Quick, what are the most well-known literary awards out there? I’m willing to bet you’d answer the Booker Prize, the National Book Awards, and the Pulitzer Prizes. Despite these being the apex of the publishing establishment, to hear some people say it, literary fiction has to struggle to stay out of the ghetto.
Kim Stanley Robinson, a pre-eminent science fiction writer, recently editorialized in New Scientist that the Booker Prize doesn’t consider science fiction to the extent that it should. The Booker administrators, to their credit, didn’t respond with the twaddle that science fiction can’t be literary. Instead, they put the blame on publishers for nominating books other than science fiction.
Some people don’t want science fiction considered at all.
Genres have built-in audiences; it’s hard enough to draw attention to lit fic without naysayers saying it doesn’t deserve the attention. … If science fiction, or chick lit, or religious fiction, or whatever is important to you, advocate for an award or support the ones already out there- like the Nebula, the Hugo, the Sami Rohr Prize, and others. But let us lit fic nerds have our Booker Prize.
Mind you, I might be a little sympathetic to this argument if it weren’t for the fact that the awards and promotion given to literary fiction didn’t already dwarf that given to genre awards.
Results on searching Google News for various awards covering mentions within the last month:
- Results 1 – 10 of about 39 for pen-faulkner.
- Results 1 – 10 of about 466 for booker-prize.
- Results 1 – 10 of about 33 for pulitzer-prize for-fiction.
- Results 1 – 10 of about 107 for Prix-Goncourt.
- Results 1 – 10 of about 239 for national-book-award.
- Results 1 – 10 of about 169 for nobel-prize for-literature.
- Results 1 – 10 of about 18 for hugo-award
- Results 1 – 4 of about 4 for Nebula-award.
- Results 1 – 10 of about 21 for world-fantasy-award.
- Results 1 – 10 of about 30 for Edgar-award.
- Results 1 – 3 of about 3 for hammett-prize.
- Results 1 – 10 of about 13 for gold-dagger.
- Results 1 – 2 of about 2 for anthony-award.
Notice anything there? See any literary prizes not getting their comparative due? Me neither.
Here’s the other thing: science fiction quite often is literary. Let me repeat this. Science fiction is often literary. So long as the definition of literary (which is extremely fuzzy to begin with) doesn’t include not science fiction
, at least. Take a look at books that have been ensconced in the recent literary canon: George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and dozens of others. All science fiction.
Never mind the repeated defense of such works: But those are good!
(or the less often stated but equally misguided But those are literary!
) The Venn diagram below should explain this quite adequately.
On an odd note, it does appear that to be considered literary, science fiction books for the most part have to be written by authors who disclaim their science fiction nature. So, to all the science fiction authors out there who want to be considered for the prestigious literary prizes: lie! My book has no superheroes in it whatsoever!
I don’t write fantasy! I write about dreams!
Apparently this is good enough to fake out the judges. Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem need not follow this advice apparently.
Readers will notice that Rat’s Reading has quite the eclectic reading material (despite someone nominating this blog as a Science Fiction blog for Book Blogger Apprecation Week). I try to make my reading material pretty diverse within the constraints of time. Why get pigeonholed? When someone does that, they just miss out on good material.
And that’s the crux of the issue for the Booker, the Pulitzer, or other folks who just won’t read science fiction. They deny themselves really good literature. If that’s your wont, by all means have at it. If your award consistently misses out on good literature, eventually people will stop caring about your award. Or at least I will.
Great post. Can’t please everyone, I guess.
“On an odd note, it does appear that to be considered literary, science fiction books for the most part have to be written by authors who disclaim their science fiction nature.”
Yep. Sad but true.