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Art/Culture: Why Do People Not Read Science Fiction? : Reading from only one side of the brain
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Taken from Carol Pinchefsky's essay at The Intergalactive Medicine Show:
I think we've chatted about this on here before, but nothing like a fresh spin on an old problem.
I'm a proselytizer. I like to spread the word: Science fiction, fantasy, and everything that lies in between and bleeds around the edges are great choices of reading material.
Frustratingly, most book readers do not share my enthusiasm.
As an experiment, last month I gave four non-genre readers a modern genre short story to read, then interviewed them about the experience. I only convinced one reader to consider speculative fiction when selecting his next book. (A fan of Frank McCourt, he is currently reading the works of Edgar Allen Poe and needs suggestions.)
As for the other three readers, even though they enjoyed the stories presented to them, they politely said "thanks but no thanks" to a repeat experience.
The books that I savor are full of brilliance and wit and wonder. Why people don't read science fiction and fantasy continues to baffle me.
The reasons are varied but inarguable -- science fiction holds only a 6% market share, according to research done by the Romance Writers of America in 2005. (1)
Why does speculative fiction not appeal to mainstream readers? The answer, "It just doesn't interest me" does not interest me. So after years of observation, I've drawn a few (non-scientific) conclusions. The answers are more complex than a choice to avoid the science fiction section of the bookstore. (Summary headings follow, see full answers here):
1. Some readers need to be presented with context before engaging with the material.
2. Mainstream readers do not think the same way.
3. Speculative fiction is a taste acquired from a young age.
4. The social stigma associated with speculative fiction still exists.
5. Science fiction just does not interest most readers.
6. People are already reading science fiction and fantasy -- they just don't call it that.
What do you think? -
Back with a vengence eh Dan...Just in time to pickle my head for the new year.
'You'll never go broke by underestimating the public's taste'
6%!! That's twice my guess...I'm so pleased. -
All of the reasons listed are valid but there's another element, which Warren Ellis describes:
...the old dream (circa 1950s)
I share a conviction with Steven Shaviro, whose most recent book was CONNECTED, that we live in a science fictional world. Not the one everyone expected, of course — no jetpacks. But good science fiction, challenging science fiction, is never about the future we expect. Sf has never been about predicting the future. It’s been about laying out a roadmap of possibilities, one dark street at a time, and applying that direction to the present condition.People have spoken at length over the last few years about the death of sf, and even of the death of futurism. This isn’t new. In the 1980s, grand masters of the form such as Robert Silverberg and Robert Sheckley talked of sf losing its way when the common visions of the form were abandoned: Silverberg in particular (author, curiously, of some of sf’s most depressing stories) spoke of the cyberpunk/radical hard sf landscape being one he did not choose to inhabit, and so turned to writing fantasy. Today, sf, like so many arts, is utterly fractured, with several competing movements, none of them gaining much traction, while sales slip, magazines struggle and the written genre slides out of general view, dragged down to Davy Jones’ locker by the bony hands of the Western.
...the sf reality (Shanghai, 2007)
I’m a science fiction writer. I work in many other genres and areas, but first and foremost I think of myself as a writer of sf. I’m no good at science. My girlfriend still has to program the video machine for me. I love science for the fiction in it. Every great scientific innovation has poetry in it. In a BBC TV play about the discovery of the DNA molecule, Jeff Goldblum as James Watson says upon seeing the assembled DNA double helix for the first time; “I knew it’d be pretty.”
The challenge in sf now is, to an extent, the one William Gibson met in PATTERN RECOGNITION by not writing sf. When we live in the science fiction condition, what’s left but writing contemporary fiction with the eye for detail and extrapolation that comes from an sf writer? It’s what the Mundane SF movement (and, my God, what an exciting name) is referring to: if we’re living in the science fiction condition, why invent castles in the air?
[...]
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More to the point, why do literary critics not like speculative fiction?
(Those guys being them what push books on the kids)
There are some exceptions (of course) but getting Harold Bloom to push Heinlen in lieu of Shakespeare may be difficult.
Consider though that Midsummer Nights Dream would qualify in this regard (sort of) but I don't think he sees it that way exactly. -
I think I've commented before that it is not the science of sci-fi that fascinates me, but the ideas. Science Fiction, and more specifically speculative fiction, is replete with brain crushing philosophical megamonsters. I come back time and time again to give my mind a beating - everyday conversation so easily strays into the acceptance of 'the real'.
I have come to the conclusion recently that Jorge Luis Borges was the greatest sci-fi writer of all time. He isn't known for it, nor would he have acknowledged this prestigious prize himself, but no writer I have found manages to cram so many speculations in so succint a space (and by the way, the critics loved/love him).
