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.

Book blogger Bella over at A Bibliophile’s Bookshelf has started a separate blog with the intention of creating a list of the 101 best fantasy books of all time.

She’s asking fantasy fans to submit a list of books they think should be on the list by August 31 this year. Once the nominations are closed, readers will be able to vote for their favourite books and make sure they stay on the list. And of course the prize: A lucky reader will receive a copy of the winning number one book, although Bella doesn’t mention how the prize will be allocated!

But wait, there’s more! Ink and Paper blogger Jo, who’s helping out with the project, has asked people submitting entries to email in links to books they’ve reviewed and that they want to be on the list. “When it comes to voting,” she writes, “your reviews will be linked to, bringing traffic to your blog and giving exposure to the novels.”

The list is already quite big and contains famous authors like Robert Jordan, Robin Hobb, Raymond E. Feist and so on.

Commentary
OK, here’s Keeping the Door’s list of books we’d like to submit (and we’ll be voting for). We’re going to be slightly boring by submitting Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea quintet, which is already on the list, but with a few additions which aren’t yet there:

Ursula K. Le Guin
-A Wizard of Earthsea
-The Tombs of Atuan
-The Farthest Shore
-Tehanu
-The Other Wind

Roger Taylor
-The Call of the Sword
-The Fall of Fyorlund
-The Waking of Orthlund
-Into Narsindal
-The Return of the Sword

Haruki Murakami
-The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
-Kafka on the Shore
-A Wild Sheep Chase

Science fiction in 1968 was male-dominated, Ursula K. Le Guin ruminates in a new interview with The New Yorker, and as such she was taking a huge risk with her gender-bending book The Left Hand of Darkness.

The book, often described as one of the first major works of feminist science fiction, is about a relatively normal human male, Genly Ai, who visits Gethen, a world where people are normally of no sex, but switch to either male or female during certain times. Ai’s non-sexual relationship with a character named Estraven comes to be the main theme of the book, and the lens through which the reader views the alien sexuality of the planet’s inhabitants.

Says Le Guin:

In 1968, I don’t think anybody could have imagined an Earthman feeling at home with and welcoming the alien gender situation of Gethen. I did think about sending an Earthwoman there—and she would have reacted very differently from Genly …

But science fiction in 1968 wasn’t about women. It was about men. It was a man’s world. I felt I was taking a huge risk as it was, presenting a largely male readership with these weirdly re-gendered people. I thought the guys would hate it.

I was wrong. They liked it fine. It was the feminists who gave me a hard time about it for years. They wanted me to have been braver. I guess I wish I had been. But I did the best I knew how to do. And Genly does learn a lot!

The Left Hand of Darkness was one of the few titles to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards. There are quite a few resources online devoted to analysing it; for example this study guide. A solid review is here.

Commentary
A typical Le Guin interview, The New Yorker‘s piece displays what at first appears to be the deceptive simplicity of the author’s thought processes and writing style.

The genius of Le Guin’s writing is that it is so comfortably easy to read that before you know it, you’re thoroughly engrossed in her characters and invested in their worlds.

But the truth is that all of this master storyteller’s books operate at a much deeper than surface level. As Le Guin says in the interview about the Taoist or Zen traditions, explaining things intellectually is not where it’s at. Her books, like life itself, need to be understood at a more emotional level. In my experience, you generally of absorb them quickly, without over-analysing them at the time.

It’s only later, that you really realise what life lessons and insights into our existence the wise Le Guin has seeped into your mind through the back door.

Alongside Frank Herbert (author of the Dune series), I would place Le Guin amongst my favourite all-time science fiction authors. I particularly love her book The Dispossessed, which I consider to be the pinnacle of her work, but The Left Hand of Darkness also affected me greatly.

During periods of great turmoil in my life, I often carry around a copy of The Dispossessed as a talisman and a needed reference that I can seek inspiration from at need. That’s how important Le Guin’s writing has become to me!

Technorati blog claim code: 3hfak4sj8g