The hatred for sf and fantasy by the doyens of literary fiction is as vast as the sea of tears they weep when someone points out that despite the push from many publishers, academia, the media, ordinary people don’t read it much. In truth no-one reads it much. It’s a genre whose only real selling point is that those who read it can feel they’re better than the hoi-polloi reading trashy sf or trashy romance, or trashy detective novels.
You don’t actually have to read it, to enjoy this superiority because it is not like about enjoyment (so other genres have to have their fans enjoy the books to sell them) this is more about display, or if no one is going to see it anyway, pretending to be able to display. It is really a ‘status-among-peers’ thing, and its hallmark is the loud derogatory scorn poured onto these lesser genres.
I remember my unholy amusement at two arch-feminists whose output was sf but attempting to gain the ‘respectability’ of being literary complaining angrily that if they could only sell half as many copies as they had people crowding into their various man-bashing panels. It was important to be seen to support them, not to actually do it.
The curious thing is that not only are there desperate quests from sf writers to gain respect by loudly scorning sf, but that the literary writers so often write sf or fantasy. Atwood (‘sf is squids in space’) and Winterson spring to mind, but there are many examples. They often do far better than the ordinary literary offerings, because all things are relative. The thing is the authors never sully their minds with sf or fantasy, and then write it.
And most sf readers… go ‘huh? Whut?’ You see, like every genre, sf and fantasy have their ‘conventions’- both stylistically and in terminology and especially in assumed shared background knowledge. This is as true for almost any genre – sf and fantasy are no different to murder-mysteries or romances, in this sense. Readers share a large pool of ‘common knowledge’ that the writer does not have to explain. Everyone knows what FTL means. Everyone who reads the genre knows the structure typical of that genre. They’re used to it, and they like it. Or rather they loathe having it not followed.
It’s a common language. And it’s really one that is only learned – if you’re going to write in it, by immersion. And not just reading the current works, but the ones which gave rise to form. So, if you were going to write detective novels, and you manage not know Hercule Poirot and Watson you have a problem. Or sf and not know what the door into summer is or the Foundation was, and so on. There are many that dress their laziness and high opinion of themselves in disdain for the genre and foundational novels.
It tends to show. Don’t make it your undercarriage that is on public display. Read a lot of anything that you plan to write.
Mad Genius Club 
29 responses to “A common language”
Ah, the literati – “How dare my ideas not be as popular in reality as they are in my head!”
I have to confess that I immediately looked up what FTL meant. (But that’s my fault – I am terrible with acronyms.) To your point though, I completely agree with you. I have never really liked the erudite “This is my idea that I came up with and it has not been sullied by the popular press” approach. Plus I can imagine that reinventing the wheel is a risk if the writer doesn’t read in their field. To submit/publish a manuscript and then learn that Poul Anderson, or whoever, essentially did the same thing years before would be highly embarrassing.
If it was good enough for Homer (and Kipling), it’s good enough for me:
https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/when_omer_smote.html
“When ‘Omer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre,
He’d ‘eard men sing by land an’ sea;
An’ what he thought ‘e might require,
‘E went an’ took — the same as me!”
Especially because Original Ideas that you get without any familiarity with the genre tend to be things E.E. “Doc” Smith did first — and better.
Yep. Still put out at the guy the SF Book Club got to write their forward for the Lensmen series, who thought Smith was a proto-fascist.
Proto-Fascist?
I just loved the scene in the Lensmen where the Big Bosses were concerned about taking in more in taxes than they needed. 😆
And the reason for it: “the restriction of government to its’ proper sphere.”
Fascist? Suuurrreeee.
The latest English language editions of Otto Skorzeny’s autobiography, Hitler’s Commando have a foreward to warn everyone that Fascism is bad, even though the book didn’t cover much for politics. I read it because I wanted to better understand a significant military personage and his daring do’s. I guess publishers just think the public needs to be spoon fed information today.
I’ve got plenty of disdain for trad pub, but in this case, they are not wrong.
You simply don’t know what your readers don’t know anymore.
We’ve lost that common education.
Modern cookbooks have to assume the person opening them has never operated a stove.
That was Fanny Farmer. As part of inaugurating home economics, she did a lot to alter cookbooks from here are some tips for the experienced chef to learn some new recipes.
In part because after her father lost his fortune she was cooking without ever having to start a stove before
I did not know that! What I have seen is my older cookbooks (unless they’re aimed at absolute beginners) all assume a higher level of knowledge. So do my sewing books. I’ve got an excellent mending manual that would need to be rewritten today to explain everything the author takes for granted.
I suspect so. And that the words like ‘Nazi” and “Communist” and “Fascism” have been abused to the point of being meaningless in a modern context, and even confusing in the original context for some readers.
It just may be one of the Enemy’s great victories: to make people believe the qualities and attitudes that DEFEATED fascism are fascist.
One thing I’ll always remember about the stupid lockdowns, was that the pundits and literati who were suddenly forced to teleconference from home had stylists purchase and curate libraries to appear behind them.
And that this was widespread enough not only to create employment for many, but for them to also be classified as “essential” workers.
On the bright side, it was obvious once you were looking for it. (Who organizes books by color? Or has the all the latest printings of books that were first published at least decades ago? Or doesn’t have oddball “personal favorites” sprinkled in?)
