Guy Gavriel Kay

Canadian fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay has stuck the boot into one of the judges of this year’s Man Booker Prize, declaring his attitude towards science fiction to be “hall of fame-quality idiocy”.

The prize is awarded to the best novel each year written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth and has a 50,000 pound prize. Earlier last month, the shortlist for the prize was announced, but no science fiction books were to be found on it, spurring American sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson to lambast the judges of the award for what he said was a misguided focus on historical fiction.

In an article published by UK newspaper The Guardian, Booker judge and University College London professor of English John Mullan, made some rather disparaging comments about sci-fi literature.

“One of this year’s Booker judges, John Mullan, replied to Robinson’s comments with an almost definitively asinine comment,” wrote Kay in a column published in Canada’s Globe and Mail last week:

“”It was Hall of Fame-quality idiocy. After first noting that he was “not aware of science fiction” (which might normally preclude going on to comment), he proceeded to declare, through the foot in his mouth, that it was “bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.” I do admit to wondering what size shoe Professor Mullan wears, and how it fits between his teeth, and whether he teaches grammar.”

Kay has published eleven fantasy novels, commencing with his applauded trilogy The Fionavar Tapestry. He has won a number of major awards and been nominated for many more. His next novel, Under Heaven, is slated to be published in April 2010.

Kay’s comments come as part of a wider debate within the sci-fi and fantasy community about whether the broad genre is being discriminated against by the literary establishment.

American fantasy author Janny Wurts recently argued in a podcast that the fantasy genre was chronically marginalised by its immature image by book critics and readers, a theme she expanded on in a recent interview with Keeping the Door.

And Canadian author Margaret Atwood, considered to be a ‘mainstream’ novelist, has taken a stance that her latest novel The Year of the Flood is not to be classified as science fiction, despite the book containing a dystopian vision of the future including mutated versions of humanity. American sci-fi and fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin has criticised Atwood’s stance.

Ultimately, Kay is optimistic about the future of the sci-fi genre, concluding his Globe and Mail column by noting that speculative fiction themes are embedded in many younger writers, a theme that is eroding prejudice and genre assumptions on the part of the literary mainstream.

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.