Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
I'd like to claify that Orwell was not pro socialist, nor was he a science fiction writer, he was more in line with the anarcho syndacilists and he saw in socialism (at least organised socialism at the time) the same dangers as he saw in communism, stalinism etc. His only work that edges near to science fiction is 1984, but it so transcends all the restrictions of genre, I don't believe it deserves that name. Just as Animal Farm is not a 'children's book', 1984 is not 'science-fiction'. Orwell was a great writer and there endeth that story, you can't lump him in with people like Asimov and Dick, that's an insult to his capability. It's like putting James Joyce in a list with Maeve Binchy. *shudder*
|
It so clearly is science fiction though, even if it is many other things. Something doesn't become 'not science fiction' because it has literary merit. It's just a classification, not a restriction. Sure the publishers use genres as a way of marketing to specific audiences, and modern literary fiction is as much a genre in that sense but that doesn't mean literary fiction can't also be science fiction.
Ursula K LeGuin sums it up nicely:
Quote:
|
To define science fiction as a purely commercial category of fiction, inherently trashy, having nothing to do with literature, is a tall order. It involves both denying that any work of science fiction can have literary merit, and maintaining that any book of literary merit that uses the tropes of science fiction (such as Brave New World, or 1984, or A Handmaid’s Tale, or most of the works of J.G. Ballard) is not science fiction. This definition-by-negation leads to remarkable mental gymnastics. For instance, one must insist that certain works of dubious literary merit that use familiar science-fictional devices such as alternate history, or well-worn science-fiction plots such as Men-Crossing-the-Continent-After-the Holocaust, and are in every way definable as science fiction, are not science fiction — because their authors are known to be literary authors, and literary authors are incapable by definition of committing science fiction.
|