Roundtable: McCarthy, Chabon, and Franzen
Guy Gavriel Kay
He wasn’t even midlist. Not sure how ‘cagey’ he was … all accounts pretty isolated, out of it culturally, before that book. Different by the next one. But I also remember those quotes … felt naive to me, not strategic. But maybe I’m the one being naive.
F. Brett Cox
This discussion brings me back to something I’ve believed for some time: the things that we as fiction writers, critics, scholars, and teachers discuss unceasingly and with such deep concerns are pretty much irrelevant to most readers. There have always been intelligent and omnivorous readers who read the literatures of the fantastic as part of the mix, but usually, per Gary’s point, without a conscious awareness that they’re reading something that some of us classify as “science fiction.” (Over the weekend I had a conversation with one such person who expressed surprise that I classified Mad Max as a “science fiction” movie, rather than a “postapocalyptic” movie. Call it the The Road Syndrome.) This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t have such conversations–we have to–but we should keep them in perspective.
And if you’ll grant me an elitist moment, let me also say that some of the most interesting and rewarding sf I’ve read has often been very self-referential, and I see nothing wrong with that. Just as we honor YA fiction that understands that the terrors of youth are so pervasive and profound that young readers feel ill-used and cheated if those terrors are not addressed, we should also honor fiction for adults that considers possible futures fueled by neither the power fantasies of oblivious (white, male) technocrats nor the undifferentiated energies of adolescence, and does so with a deep and unapologetic understanding of its own history as a literary form. Yes, such stories will have a limited audience. So what? (Acknowledging that such a statement comes from a reader of fiction and not from a writer whose writing has to pay the rent.)
Karen Joy Fowler
The topic has become so wide-ranging I’m not sure where we are.
I wonder if it might be interesting to flip the original question. It’s often been noted that science fiction, when written by Atwood or McCarthy, is received differently in the mainstream than work generated by anyone known primarily as a science fiction author. But did The Road or Oryx and Crake or any other outsider work find an enthusiastic audience inside science fiction? How hard is it for a writer from the outside to break through in the other direction?
And if they don’t, why is that? Are they insufficiently fluent and referential? Is it easier for us to love Housekeeping (which I passionately do) than The Handmaid’s Tale? (which I also do.)
And to the list of sf book’s that did find a larger audience, I’d like to add Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. This book, with its space ships and aliens and first contact catastrophes, continues to be extremely popular in many places, but perhaps most surprisingly in the women’s book club world.
Guy Gavriel Kay
Gary’s notes also seem to set up a point I’ve argued for decades: origin is destiny. McCarthy or Atwood or Cronin hit commercially with sfnal books (leaving aside fights over labels for now) because they start outside genre and have readers (and expectations) elsewhere. Slack is cut, elasticity offered. The marketing approaches are easier. The publishing houses are not genre-specific. The publicists’ rolodexes spin easily beyond genre blogs.
So, to echo Jeff: What is this ‘suffering’ of which we speak? None of us have the right to expect huge audiences, in or out of a genre. There’s luck, context, trendiness, timing. This also applies, not incidentally, to levels of success within sf and fantasy (though this discussion I believe was meant to focus on sf). So, are we here just thrashing out the old topic of how to go wide in sales and marketing terms with sf … or did Karen want us to discuss how to write better? Or are we supposed to figure out how to make readers take their medicine? Art that’s good for you, we promise!
