Exchange of Realities

Warning: The following will be more than mildly ranty.

There is a problem with speculative fiction. And no, I don’t mean that it’s corrupting our children, or that it’s taking us away from the real world, or that it somehow decreases our interest in truly good writing. I find these arguments silly.

The problem of speculative fiction is the role it currently holds in the public consciousness. The genre has, for various reasons, acquired itself a bit of a bad rap, much the same way the romance novel has. What can we say about a genre whose own up and coming writers often seem to think that writing in that genre excuses shoddy work, lack of original plots, lack of decent character depth?

No, I’m not an anti-speculative fiction writer. Hear me out, all right?

I never really noticed this issue before my senior year of college. Sure, there were people who found it really surprising that I, scholarly type that I was, would so much as touch a fantasy novel (I lived off the things). Sure, there were people who’d look at me funny when I was reading the stuff. Sure, I’d occasionally hear complaints from my friends about writing teachers who didn’t consider the genre to be worth considering. But then I got into Introduction to Writing Fiction.

What happened there showed me why it is that the genre has issues. Our professor wanted us writing literary fiction. Now, this didn’t bother me any; I consider every piece of fiction I write, unless I’m trying to write badly, to be literary. But she also utterly forbade genre fiction of any sort whatsoever.

This, needless to say, bothered me. It wasn’t enough to make me actively fight it. Passively, yes; I practically made a game out of seeing how close I could get to writing fantasy without actually writing fantasy. I definitely tended to go home and run through long IM rants about being forbidden to play to what I considered one of my strengths. And I still take issues with the fact that, whether she meant it to or not, it tended to cause my classmates to group “literary fiction” and “speculative fiction” into two separate groups.

It wasn’t until the following class that I understood why she had done so. In English 402, our submissions for the in-class workshops were allowed to include speculative fiction of all sorts, with the warning attached that she wouldn’t be able to grade them quite as well because she didn’t understand the genre conventions. This I could work with. Sort of. Until I saw the materials. No offense to my classmates, but I don’t think they wrote speculative near as well as they wrote the standard, and sometimes I wondered if the amount of effort put in was the same. Perhaps I was just being judgmental; I’m not sure.

She told me, after a yet another discussion of whether speculative fiction could be literary, why she’d banned it in the first-level class. Apparently it was a student thing; they’d show up with dubious plots or characterization, things nobody would ever let slide in a literary work, and claimed it was okay because it was “only fantasy” or “only science fiction”. If even our writers can’t take their own genre seriously, what are we? If half of our iconic pieces are derived from the same book, if people are running about doing half-baked imitations of arts that are our genre’s prerogative and then calling them easy, what are we? Are we ever going to get out of this genre ghetto if we can’t take our own work seriously? If we can’t treat pieces in our genre with the same respect and the same critical eye that we expect “literary” fiction to be treated with? If anything, we should be a pickier audience, because along with the standard collections of tired clichés and worn-out phrases, we have an entirely genre-specific collection of things to be avoided. Color-coded magic. Stock races. A lack of willingness to really research our own languages. And then we tell each other that these pieces that have so much room for improvement are brilliant, and as a result it seems like it’s only the “elitists” like me who think they need to improve.

There is so little real criticism, that despite the very delightful and heartening feedback from and connection with the fans, the writer is almost his only critic. If he produces second-rate stuff, it will be bought just as fast, maybe faster sometimes, by the publishers, and the fans will buy it because it is science fiction. Only his own conscience remains to insist that he try not to be second-rate. Nobody else seems much to care.

Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Citizen of Mondath”

It’s been thirty-five years since she wrote that essay. Can we please render it out of date now?