In a review of Margaret Atwood‘s new book The Year of the Flood, sci-fi and fantasy master Ursula K. Le Guin has criticised the Canadian author’s stance that her work is not to be classified as science fiction.
The book, released this year, is a dystopian vision focused on the God’s Gardener’s group, a small collective of environmentalists who survived the disaster Atwood created in her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake. It contains a wide variety of themes found in the science fiction genre: a post-apocalyptic landscape and society, including mutated species, and more.
Writes Le Guin in UK newspaper The Guardian:
“To my mind, The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire.
But Margaret Atwood doesn’t want any of her books to be called science fiction … she says that everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have already happened, so they can’t be science fiction, which is “fiction in which things happen that are not possible today”. This arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders.”
Commentary
There is no doubt that much of Atwood’s work is science fiction. As Le Guin notes, you can’t postulate a human species whose individual members turn blue when they want to have sex, without describing such a work of fiction as sci-fi. We simply don’t have the technology to create such a race of humans in current day 2009.
Hence, any work describing such a race is by definition postulating a world where scientific concepts are extended to their logical conclusions in the future; the very definition of science fiction.
Atwood’s desire to escape such a label is likely sourced from the desire to avoid her work being classified in the much-aligned and misunderstood genre. It’s a problem that also extends to the world of fantasy literature, as Janny Wurts has recently complained.
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It is definitively Science fiction. It seems that “ordinary authors” feel it is prestige drop when the novels are classified as Science Fiction.
The problem is not being labelled as Science fiction, but how critics view that literature genre.
Hopefully the problem will ease as time goes on. I know many people in the younger generation (young than me, I mean: I’m 28) don’t really make the distinction between science fiction/fantasy and “normal” literature :)
I would imagine that although Atwood disdains to call her work science fiction, she would probably prefer the term “speculative fiction,” which is just a PC way of saying science fiction. The labels on the various genres are more for bookstores and publishers than for readers. A good book is a good book regardless of genre. Too bad most people cannot see the distinction.
I’ve always found it odd that she doesn’t want the label of “science-fiction” when a handful of her books exemplify the best features of the genre. Admittedly, her other work is decidedly *not* science-fiction, but does she think readers won’t be able to tell the difference? It seems a little rude to me to brush off half of your potential audience that way.
If you consider ‘Oryx and Crake’ and ‘Year of the Flood’ as extended metaphors for society (past, present and future) then they seem much less like science fiction. I think this is why Atwood does not agree with that particular classification.