Wednesday and Slightly Wasted (Guest Blogger: Richard K. Morgan)
Okay, seems we’re out of directional thematic metaphor, done up, done down, “roundabout Wednesday” sounds crap, so this’ll have to serve instead. Though Slightly Groggy is probably a fairer assessment, since neither Steve Erikson (yes, that is the fantasy, not the “literary”, writer) nor I drank heavily last night. But – I am these days so unused to regular alcohol consumption (like I said, what the fuck am I doing living in Glasgow??) that the relatively restrained quantities of Jack Daniels and Pinot Grigio I put away (no, not in the same glass) plus an early morning airport run have me a little ragged around the edges. You know – somewhere around that Zen state peripheral to actual hangover, where consciousness gets in the back seat and dozes and you just get on and function, while everything apparently trundles along just fine on some set of slightly dreamy autopilot rails. (Tell you a great story about that someday.)
About those inverted commas around “literary” back there; no disrespect to that Steve Erickson (whose first novel Days Between Stations was an enchanting meditation on distance, loss and cinematic wonder which still echoes in my memory more than twenty years after I first read it, but whose other work I’m entirely unfamiliar with) but I’m a little tired of the range wars and strung barbed wire deployed every time the “literary” critical world comes into contact with genre. It’s something Steve (the other Steve Erikson) and I bitched about last night at great length – the ingrained prejudice that lives and breathes within the mainstream critical establishment against genre fiction.
I mean, look, let’s be clear about this: I’m not suggesting we should expect the New York Review of Books to devote column space to the latest Star Wars tie-in novel or yet another mock-medieval pot-boiler about yet another Good Hearted Farmboy growing up to be a Warrior or a Wizard and defeating yet another Evil Empire. That would be populist entertainment relativism above and beyond the call of sanity.
But.
But:
There has to be a reason why books like DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little or Yann Martel’s Life of Pi walk off with the Booker prize, while Geoff Ryman’s Air isn’t even short-listed (and it sure as shit ain’t about how good they are, because Ryman’s book pisses all over the other two in every meaningful measure there is of literary quality). There has to be a reason why David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood can all try their hand (rather clunkily) at visions of a genetically modified future and be reviewed at length for it in the mainstream press on three continents, while a whole host of SF genre writers (of varying but by no means uniformly poor stylistic merit) have been writing confidently and compellingly about exactly the same thing for a couple of decades now at least, and are all summarily ignored (and yes, I am including myself in there, and yes, I am sulking). There has to be a reason why Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 are by-words in the English Literary Canon and Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is unheard of outside of genre circles. There has to be a reason why-
Ah, fuck it, why go on? Sure, there’s a reason, and that reason is blind prejudice. The mainstream critical world doesn’t like (or know anything much about or want to know anything much about) SF and Fantasy fiction for exactly the same reason British people on package holidays to Spain demand access to fish and chips and Sunday roast – because they’re too ignorant and self satisfied to look beyond their own narrowly ingrained and inculcated tastes and taboos. It’s different than what they know, and they don’t like that; plus they once heard somewhere that SF is shit, and it must be true because look at all that god-awful stuff on TV (which latter is a bit like writing off all of British post-colonial literature from Salman Rushdie to Monica Ali, because you once saw a couple of Bollywood movies and didn’t rate them very highly).
Truth is (and I’ve said this before in the second half of an article here) our only mistake within genre is to bother with these people at all – like bigots of any stripe, you can’t talk them round, you can’t argue the point, you can’t make them see the light, any more than you can persuade the Ku Klux Klan that the colour of someone’s skin is no good indicator of their worth as an individual. The stance of the mainstream with regard to genre fiction is neither critical nor analytical, it is deeply emotional – and you challenge people’s deeply held emotional beliefs at your peril.
Example – just try telling an audience of fantasy fans that Frodo should have died at Mount Doom. Steve Erikson (the fantasy Steve Erikson) tried it at a convention, he told me last night, and nearly caused a riot as a result. Oh yes, children, for if there is bigotry out there in the big bad world of mainstream literary crit, there’s as much and to spare in here, in the cosy and slightly claustrophobic confines of our genre. For every mainstream critic who wouldn’t know good science fiction or fantasy if it bit him in the ass, there is also a fistful of genre fans who think The God of Small Things must be some kind of fantasy epic about war between microscopic elves, Vineland is that Norse Saga about the Vikings discovering America, and Philip Roth is, wait a minute, oh yeah, that guy who used to sing with Van Halen, right?
Yes, sad to say, people, this is not a one-way bigotry we’re talking about here. Intolerant, uninformed people on both sides of these barricades have some serious self-examination (and reading) to do if they’re ever to be disassembled (the barricades that is, not the intolerant, uninformed people. Though come to think of it...)
Free your mind, people. Your reading habits will follow.
Meantime, I’m off to take some aspirin. My Zen state is peeling back here. --Richard Morgan
Linda P on July 09, 2008 at 11:29 AM
1st Paragraph: Please tell us about your "slightly dreamy autopilot rails" story tomorrow - when you're feeling better.
Next few paragraphs: Nobody really likes Life of Pi, 1984 or Ishiguro, etc - they just pretend to, because they're supposed to, because TPTB have said they are so good. (Although I do know a Wiccan who liked Life of Pi, but my students complain a lot about having to read 1984).
