Science fiction - As serious literature

Mary Shelley wrote a number of science fiction novels including Frankenstein, and is treated as a major Romantic writer. A number of science fiction works have received critical acclaim including Childhood's End and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner). A number of respected writers of mainstream literature have written science fiction, including Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing wrote a series of SF novels, Canopus in Argos, and nearly all of Kurt Vonnegut's works contain science fiction premises or themes.

The scholar Tom Shippey asks a perennial question of science fiction: "What is its relationship to fantasy fiction, is its readership still dominated by male adolescents, is it a taste which will appeal to the mature but non-eccentric literary mind?" In her much reprinted essay "Science Fiction and Mrs Brown," the science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guinhas approached an answer by first citing the essay written by the English author Virginia Woolf entitled Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown in which she states:

I believe that all novels, ... deal with character, and that it is to express character – not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved ... The great novelists have brought us to see whatever they wish us to see through some character. Otherwise they would not be novelists, but poets, historians, or pamphleteers.

Le Guin argues that these criteria may be successfully applied to works of science fiction and so answers in the affirmative her rhetorical question posed at the beginning of her essay: "Can a science fiction writer write a novel?"

Tom Shippey in his essay does not dispute this answer but identifies and discusses the essential differences that exists between a science fiction novel and one written outside the field. To this end, he compares George Orwell's Coming Up for Air with Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants and concludes that the basic building block and distinguishing feature of a science fiction novel is the presence of the novum, a term Darko Suvin adapts from Ernst Bloch and defines as "a discrete piece of information recognizable as not-true, but also as not-unlike-true, not-flatly- (and in the current state of knowledge) impossible."

In science fiction the style of writing is often relatively clear and straightforward compared to classical literature. Orson Scott Card, an author of both science fiction and non-SF fiction, has postulated that in science fiction the message and intellectual significance of the work is contained within the story itself and, therefore, there need not be stylistic gimmicks or literary games; but that some writers and critics confuse clarity of language with lack of artistic merit. In Card's words:

...a great many writers and critics have based their entire careers on the premise that anything that the general public can understand without mediation is worthless drivel.  If everybody came to agree that stories should be told this clearly, the professors of literature would be out of job, and the writers of obscure, encoded fiction would be, not honored, but pitied for their impenetrability.

Science fiction author and physicist Gregory Benford has declared that: "SF is perhaps the defining genre of the twentieth century, although its conquering armies are still camped outside the Rome of the literary citadels."This sense of exclusion was articulated by Jonathan Lethem in an essay published in the Village Voice entitled "Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction." Lethem suggests that the point in 1973 when Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow was nominated for the Nebula Award, and was passed over in favor of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, stands as "a hidden tombstone marking the death of the hope that SF was about to merge with the mainstream." Among the responses to Lethem was one from the editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction who asked: "When is it [the SF genre] ever going to realize it can't win the game of trying to impress the mainstream?" On this point the journalist and author David Barnett has remarked:

The ongoing, endless war between "literary" fiction and "genre" fiction has well-defined lines in the sand. Genre's foot soldiers think that literary fiction is a collection of meaningless but prettily drawn pictures of the human condition. The literary guard consider genre fiction to be crass, commercial, whizz-bang potboilers. Or so it goes.

Barnett, in an earlier essay had pointed to a new development in this "endless war":

What do novels about a journey across post-apocalyptic America, a clone waitress rebelling against a future society, a world-girdling pipe of special gas keeping mutant creatures at bay, a plan to rid a colonizable new world of dinosaurs, and genetic engineering in a collapsed civilization have in common?

They are all most definitely not science fiction.

Literary readers will probably recognize The Road by Cormac McCarthy, one of the sections of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood from their descriptions above. All of these novels use the tropes of what most people recognize as science fiction, but their authors or publishers have taken great pains to ensure that they are not categorized as such.