Comments on: A useful distinction?

By: SF as a Literary Genre « Torque Control

SF as a Literary Genre « Torque Control — Fri, 09 May 2008 08:11:18 +0000

[...] with the amnesia of society: it is about forcing us to remember or to recognise. (Building on a distinction he’s talked about before.) This sort of horror can be seen in dystopias, in “Hitler Wins” stories, in apocalypse [...]

By: » Science fiction is a floating point variable » Velcro City Tourist Board » Blog Archive

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 20:48:06 +0000

[...] the wranglings of the genre; the coincident arrival of a report from a con panel and a new column from esteemed critic Paul Kincaid seems to have revived the perennial ‘what [...]

By: Nick Hubble

Nick Hubble — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:53:47 +0000

To paraphrase a joke by William Empson, can’t we have a third option: ‘bringing in the golden future less prematurely’

By: Dr A

Dr A — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 00:06:13 +0000

Argh - “Can’t-Do Spirit”, I meant.

By: Dr A

Dr A — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 10:42:57 +0000

Sudden thought: if you do accept the terms (and obviously I don’t have the context of the actual discussion at the con and I’m not sure I do) and if you accept that recognition is eclipsing advocacy (broadly speaking) is this another version of Clute’s death of Agenda/first sf?

The optimistic Gernsback-Campellian Continuum is displaced by the New Wave (what I’ve called the Can-Do Spirit)?

By: Pete

Pete — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 21:54:31 +0000

I don’t know about this distinction - certainly both types exist, but it misses out (or seems to me to do so) a whole swathe of the genre in that it assumes the whole of Sci Fi is intended to portray possible futures.

A book like Sheckley’s Mindswap, which never takes the future it portrays seriously, might be put in the Recognition camp by an overzealous perpetrator of the distinction, in view of its satirical content, but that is to miss the fact that the satire lies in the metaphorical application of ideas in the book to the actual world, rather than their literal application to an sfnally possible world.

Or, since Lem’s been mentioned already, what about something like the Cyberiad? The world of Trurl and Klaupacius, delightful or horrific though it may be as a possible future, is surely not intended to be taken as such.

Some of the best SF - even some of the best “hard” SF, such as, if I may be so bold, Greg Egan’s short fiction - has value not in view of its prophetic claims, but because it uses the genre to map out fascinating areas of the landscape of ideas. To reduce, say “Learning to be me”, to advocacy of extropianism (though it may contain that) is to lose sight of what makes it a valuable read even to avowed non-extropians, it would seem.

By: option b from outer space « Uncle Zip’s Window

option b from outer space « Uncle Zip’s Window — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 15:29:27 +0000

[...] an interesting discussion over at Torque Control. Light & Nova Swing were certainly intended to take some advantage of, or traction from, Option [...]

By: Martin

Martin — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 14:02:00 +0000

I could probably happily describe Richard Morgan’s Market Forces as socialist-advocacy SF and his Black Man as feminist-advocacy SF.

By: Niall

Niall — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 06:40:54 +0000

Matt, Kathryn — thanks for the extra background. Kathryn — excellent last point. I could suggest Ken MacLeod’s books as socialist-recognition sf, and possibly Gwyneth Jones’ Life as a feminist-recognition sf novel. But I think you’re right that a lot of feminist/socialist sf is advocacy-based (has to be, by definition), and that putting recognition-based sf first may devalue the importance of such books. And now I’m wishing I was at Readercon to continue the discussion … :)

By: MattD

MattD — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 06:13:32 +0000

I think #1 may be overstating what the panel said: it was more that some books do this, some other books do that. At issue was the trend towards recognition-themed works. This part of the discussion arose from comments Liz Hand made about how she sees more SF than ever whose “real year” is now, rather than in the past or the future, and thus correspondingly fewer books that create a “sense of wonder.” That led into the comments by John Clute and Graham Sleight.

As for #3, one of the other things Clute said was that a vital task for a critic is to learn when to apply a certain tool in the critical toolbox. He was talking about the idea of the “real year,” but I suspect it would apply to this division as well — that Niall is right in seeing it as a potentially useful distinction to make when looking at the goals of a particular work of SF rather than as a tool to categorize all works, except perhaps on the level of trends. Certainly you can look at Star Wars from the standpoint of advocacy vs. recognition, but it would be a more useful tool in comparing, say, the original trilogy to the prequels, than in analyzing any of the films in isolation. There are better tools available for that.