Quote:
Originally Posted by ATDrake
Reminds me of Margaret Atwood trying to live down her Arthur C. Clarke award for The Handmaid's Tale by claiming that since Oryx and Crake didn't involve rocketships but instead portrayed a speculative post-apocalyptic near-future scenario based on genetic engineering technology we don't have yet going horribly, terribly wrong, it couldn't possibly be that nasty old *science fiction*.
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I suspect that down inside, Atwood knows better. She's simply trying to avoid being tarred with the genre brush.
Part of it may be the nature of the Canadian market. It isn't big enough to support folks writing fiction solely from domestic sales. To encourage local writers, the Canadian government offers grants, so the goal of a writer in Canada is to qualify for the highest possible level of grants.
Atwood has garnered a market outside of Canada, and
can make a living as a writer sans grants, but I suspect that "literary" fiction gets a bigger slice of the grant pie than genre fiction, and it's in her financial interest to claim that what she's writing isn't SF.
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Dennis