Mainstream audiences aren't particularly hostile to fantasy, but mainstream fiction -- by which I'm assuming Shatterstripes means the (non-fantasy) literary community, particularly editors -- has had a long-standing hostility toward non-mimetic work. There are signs this is thawing, and there have always been limited exceptions out there, like Vonnegut, Pynchon and Borges, but it's not mere happenstance that works by the fantastists who've snuck into the canon, or even just close enough to look over the wall, aren't generally considered sf/fantasy authors and certainly don't get shelved in the F/SF section of your local Borders. The presumption, usually (but not always) unspoken, is that work that's good enough to be "literature" is somehow no longer fantasy or sci-fi: it's transcended the genre's limitations, borrowed its tropes to tell a real story, or what have you. It's a particularly frustrating mindset because it's essentially self-sealing: you can't use the best of what the genre has to offer as proof that the best of it really is equal to the best of anything else, because if it really is that good, then presto! it's not really in the genre at all.
Having said, that though, it seems to me that Dave Wolverton, author of the linked article, is trying to place an awful lot of baggage at the estimable Mr. Howells' doorstep. Science fiction was barely even a proto-genre when the man was at the Atlantic (1866-1876); Jules Verne's most popular books were being published during that very period -- but not translated into English yet -- and H.G. Wells wouldn't start publishing until 1900. Wolverton glosses over a lot of change in the mainstream literary world in what's considered "acceptable," and ignores entirely the question of how much of the ghettoization of F/SF may just be its own damn fault. An honest analysis of how this came to pass would focus a little less on William Howells and a little more on Hugo Gernsback.
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Date: 2007-09-19 03:42 am (UTC)Having said, that though, it seems to me that Dave Wolverton, author of the linked article, is trying to place an awful lot of baggage at the estimable Mr. Howells' doorstep. Science fiction was barely even a proto-genre when the man was at the Atlantic (1866-1876); Jules Verne's most popular books were being published during that very period -- but not translated into English yet -- and H.G. Wells wouldn't start publishing until 1900. Wolverton glosses over a lot of change in the mainstream literary world in what's considered "acceptable," and ignores entirely the question of how much of the ghettoization of F/SF may just be its own damn fault. An honest analysis of how this came to pass would focus a little less on William Howells and a little more on Hugo Gernsback.