Almost last paragraph: "though come to think of it..." thats the problem - no one wants to have to think while reading a book, it's too taxing on the brain.
on July 09, 2008 at 12:42 PM
Hey, I just wanted to speak up as someone who liked _both_ Life of Pi and Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (although Vernon God Little: not so much), and I don't think I'm pretending.
Linda C on July 09, 2008 at 05:33 PM
I enjoy reading Amazon's book blog--some entries more than others. However, the current blog Richard K. Morgan is something different: It is offensive, and boring. If it were simply uninteresting, I would simply not read it, not comment, and wait till the next edition and hope it was more interesting (to me). Mr. Morgan, however, chooses to sprinkle obscenities throughout his writing in addition to being uninteresting. Can you please assign this blog to writers who have something to say and can find words with which to say it that are not offensive.
Linda C on July 09, 2008 at 05:34 PM
I enjoy reading Amazon's book blog--some entries more than others. However, the current blog Richard K. Morgan is something different: It is offensive, and boring. If it were simply uninteresting, I would simply not read it, not comment, and wait till the next edition and hope it was more interesting (to me). Mr. Morgan, however, chooses to sprinkle obscenities throughout his writing in addition to being uninteresting. Can you please assign this blog to writers who have something to say and can find words with which to say it that are not offensive.
Linda C on July 09, 2008 at 05:34 PM
I enjoy reading Amazon's book blog--some entries more than others. However, the current blog Richard K. Morgan is something different: It is offensive, and boring. If it were simply uninteresting, I would simply not read it, not comment, and wait till the next edition and hope it was more interesting (to me). Mr. Morgan, however, chooses to sprinkle obscenities throughout his writing in addition to being uninteresting. Can you please assign this blog to writers who have something to say and can find words with which to say it that are not offensive.
Paul Sparks on July 09, 2008 at 08:25 PM
I have no literary background whatsoever, so you can take what I say with a grain of salt. I am a fan of the two books of yours that I have read (Thirteen and Altered Carbon). I also liked 'Life of Pi'. And for that matter, I like Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell. I haven't had the pleasure of reading Kazuo Ishiguro yet but 'Please Let Me Go' is sitting on my shelf along with Geoff Ryman's 'Air' which I just picked up a couple of days ago.
I browse the Sci-Fi sections as well as the 'literary fiction' section. You're right about there being bigotry on both sides of the fence. I find it sad that people can't look up from their stack of genre books to see what else is out there.
Oh yeah, I've got Michael Chabon's 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union' on my shelf as well. What genre is that one?
Samuel Tinianow on July 09, 2008 at 10:34 PM
This reminds me of the time in my college ethics class when the professor divided the class into groups and asked us to come up with an ethical argument to persuade the Nazi officials at the Wansee Conference to stop killing the Jews and close down the concentration camps.
I walked right up to the professor and explained that the exercise was bogus because those people were all crazy and there was no way to shake enough rationality into their heads to make them respond to any argument, no matter how compelling.
It's kind of like... ah, I just invoked Godwin's Law didn't I? OH SHIZL
Evan on July 11, 2008 at 02:43 PM
I don't think SF gets ignored because of blind prejudice -- to me it's always seemed more like self-defense. Good SF by its nature deals with very destabilizing issues (our place in the universe, unchanging v. changing morality, the future of life, the injustice and violence inherent in "the system," body v. identity) and it's much easier for people to dismiss all of that as childish and just move on and live comfortable lives. Your fiction, Richard, is precisely the sort of destabilizing stuff I'm talking about.
If you really allow the experience of reading good SF it is impossible to go about your life in quite the same way. The sense of wonder, the sense of strangeness, the lingering moral questions, they change you. And people hate that sort of thing.
And I think you're being a bit harsh on David Mitchell, whom I've always thought of was secretly very knowledgeable about SF. Cloud Atlas is a first rate work of SF, as far as I'm concerned.
Ed Stackler on July 16, 2008 at 11:05 AM
Thank you for the deep belly laugh, Richard Morgan. The Vineland/Roth/God of Small Things line had to be the funniest thing I've read in months! For me, your hangover was the best thing to happen all day.
Neuro Splicer on August 18, 2008 at 01:54 PM
Life of pi, When we were Orphans and 1984 were all good books and comparable to Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive - and if we are looking for who enjoyed them, count me in, I am Spartacus too.
Having said that, SF (and especially its cyberpunk faction) has always been literature's, well...Black Man: flexing its poetic muscles, lighting the way towards the next societal paradigms and posing those annoying questions the establishment rather keep under the carpet.
Mainstream is both afraid and fascinated by SF. It loves to talk its talk and pseudodance under the table to its tune but it will NOT invite SF in its ivory tower because it cannot predict what SF will stir up next. And have you seen the SF crowd...?
Neuro Splicer on August 18, 2008 at 01:55 PM
Life of pi, When we were Orphans and 1984 were all good books and comparable to Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive - and if we are looking for who enjoyed them, count me in, I am Spartacus too.
Having said that, SF (and especially its cyberpunk faction) has always been literature's, well...Black Man: flexing its poetic muscles, lighting the way towards the next societal paradigms and posing those annoying questions the establishment rather keep under the carpet.
Mainstream is both afraid and fascinated by SF. It loves to talk its talk and pseudodance under the table to its tune but it will NOT invite SF in its ivory tower because it cannot predict what SF will stir up next. And have you seen the SF crowd...?