How close is sci-fi to literary?
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How close is sci-fi to literary?
Just wondering.. I'm writing what you would call a sci-fi book, but as with most sci-fi its very philosophical and deep - traits you would find in lit-fic. Obviously there is some sci-fi that just aims to please with a spacey setting, but the sci-fi I'm into is more like Philip K. Dick, and Vonnegut to a lesser extent, where it's very much sci-fi but first and foremost philosophical and deep (as well as containing elements of romance, humour etc.)
Anyone got any thoughts on how close the two are?
Re: How close is sci-fi to literary?
They're as close as you want them to be—or rather, as you write them to be. It's all a matter of care for the language, an interest in writing English that is beautifuuly crafted, that reads as though you have read and learned from the books in the literary canon.
I think most of us on this forum are in agreement that literary fiction is not a matter of what you write: it's how you write.
Re: How close is sci-fi to literary?
I'm not going to make a blanket generalization about either Dick or Vonnegut because I've only read a few books by each, but... the VALIS trilogy, Slaughterhouse Five, and Player Piano are all very Lit Fic in my opinion. Honestly I don't think I could bring myself to describe either VALIS or Slaughterhouse Five as Science Fiction, especially the former. But authors like Asimov? No way, total Science Fiction.
I could also start listing Romance and Fantasy titles that are more Lit Fic than their respective genre. I think the distinction that I draw is whether or not a title transcends genre conventions while still working within them. There's a need for literary junk food and straight genre has its place, but unless a book is also Lit Fic I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time obsessing over the author's brilliance :)
When authors of realistic mainstream fiction blur/cross the Lit Fic line their works are just automatically considered Lit Fic. And some works that were considered mainstream fiction at the time of publication are considered to be Lit Fic by later generations. Emma and Jane Eyre both meet the criteria for Romance really well, but they are sooo Lit Fic or rather they are both Lit Fic and Romance. I think the same thing applies to Science Fiction.
A more difficult question is what about mainstream fiction authors who write (fairly literary) fiction about science, like Neal Stephenson? Is The Baroque Cycle science fiction because it is fiction about science? Historical fiction? Adventure? If it's Lit Fic then it's probably Lit Fic Light :P
Re: How close is sci-fi to literary?
Good posts, I think I'm going to change my main genre from sci-fi to lit-fic, I think it applies to me more
Re: How close is sci-fi to literary?
To put in succinctly, I believe that it's only science fiction if the conflict is something radical, like the TARDIS being pulled into a black hole or something. On the other hand, it's LitFic if the conflict has to do with a personal struggle, or some aspect of society.
Re: How close is sci-fi to literary?
Give me an edit button -_-
I should elaborate. By "radical" I don't mean anything out of the ordinary. It has to fit into the expected sci-fi templates; you know, stuff like aliens and super-advanced technology. If you go too radical, it's fantasy, and that's a different discussion entirely.
Re: How close is sci-fi to literary?
I disagree, Yomanude. I think that literally any story can be LitFic. It's all up to the writing: how well-crafted is it? how well does it fit in the Canon?
I've definitely read LitFic that doesn't involve a personal struggle or struggle with society. Not all literary fiction has a society in it. Not all characters struggle. Think of high modernist authors, for example: Samuel Beckett, Robert Walser, Gertrude Stein.
Let me put it this way: a literary novel could be about a never-changing entity floating in a void—if it is beautifully written—and better yet, if the entity is quoting T. S. Eliot to itself : "Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees / Letting his arms hang down to laugh."
For that matter, a literary novel could be one long prose poem, musical but nonsensical.
Who was it said, "A novel is a work of prose of a certain length that has a problem"? George Steiner?
Re: How close is sci-fi to literary?
Randell Jarrell!
Re: How close is sci-fi to literary?
Of course it's Randall Jarrell: thank you so much, Robin! The line reflects Randall Jarrell's wicked sense of humor. George Steiner is brilliant, to be sure, but he's too stiff to have said that.
Re: How close is sci-fi to literary?
I agree with all of that -- except the part that says "It's all up to the writing: how well-crafted is it? how well does it fit in the Canon?"
I don't think a Lit Fic novel has to be well-crafted or fit well in the Canon.
Re: How close is sci-fi to literary?
I was talking about this with my husband Bob last night, and we had the following exchange...
