"Coming Out": I'm KB, and I'm a... a...

Literature & Writing I'm a writer!
21

Oh and one other thought.

Sci-Fi / Fantasy use to have a “bad image” but as of late interest in both has taken off tremendously. Many popular movies and books are coming from the Sci-Fi Fantasy realm where as “proper” books are now seen as pompous and dusty - made more for the aristocrat critic who armed with a thesaurus and a dictionary wade through the ever popular form of writing gibberish and forgotten words in hopes to appear worthy of some lame duck title.

Bah. What famous piece worthy of such has been written in the past twenty years?

What famous Sci-Fi/Fantasy books have been written in the past ten years?

I rest my case.

Once someone starts thinking of a genre BEFORE actually telling a story they already impede progress on that tale because even though they don’t think about it they govern the tale to fit the genre where in truth the genre should be picked AFTER the tale is told. Who knows maybe I want to write a Mystery copy novel with rabid bunny rabbits and hamsters that have rocket engines that can cast spells and a world where the Mop Bucket is an evil foe and the Windex bottle is weapon of choice.
:slight_smile:

Write what you want then pick a genre to describe it.

22

I can understand the argument for putting everything together in small to medium size bookstores, but in larger ones (say 100,000+ fiction titles alone) it would get to be really messy and difficult to use without some sort of segregation—but then you need it at all levels. Poetry, small-press, criticism and studies, graphic novels, zines, fantasy world inspired art, and yes, way off in the corner near the toilets, a Star Trek section. Maybe even in the bathrooms themselves. Oh and you can imagine the fury in the Bible Belt United States if erotica was shelved by author name instead of having its own, seedy section!

That’s the way my local super-bookstore is set up. There is a room for general literature, which is sub-divided into a bunch of sections along the walls, and then upstairs is another room for genre fiction, which is itself sub-divided into niche nooks. There is even a whole shameful shelf near the floor filled with dime novel muscle spaceman stories with bad rocket cover art and tentacled aliens. Yes, it means some hunting around if you don’t quite know which section an author is officially declared by, but I don’t mind this sort of hunting around for the same reason I like to browse.

23

Hi,

what an interesting thread. Some ideas:

  • I grew up being told that ScienceFiction is a serious genre of literature, reading Soviet Science Fiction was entertaining and inspiring. So I would not be ashamed of writing Science Fiction (though I do not, since my imagination is not so vivid…)

  • An important point I read in one of the last posts: Writing (science fiction or any other genre) is a way of getting away from reality, creating its own world. Yes, this is one of the miracles when writing, as I experience. But at the same time I think, only if the own creation has relevance in the world and for people, it may become “literature”. But works without this relevance are as important as literature, just because we need to dream.

  • I enjoy reading and writing both. Each at its time.

  • We want to be recognised as somebody, as an archaeologist, as a serious writer, as a commercially successful writer or whatever. But the public does not accept the variety in one person. It expects the same sort of work from a person with one name. So my solution is: Different names for different genres. May be this is the solution of a coward, but it is easier to live. KB: Why not publish your SF under the name of “Amantha Celebre”? Or whatever you like?

Maria

24

It’s interesting that so many of us sort of apologize for wanting to write SF. I take that as evidence of decades of snobbery from the lit crowd. Ursula LeGuin has some sharp things to say about this in a couple of her essay collections; I can look up the essays if anyone’s interested.
Like lots of teenagers, I and my school friends really made SF our own literature of choice. (The old slogan is, “the golden age of science fiction is thirteen.”) I think we were responding to its breadth of imagination. It was so much more exciting than the hyper realist fiction that really had more to do with models forged in the late 19th century than in the possibilities offered by the upcoming (then) 21st.

Of course a lot of the space opera and ray guns and spaceships were crap. (Sturgeon’s law, coined by SF writer Ted Sturgeon in defense of SF: “90 of EVERYTHING is crap.”) That’s why so many of us welcomed the advent of strong characters and more literarily accomplished writing beginning in the '60s and '70s in writers like Dick, LeGuin, Kate Wilhelm (and I don’t just mention those two because they’re Oregonians), and others Amber and others have mentioned.

