to prevent paradoxical situations from actually violating causality.

I just think it is odd that we dress up FTL as especially problematic or impossible when can barely contain fusion, have theories about the composition of the universe that involve huge masses of an unknown type of matter and can't understand the cognition of animals with only a handful of neurons. I think everything is on the table at this point.

But I do greatly appreciate the efforts of writers that stay within the confines of light speed. It isn't as easy given short human time scales.

 

[Orcadian]

Does it show when I quote you?

Hi Brian,

Yes I got notification of this one. But as of a moment ago, Latest Activity shows that there have been more than 70 items in the 5 threads I am Watching - yet I have received only SIX notifications - attached.

(No response on this yet from Admins.)

 

[Swank]

Hi Brian,

Yes I got notification of this one. But as of a moment ago, Latest Activity shows that there have been more than 70 items in the 5 or 6 threads I am Watching - yet I have received only SIX notifications - attached.

(No response on this yet from Admins.)

Sorry to cut in: You know you'll generally only get one notification per thread unless they are quotes or likes, right?

 

[Orcadian]

Thanks, Swank. IMO you are not "cutting in", you're helping.
And no, I didn't know that. Maybe that's it?

 

[psikeyhackr]

I wish fans of Robert E. Howard would do a thought experiment: Suppose that Lancer Books had folded up in the early 1960s rather than ten years or so later, and that the Conan stories had been reprinted by Ace Books instead, with Jack Gaughan being assigned to do the cover art -- not Frazetta. Suppose Frazetta never did a Conan picture. Now ask yourself, would that have changed your feelings about the Conan stories? If so, that suggests that some or even a lot of what you feel about the Conan stories is (without your having realized it) attributable to something extraneous to them.

It might have affected the probability of my buying my first Conan book but I don't it would affect how much I like the stories. I still read one now and then since they turned up in Project Gutenberg. Trying to get them in internal chronological order in relations to Conan's life is a nuisance.

The Australian Project Gutenberg has some REH stories that are not in the American PG.

 

[Randy M.]

that still keep us talking about the work and not the author, not "society," not politics, ... not influence, etc. (Those matters may have their place, but too often around here it seems people are talking about those things when they evidently think they are talking about a piece of writing. It is easy to type away about those things, hardly thinking about what we say but just repeating something we picked up somewhere, and not come to grips with the work itself. We may fool ourselves into thinking we are talking about it when we have been circling around it at a distance, never getting close to it.)

So, you want to extract the work from its context, often context that may have dictated the direction of the work?

Maybe here or in a separate thread, Extollager, you could offer up an example of what you're trying to describe?