FI: Each of the so-called "genre" fiction categories concern specific subject areas, whereas neither mainstream and literary fiction have defined subjects. You list all the genres, then mainstream and literary are both "none of the above," So what's the difference between literary and mainstream? It's hard for me to define that difference without resorting to quality references: literary fiction is better crafted, has more beautiful language, and so on.
BOB: Why can't it be like the distibction between fine art and commercial art? Fine art can be of low quality. Commercial art can be of high quality.
FI: That's a good notion—I like the analogy—except the distinction between fine and commercial art is a whole lot more obvious to me. When I think about the distinction between literary and mainstream fiction, I flounder! Ugh...
BOB: I think of literary fiction in terms of who the intended readers are: readers who are familiar with the "great books."
FI: I balk at that definition, because a bright 12-year-old who hasn't read any "great books" can pick up a literary novel like Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and love it. I guess I'm an intellectual snob, because now I want to blurt out, "Yes, because Cat's Cradle is so good, that's why!" Which makes me feel like an idiot, that I can't define this genre any better than that...
And so on...we didn't resolve squat. But I still like Bob's anlogy of fine vs. commercial art. I just don't know how to map it onto literary vs. mainstream fiction.
How do you define literary fiction? Anyone?
Re: How close is sci-fi to literary?
Thanks for the reply. I was going to say more in my earlier post, but it got late, and I was too tired to think straight, so I didn't. I'll try to do better now.
I think there are at least three different notions of literary fiction in use.
One is about quality. Literary fiction is better written. It's literature; it has literary merit; it's art. There are various ways to say it, and various ways to explain what it means. (Better how?) It's fiction that deserves to be on the same shelves as the classics. Some bookshops even have a section labelled "Literature" that does exactly that.
I think that's a perfectly legitimate way to characterise literary fiction, but I think it has significant problems when literary fiction is seen as a kind of genre, as it is in NaNoWriMo. I don't think quality should be built into the definition. There has to be room for literary fiction that isn't very good. If I say my novel is literary fiction, I'm not saying it deserves to be up there with the work of the best writers or even that it's better written than the novels that are classed as fantasy or SF or some other genre; and I don't think I'm very unusual there.
A different idea that's often seen is that literary fiction is character-driven rather than plot- or story-driven. As FatDragon put it last year, it's "fiction that emphasizes character over plot, that strives toward a goal of conveying some truth over a goal of telling a gripping story." One the Genre Lounges page, this forum is described in similar terms: we're "grappling with complex personal and societal issues" and "we don't always have the tightest plots." "Psychological depth" is sometimes mentioned as well.
The problem with that is that it's too narrow. I don't think literary fiction should be defined in a way that excludes the things you mentioned earlier: the work of high modernist writers, prose poems, and so on. I don't think literary fiction has to be focused on character, on psychological depth, on complex personal and societal issues, or on conveying a truth; it could also be focused, for example, on style: perhaps on an unusual way of structuring a story. In a sense, literary fiction is defined by what it's not: it's not focused on being a straightforward, plot-driven narrative.
That negative definition is a third way to characterise literary fiction, and it's the one I prefer. The positive side is that it gives you great freedom. Saying your novel is literary fiction is a way to say you're not trying to meet all the expectations, or follow all the conventions, that go with mainstream fiction or with whatever other genres are also involved. (I like what rparker said above about transcending genre conventions.)
Re: How close is sci-fi to literary?
Science fiction began as a pulp fiction genre -- for that matter, the genre's founder (Hugo Gernsback) was a pulp magazine publisher -- but developed a literary strain when it came of age. That was the New Wave of the '50s through '70s, starting of course with Philip K. Dick. Cyberpunk replaced the litfic influence with hard-boiled crime fiction and film noir (Blade Runner is in fact considered one of the few great neo-noirs, and of course it's based on a PKD novel). Together they make up the literary side of SF. Though there is some pure pulp among the lesser cyberpunk novels, the best read as punk fiction that just happens to be science fictional. I myself am combining the two approaches, the literary and the noir.
Of course, there's still a lot of pulp SF with no literary pretensions. The entire military SF subgenre is this, and it descends from space opera, a pulp subgenre that persists to this day. So how close SF is to litfic depends in large part on the subgenre. At the pulp extreme, you have the likes of John Ringo (OH JOHN RINGO NO!!!); at the literary extreme, I'm sure there's SF novels as convoluted and nearly unintelligible as the ultra-pomo House of Leaves (which is literary horror, by the way).