Plenty of contemporary novels that are now accepted by the lit establishment (Pynchon, Chabon, Winterson, Gibson, Murakami etc etc. ) are SF but won’t be called that because the term is still seen as disparaging.
As for Keith’s disclosure… I think any writer, any artist, has to write what she’s compelled to write. If you try to force yourself to write what’s “approved” by any establishment, it’ll be false. And think of how many works now regarded as classics started as genre or pulp novels – Raymond Chandler, Maus (a comic book! er, graphic novel fer vick’s sake!), Dick, Borges, Calvino. It’s the same with other art forms – the Beatles, Talking Heads, Warhol (a commercial artist!), blues, Hank Williams, and all the others now seen as immortal even by the once-scornful high culture establishment, while most of the high culture stuff that garnered awards at the same time was forgotten within a few years. Just write what calls you to be written – let the academics and pundits and historians sort out the rest.

25

KB - writing for the love of it is all you need to do, whether that’s science fiction, or LITERARY work.

Consider, too, that even the Man Booker prizewinner sold only 3,000 copies - even mid-list sf sells a lot more than that, I’m sure. Consider this - when John Scalzi started making his Agent of the Stars available online, he made $400 dollars to $1000 each year, but when he sold Old Man’s War, and got advances, in 2004 he got $67,000. I doubt if a “literary” author makes that much.

Of course, we’re not in it for the money, are we?

26

I’ve split this thread into several different threads seeing as it was getting long and very eclectic. I hope no one takes offence at this - the thread was interesting and I went just as off-topic as everyone else (hmm, I may have even started the off-topicness :blush: ) so please don’t take this as over-zealous moderating. I’m just trying to tidy it up so that newcomers can find relevant information in the appropriate forums, and also make it so that we can all continue the various strands of discussion without having to worry about going off-topic.

If you feel I’ve placed any of your posts in the wrong topic (it was difficult deciding what should go where so I just went for a best-fit), let me know and I’ll move it to where you think it belongs.

All the best,
Keith

27

observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/ … 33,00.html

[size=150]THE TRUTH IS OUT: X-FILES GOES PUBLIC[/size]

28

nytimes.com/2008/02/03/weeki … ei=5087%0A

29

I’m a long term fantasy writer and I’ve just starting migrating to sci-fi. I’m proud to admit it too. Funnily enough, now that I know KB is a sci-fi writer, it makes me love Scrivener even more than I did before.

I must admit I do find it irritating that I have to justify speculative fiction to the literati types out there. Without risking flames, it’s the oldest form of storytelling; in fact it’s the well spring from which all other genres derive. The epic of Gilgamesh, the Greek and Roman epics and large chunks of the Bible are undoubtedly speculative writings.

‘Literature’ is great and all but when it comes to the big questions, ‘literature’ rarely challenges our beliefs or provokes our thoughts at the same time as entertaining us with a ripping yarn.

30

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if sci-fi and fantasy were the oldest forms of storytelling. These days, though, it seems like sci-fi and fantasy are the last refuge of written Romanticism, after it was driven out of “serious literature” by Naturalism and postmodernism.

I’ll tell you a little story. I was talking with my parents the other day, and they asked me if I’m still writing sci-fi. I just smiled and said, “No. I’m writing the world’s most violent romance novel. It’s a love story with swordfights, gun battles, explosions, conspiracies, demons from outer space, alien sorcerers who have been manipulating humanity in order to fight these demons, and lots of bad jokes.”

My mother just shook her head and said, “So, you’re still wasting your talent on that ‘Starbreaker’ idea. Why not write something worthwhile? Your father and I have lots of stories to share with the world.”

“I gave you a computer for Christmas two years ago,” I said. “So start typing. I don’t give a damn about your stories. My story is the only one that matters to me. I will write as I please, or not at all.”

Life’s too short to spend a moment of it writing the way somebody else thinks you should write. It’s bad enough we have to obey laws and pay taxes. Should we submit to others when we write as well?

31

And of the worse species. Aren’t all those giant fighters, in Gilgamesh and the Ilyad, characters from an anime robot saga?

Paolo

32

If you like…

I know it’s been a while since I read Gilgamesh or the Iliad, but I doubt that all of the heroes were actually giants. One need not be exceptionally large to be a demigod. Hell, excessive size would probably have been a liability for Achilles (for example).