My theory for why sci-fi is still perceived as under-stream? People don't like to question the borders of their world. Sure, they'll jabber endlessly about the substance of their fellow humans, the interactions of the state or between states, the downfall of entities, both collective and individual, but ask them to consider that reality itself is a mere consensus and most will run away screaming. Hollywood has in some arenas managed to rectify this (all scream 'Matrix'), but escapism of an hour of eye candy is no substitute for a book injected slowly and allowed to breed in the mental-gut of its inhabitant. Sci-fi/Spec-fi/Magical Realism, all alike make my brain horny in anticipation. If people don't want to share in that then that's their loss.
I am often told as a (wanna-be) scribe that writers are fascinated by the substance of people. I worry about this definition because it doesn't go deep enough for me. I plan to write a novel someday with as little anthropomorphic/anthropic elements as it is possible to muster. Pure sci-fi/spec-fi would subtract everything person-like out of its equation completely. -
Ideas on the edge can come in many forms and need not necessarily come in the form of Sci-fi, though that genre lends itself more easily towards the hard questions, and allows for imagination to break the our limitations imposed by realistic unities.
But this is done as easily by invoking Magic and Myth - which are within the classical comfort zones of most critics, thus sci-fi tends to be (but for a few exceptions) ignored.
Consider which Sci-fi traditional lit critics like and their reasons for doing so:
1. Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) - It didn't hurt that Mary's hubby was Percy the poet. Nevertheless, it turned more towards Gothic Horror than true sci-fi so if Poe is ok then so is this.
2. Jules Verne and H.G. Wells - a bit of fin de sigle neo-romanticism as adventure rather than true sci-fi makes this 'safe' and we always liked romanticism don't we - even if it flies in canon shells to the moon.
3. Aldous Huxley - wrote lots of non-sci-fi (that invariable also included the benefits of drug abuse) so "Brave New World", albeit a novel about the future, had contained a theme centered on the dangers of social engineering - something other sci-fi writers tended to gloss over prior to advent of the 'Hard' writers (Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke) thus making this the first in the genre to do so and something lit-critics liked.
So how come they like Magical Realism and not Scientific Speculativism (did I just coin something?)
Because Magic is as old as Hesiod, Mallory and Shakespeare, and Science isn't? -
I just love aliens. I want to meet one, anything from Heinlein's 'Star Beast' to a 'Predator', to an 'Overmind'...anything but an 'Alien', those things scare the shit out of me.
And Dan, has anyone written a book that follows the interactions between non-human species successfully? My memory is still down thanks to bloody New Year.
How would we feel if SF suddenly became mainstream?
And I like Iain Banks as much as I like Iain M. Banks...or do I? More 'Culture' novels! -
“Men do not live by truth alone; they also need lies: those that they invent freely, not those that are imposed on them: those that appear as they are, not smuggled in beneath the clothes of history. Fiction enriches their existence, completes them and, fleetingly, compensates them for this tragic condition, which is our lot; always to desire and dream more than we can actually achieve.
When it freely produces its alternative life, without any other constraint than that of the limitation of its own creator, literature extends human life, adding the dimension that fuels the life deep within us—that impalpable and fleeting, but precious life the we only live through lies.
This is a right that we should defend without shame. Because to play with lies, as the author and reader of fiction do, the lies that they themselves fabricate under the rule of their personal demons, is a way of affirming individual sovereignty and defending it when it is threatened; of preserving one’s own fee space, a citadel outside the control of power and of the interference of others, where we are truly in chard of our destiny.
Other freedoms are born with this freedom. These private refuges, the subjective truths of literature, bequeath to historical truth, which complementary to them, a possible existence and a particular function: that of regaining and important part—but only a part-of our memory, that greatness and poverty that we share with others as gregarious beings. This historical truth is indispensable and irreplaceable for us to know what we were and perhaps what we will be as human collectivities. But what we are as individuals and what we wanted to be and could not really be and had therefore to be through fantasy and invention—our secret history—only literature can tell. This is why Balzac wrote that fiction was ‘the private history of nations’.
By itself, literature is a terrible indictment against existence under whatever regime or ideology: a blazing testimony of its insufficiencies, its inability to satisfy us. An, for that reason, it is a permanent corroder of all power structures that would like to see men satisfied and contented. The lies of literature, if they germinate in freedom, prove to us that this was never the case. And these lies are also a permanent conspiracy to prevent this happening in the future.”
The Truth of Lies, Mario Vargas Llosa, Barcelona 1989 -
"By itself, literature is a terrible indictment against existence under whatever regime or ideology: a blazing testimony of its insufficiencies, its inability to satisfy us."
Mario talks good... :) -
Nowadays, generally, people consider books in general to be too slow-paced and thus boring.
Whereas 6% of book sales are science fiction, I would guess that books--and reading in general--, as an entertainment media, probably likewise account for around 6% of sales of all forms of entertainment media. How few people read regularly at all, preferring less substantial, more sedating forms of entertainment, unsurprisingly reflects itself here in that of the people who do read, few read things of substance. (Gee...thanks for the John Grisham novel, mom...) The majority of people are neophobes, remember?
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