My sister, years ago, with a new house, hired a decorator . . . the library shelves were filled with matching sets of classics. Untouched when I visited. I’m looking at them, and going “Oh! The Sea Wolf! haven’t reread that for decades! Debby, you must read it. Oh! And you’d love . . .”
It was so sad, all those good books (and some bad!) all untouched. I’ll have to ask if she’s read any of my recommendations . . .
You could be unpleasantly surprised if you tried to borrow one of her “library.” Some of those barbarians took a tip from Unholywood prop masters and cut off the cover – or even just the spine – of a poor defenseless book and glued the skin to a cardboard box. Made them so much easier to move around.
(A physical manifestation of “take it over, eviscerate it, and wear the skin” practiced by the “elite” of any persuasion.)
Oh, if you think the literati are snobbish about fantasy and science fiction, it’s all that infinitely multiplied when it comes to westerns. The Literary Industrial complex has tried their best to bury that whole genre, although it is still very popular among readers! (Especially male readers, which might be why…)
When I wasted some time and postage trying to interest agents in my first two historical fiction novels, nine out of ten I got a snotty reply – “We don’t ‘do’ westerns!” Me protesting “But it’s a historical novel set on the 19th century American frontier!” cut no ice, at all.
I was unfamiliar with the story The Door Into Summer until just now. But I have seen variations of the story.
Aghast that any Hun has not yet read it. Envious that some still have it to read for the first time.
c4c
I used to sneer at the unread and unlettered. I proudly carried my library of paper books with me through endless moves, like a snail with his house on his back. I used to read at least a book a week. Usually 2 or 3.
Now? Nothing.
2014 rolled by, and I pretty well stopped reading entirely.
Now I am the unlettered and unread savage, cocking a snook at my literary betters. Forced to write the books I want.
Or possibly I’ve just gotten weird in my old age. 😡 Certainly a possibility.
Same, pretty much. Anymore I read for pleasure in genres that I don’t want to try to write, and I read stuff in genres vaguely adjacent to what I want to write, so that I can get angry enough to keep writing what I want. This latter procedure is called market research.
Market research, ~:D That’s a good one.
I do not have any liver cells left to burn. My poor old liver is a little nubbin compared to the mighty organ of my youth. I can’t risk having the whole thing burst into flame in a bookstore, reading the blurb of some Hugo-wannabe defiling my beloved SF with their woke trash.
I mean, just imagine the mess on the carpet.
PG posted the Washington Compost’s list of the “best SF books of 2023” just a couple of days ago. One of the very few of his posts that I scrolled right by to get to something of interest.
I just read my first regency. If Alida Leacroft doesn’t intend to write more, I need recommendations for someone just as good.
Have you read Georgette Heyer, probably the main inspiration for that subgenre?
Most archetypical of her novels: Arabella, The Nonesuch
Personal favorites: Cotillion, Quiet Gentleman, Frederica, Black Sheep
Personal unfavorites but loved by others: Friday’s Child, Civil Contract
Georgian era novels (earlier setting, Frenchier social protocols, goofier men’s wear): The Black Moth, These Old Shades, The Masqueraders
M.C. Beaton (the Hamish MacBeth mysteries) wrote a lot of short satirical regencies under one of her other names, Marion Chesney, which are now being reissued under the MC Beaton pen name. They can be funny, but she likes to rub people’s faces in the grossout aspects of the period. All the ones I’ve run across are slight but amusing, but they’re mostly in series, and it’s somewhat important to get hold of book one to start with, and then space the series out just far enough so you don’t get tired of their more repetitive traits.
If you’re brave enough to face fairly long books with rather old-fashioned language that break a lot of the modern rules of narrative fiction (more telling than showing, little physical description of people, grammar and vocabulary influenced by Romance languages), there’s always Jane Austen, who actually lived during the Regency and whom Heyer was riffing on in some ways. Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion are the three that hold together well as stories. Some people really can’t stand the title character from Emma, so skip it if you don’t think you would like “snobbish matchmaking busybody gets her comeuppance and the man she didn’t know she wanted.”
From the same author, Mansfield Park is “literary” in the modern sense of having a deliberately anti-heroic lead couple (he’s deludedly in love with the wrong woman, she’s emotionally insecure and usually passive), a series of pretty ambiguous supporting characters, and not much plot. Northanger Abbey is a satire on the Gothic literature of Austen’s youth, difficult to follow unless you’re up on the pre-Frankenstein, state of that genre, and populated by the idiots you find in modern teen dramas. Sense and Sensibility is sort of the midpoint between that sort of thing (satirizing Romanticism this time) and the more polished and nuanced Pride and Prejudice.
Sorry, forgot Blake Smith, who posts here on Wednesdays or Thursdays: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Blake-Smith/author/B0796L67RT
Georgette Heyer. She is in many ways the gold standard that inspired the genre. Specifically her Regency Romances (she has other genres). Some of my favorites:
Arabella
The Black Sheep
A Civil Contract
Cotillion
Frederica
Friday’s Child
The Grand Sophy
Lady of Quality
The Nonesuch
Sprig Muslin
The Unknown Ajax
Venetia
If you just want a sample, I suggest starting with Frederica.
Thank you. I’ve heard her name but it’s nice to have titles attached.