33

Spot on, my friend. The giants were a different breed from heroes, at least in Greek and Norse mythology. Gilgamesh is a bit of a mystery though; he was a half god, half mortal. Is that what a demigod is? Damn XP for not having a lovely dictionary built in! Can anyone remind me why I’m actually using bootcamp?

@ptram you’re either watching too much or too little television, mi amico!

34

Pretty close. ‘Demigod’ was originally used to describe Greek mythological heroes, who were often described as having been sired by one god or another (usually Zeus).

35

To play cheap video games, watch Netflix Instantly watch, and to keep in practice of updating “Virus Software” daily.

Oh and to suffer like most folks who cannot afford the luxuries of OS X. This keeps us humble in our advanced state. :slight_smile:

And last but not least to look at a PC person and say “And why should I haven’t gotten a Dell? I seem to be able to run multiple OSes including OS X and still look suave doing it.”

36

It’s never too much! I bought my first TV set two years ago, and now I can’t stop watching at it!

While kidding, I discovered I was right:

tinyurl.com/ytx4w9

Paolo

37

You know, what’s why I keep running FreeBSD on Astarte, my print/file server. :slight_smile:

I just glare at such people and say, “Let me know when you’re running a real OS. If it ain’t Unix, it’s crap.”

38

Thanks chaps, that’s exactly why I’m running bootcamp. Well that and Framemaker is dead on Mac :frowning:

39

I’ve been writing Science Fiction for years. I call all of my stories ‘Science Fiction’, even those that have such a tiny speculative element as to be unnoticeable (except by those who care to look for it). Science Fiction is my raison d’etre, and in the right hands it will always be the first and last literature of ideas.

On the other hand, I do have to say that a lot of the genre’s marginalisation is self-inflicted. Many of the aspiring SF authors I keep in contact with have a love-hate relationship with their status; they bounce between feeling like they’re writing ‘trash’ and getting angry at the rest of the world for daring to call their genre trash. In many ways, the reason why everyone thinks SF is just about rayguns and Captain Kirk is because…there are more people writing books (and television, and film) about rayguns and Captain Kirk than their are people writing about poor confused GI’s who’ve become unstuck in time.

Why get mad because JG Ballard and Margaret Atwood go into the general literature section and PK Dick doesn’t? It’s silly. Their publisher markets them that way but that doesn’t necessarily reflect who they are. Anybody who’s read The Blind Assassin knows that Margaret Atwood has a healthy obsession with the pulp-SF genres of the 50s, and she has written many novels she calls Science Fiction - The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx & Crake being two prominent numbers.

The last Nobel laureate - Doris Lessing - wrote MANY Science Fiction novels. In fact, she’s pretty much the picture of the cranky old SF author - never happy with the establishment, always ready to poke the finger, always ready to hold up the mirror to humanity and it’s inherent fascist/reactive dichotomy.

Face it, people, we’re not a marginalised genre. Quite the opposite in fact - because those who aren’t getting critical acclaim as SF authors are selling like hotcakes. I can’t stand Peter F. Hamilton: the guy writes yet another galactic-wide space opera with three-hundred main characters, and it’s lapped up. Like Robert Jordan (RIP), he’s laughing all the way to the bank.

And yet, I guarantee he marginalises himself every now and again (how dare you say I’m not a real author! Oh wait…you didn’t?). It’s just a habit, one SF authors could well learn to break.

No - writing to a genre with a stigma you’re aware of means one thing only - that you have to write the fiction that proves your bugbears (real or imaginary) wrong. I hold my Science Fiction to the highest standard I can find, and I read broadly and mostly outside the genre that I write in. Keith, you need to do the same (geez, I’m demanding this evening). It’s your task, should you choose to accept it, to take your literary aspirations and write the next Flowers for Algernon. Unless there are SF authors willing to push the boundaries of their own genre and demand quality from themselves, then we’re doomed to become what we imagine we’re seen as: glorified Star Trek fans.

Of course, you’ve got to write what you enjoy too. There are plenty of decent SF authors who adore Star Trek. So I, uh, apologise to them.

40

Writing monstrosities that sell like hotcakes is a nasty job, but somebody has to do it. Unlike George R. R. Martin, Hamilton has actually managed to finish a couple of series. :slight_smile:

Not necessarily. You could always embrace them, or even parody them.