The SciFi Ghetto

[3quency]

Okay, this is a bit of a broad topic.
Why is there so much snobbery around science fiction and fantasy? Why is it (in your opinion) that on the whole they are considered "lesser" in some way to straight fiction?

I think in all honesty this mostly applies to books, but any artform could objectively be guilty of this. Hell, the entiriety of videogames as a medium suffer from this in the mainstream.

But back on topic, in all honesty I don't understand the whole looking down on speculative fiction thing. It just seems odd.

Thoughts?



Note: unrelated to the topic, but this may be a bit of a poorly phrased intro. If I'm not making any sense I'll rewrite.

 

[Axolotl]

Because it's linked to narratives childish wish fulfilment rather than anything intellectually challenging or engaging. I mean there's a reason that that Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu didn't have this as the cover:

Spoiler

And this isn't helped by the monumental shadow Star Wars casts over the genre, which helps paint the whole genre a spectacle driven schlock.

Honestly it's not an accurate sterotype and it's not one many actual authors seem to believe. So I don't see why anyone would cae about it to be honest.

 

[bobmus]

I relate a lot better to stories where I can relate to the dilemmas and emotions of the characters in them.
I'm not an android with no emotion, and I've never been involved in a spaceship battle. For this reason dramatic fantasy and war stories don't interest me as much either, unless they are either really well told or have a good focus on the human side of things.

 

[Nerexor]

Because the book market is geared to books that sell rather than books that are artisitically significant. The one genre of novels that outsells everything else is the romance novel, you know those aisles of books featuring guys with bare chests that have more muscles than the average human has in their whole body? They are ridiculously big money makers despite being (or so I'm told) shoddily written porn of varying levels of explicitness. You want proof (or just want a laugh)? Go to kobobooks.com or another ebook store and look up what they're selling as romance. The blurbs are damn hilarious in their total lack of originality.

Back to the main point:

Science fiction and fantasy novels that sell often also fall into the wish fulfillment category, or the expanded universe category (Star Wars and Star Trek novels once upon a time. No idea what series are getting exploited now). Or worse still into the romance crossover genre (damn you romance writers for co-opting urban fantasy! DAMN YOU!!!). Because it sells. These books tend to get published rather than super complex ones because booksellers (surprise surprise) want to SELL books.

This isn't to say that complex, intellectually interesting science fiction doesn't exist. Hell, there are now some universities with courses bent on just studying science fiction and fantasy (University of Waterloo very definitely has them. I took both, and ran into some very interesting books and authors that way) It's just that for a long time in the past, and still in the present, we had books with contemptible covers showing half naked girls being carried off by aliens written for adolescent boys. But it sold, so there's a lot of it. Then everyone else browsing the book aisles sees the science fiction category full of aliens abducting girls who are in dire need of pants and decide that science fiction must be crap.

Just like most genres, you have to dig through the crap to get the diamonds buried there, while everyone else stands by and wonders why you're even bothering to sift through it.