On SpecFic and LitFic

[starshipcat]

Over at Sarah Hoyt's blog, Jeb Kinnison has some interesting thoughts on the relationship between LitFic ("liter'chur," "serious fiction") and the various speculative fiction genres, and how it relates to the current controversy over the Hugos:

I’m one of those people who straddles STEM and the literate arts with reasonable skills and interest in

Comments

[sartorias]

This debate chases its tail regularly. There are the proponents of "only grimdark and nihilism is cool enough to be considered worthy of literary merit" and then there's the fact that most writers use genre tropes and prose shortcuts, cast in unexamined limited third, or the fad of the day (first person present tense for urban fantasy). Round and round and round.

[starshipcat]

Oh yeah -- I think the "only grimdark and nihilism" stuff is the old Greek notion that tragedy is superior to comedy, only turned up to 11 and given a nasty "look how edgy I am" twist.

[marycatelli]

Eh, I think Campbell was creating his own gatekeeper status. Most literary gatekeepers don't get the rules of fantasy or SF in the most basic manner; I have actually seen a literary critic in his essay on Harry Potter complain that magic can do everything -- and then that it can't.

[starshipcat]

True. Genres each have their own rules -- in a mystery, there must be a crime and an effort to solve it, and an expectation that it will be solved and not by some trick ending. In a romance, there will be attraction between the characters, but various obstacles will prevent their realizing it and coming together and must be overcome, etc -- and a person who comes from mainstream or literary fiction (which are in fact genres in spite of their determination that no, they are just plain fiction) may not recognize some of those rules, and only capture the surface features rather than the fundamentals.

I remember Jacqueline Lichtenberg reminiscing about watching Star Trek (the original, with Shatner and Nimoy) while visiting family, and several of her relatives scornfully remarking that it "makes no sense." They did not understand the genre conventions of science fiction, and thus were trying and failing to parse it by the rules of genres they were familiar with.