You're just making excuses, Clay
11 o'clock, February 6, 2003
I’ve sat down to start writing this three or four times, and somehow it always ends up off in some irrelevant tangential rant. Probably goes to show that I haven’t really figured out what I think, yet. And maybe I shouldn’t try; maybe I don’t need to.
But it’s been bothering me since — oh, since fifth grade, say. What this SF thing is all about. What it has to do with me. And whether I’m okay with that.
This is the first year that SF’s actually going to figure into my tax return; seems like I ought to at least take a minute to step back and ask whether I know what I’m doing.
So Strange Horizons ran this article, a couple of weeks back. (Fred Bush, “Speculative Fiction: A Dozen Doorways,” 1/20/03.) A list of a dozen or so reading suggestions to get your grown-up friends and family started on speculative fiction. It’s not the list I’d make, but that’s just a matter of reading taste.
No, what I really wonder is: Why make the list at all? Why try to get someone into SF in the first place?
Mr. Bush seems to think we should do so for the sake of the genre. “Without new readers, the field of speculative fiction is doomed.” It’s true, of course, over the long run — but is it any skin off my nose? I know, that sounds pretty ungrateful, pretty antisocial, coming from someone who’s trying to start a career in writing the stuff, but — well, here’s another thing Mr. Bush says:
This is not the time to trot out your Gene Wolfe dekalogy, brilliant though it is, because it’ll require too much effort for someone to decipher the text and they’ll never read another piece of spec fic again.
I’m sorry; all I can say is Screw that. If I can’t get them to read Gene Wolfe, what’s the point?
There isn’t anyone I can look in the eye and say, “Y’know, you’d be happier — or more fulfilled — or a better human being — if you read ‘speculative fiction’.” On the contrary, there’s plenty of SF that I think would probably make their lives worse. And while I have nothing but good wishes for, e.g., Octavia Butler, Cory Doctorow, Joe Haldeman and Tad Williams (certainly I don’t put them in the category I just mentioned), I’m not into their stuff and getting someone else into it isn’t going to give that someone and me any more to talk about. On the other hand, I think my buddy Andy, over in Tuscaloosa getting his MFA, would benefit greatly from getting over his anti-SF prejudices long enough to read The Book of the New Sun... after which, as far as I’m concerned he’s welcome to climb back under them.
You see, the genre — or rather, marketing category — known as ‘SF’ is just (okay, this may be what my ex-Navy coworkers call a CLM, a Career-Limiting Move, but it’s bound to come out sooner or later) too broad for me to feel much loyalty to it. What messianic fervor I have, with regard to my reading tastes — and it’s not what it was ten or even five years ago, as I’ve grown up enough to come to terms with the idea that a difference in tastes is not always indicative of a character flaw — is more specific: I’d like more of the people I know to read Gene Wolfe and China Miéville, Maureen McHugh and Kelly Link, but I’d also like more of them to read Michael Chabon, John le Carre, Sven Lindqvist, Michael Ondaatje and Paul Watkins.
The other problem with Mr. Bush’s idea is that it assumes the reason our friends are not already addicted to SF is that they just haven’t been properly exposed to it yet. But from where I’m standing SF’s real problem seems to be, not attracting new readers, but hanging on to the readers it’s got. I’ve lost count of the number of friends who’ve told me SF is something they used to read. Something they grew out of.
Wherever it may come from, there’s a perception out there — and not just among people like my otherwise admirable cousin Drew the ocean-fishing guide (who over Christmas almost refused to join the family outing to see Two Towers on the grounds that he wasn’t into “that Dungeons and Dragons stuff”) but among people who can spell Cthulhu, explain the difference between Valar and Maiar, and argue intelligently whether Gibson’s cyberspace has more or less contemporary relevance than has Stephenson’s Metaverse — that a taste for SF is a sign of arrested development.
This is the point where I’m supposed to get defensive. Where I’m supposed to talk about the literature of ideas, or the wonderful power of storytelling, or the sociopolitical depth in the work of Russ or Delany or Brunner, or the superiority of William Gibson’s prose and grasp of fin-de-millenaire consumer culture over those of Bret Easton Ellis and Don DeLillo. Or something. I’m sure you have your own list. But I can’t do it any more, and I’m tired of trying.
RACHAEL: It seems you feel our work is not a benefit to the public.
DECKARD: Replicants are like any other machine. They're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem.
I just want to write — well, I just want to write what I want to write. But I can’t get away from the fact that most of what I want to write does, indelibly, exhibit characteristics that would lead a literary taxonomist to categorize it as some species of the SF genus. (And not one of those chameleon species that can sneak into the New Yorker, either; at least, not today.) I would like, though, to be able to talk to strangers about my work, and not worry whether the label SF — or rather, sci-fi — has already told them all they want to hear. (No matter whether any prejudice they have is the fruit of ignorance, or of bitter experience.) Offhand, I can think of four ways to do that —
— lie about what I write —
— change what I write —
— change the minds of all those strangers —
Or, of course, just stop worrying.
“No, that’s not right. Comic books actually are inferior,” Sammy said. “I really do believe that. It’s — it’s just built into the material. We’re talking about a bunch of guys — and a girl — who run around in their long johns punching people, all right? If the Parnassus people make this Escapist serial, believe me, it’s not going to be any Citizen Kane. Not even Orson Welles could manage that.”
“You’re just making excuses, Clay,” Bacon said, taking them all by surprise but no one more than Sammy, who had never heard his friend sound so serious. “It’s not comic books that you think are inferior, it’s you.”
—— Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Why try and introduce anybody to anything, be it SF or inline skating or tarantula raising or Alfred Hitchcock movies?
The best reason is that you think they'd enjoy if it they gave it a chance.
Lesser reasons, of course, include trying to find something they can enjoy as a couple, or to try and get some respect from relatives who don't get that whole crazy Buck Rogers stuff.