“His fabulistic style led people to review his work as science fiction. But that’s like calling Brave New World science fiction, or 1984.” −J.G. Ballard’s editor, Robert Weil
Predictably enough, this statement−made in the wake of Ballard’s death earlier this spring−triggered all the usual teeth-gnashing from SF writers. Ursula Le Guin was particularly vexed, calling it “shocking”, “ignorant” . . “”gravely unjust.” Her response has been rattling around in my mind ever since. On the one hand, Le Guin deserves total credit−she’s a stalwart champion of the genre, and there are many points in her career that she could have pulled a Margaret Atwood, denying that she wrote science fiction and trashing the genre in the name of her own status. She stayed the course instead. And called bullshit on Ballard’s editor.
And no one seems to have called bullshit on her.
But better late than never.
Was Weil’s statement ignorant? Absolutely. Shocking? Sure, if you’re into cozy illusions. But gravely unjust?
Like we should plead with those guys for justice.
I’m almost 40. This is a conversation that’s been going on as long as I can remember. And I’m not even vaguely interested in having it go on for another forty years. Sure, the mainstream literary establishment are a bunch of snobs who despise science fiction. Sure, they’re way more interested in their next latte than in what shape the human race will be in a hundred years from now.
So what?
We already know this. We’ve known it for a long time. And watching writers get angry because some fuckwit makes some asinine statement denying the genre its due is getting about as old to me as writers frothing at the mouth because they’re not in the NYT book review as much as they’d like, or because their friends didn’t make some academic short-list. It’s all part of the same tremendous insecurity that keeps getting in the way of moving the genre forward. And it also strikes me as more than a little self-indulgent. Napoleon said it’s with baubles that men are governed; watching the intelligentsia of the SF field clamber over themselves to snap up whatever trifles the Mainstream Literary Academy will toss them . . you’ll excuse me if I think that we’ve been missing the point.
All the more so because the literary establishment isn’t even the real target here. It’s already irrelevant, imho. Just look around you. Newspapers are going out of business because they won’t report the news. Broadcasters are losing eyeballs to the comedians who alone have the balls to tell the truth. The publishing industry is in a state of growing disarray. Frankly, there are better things to do than fight over the scraps. We should be above the question of our own literary merit. Leave that to posterity, because we’ve got bigger fish to fry.
Like ensuring there is a posterity, for one thing. Not to mention changing the mindset of the broader society that needs us more than ever−the broader society that can’t think more than two minutes beyond its own present. When the Berlin Wall crumbled, academics blithely proclaimed the end of history: an absurdity so glaring that only a society completely deaf to all possibility of future could embrace it. Yet this is the kind of idiocy that science-fiction exists to combat. SF continues to be the only literature that provides a canvas wide enough to encompass the current predicament of our species. The urgency of this task can’t be overstated. And I have to wonder, do we really still think that the best way to make our point is by convincing the close-minded guardians of a dying culture?
You’ll excuse me if I beg to differ.
David J. Williams is the author of near-future dystopian thriller THE BURNING SKIES, and posts every Wednesday on Suvudu. Learn more about his work at www.autumnrain2110.com.
