fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6056 ]

[ SECRET POST #6056 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6056 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 48 secrets from Secret Submission Post #866.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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02. https://i.imgur.com/3QYx7bj.png

I think in uni I was told she was dismissive about fantasy and sci-fi in university, declining the category of science fiction for The Handmaid's Tale, despite it obviously being so. She was rude in an interview? But I don't have any sources and that was a long time ago

What's sci-fi about Handmaid's Tale? Something like Oryx and Crake I could see a hullabaloo about, but Handmaid's Tale is pretty definitively speculative /dystopic.

IIRC she stressed that her works are "speculative fiction", not "science fiction" or somesuch and it came off as really dismissive of the genre.

She said science fiction is "squids in space."

if that's her only offence then i'm hella relieved. wake me up when she approaches jkr levels of offensive.

Honestly until I read the comments in the original thread secret of this, I would not have classified her books as science fiction, but I also don't read science fiction so I don't know the nuances of the genre.

Honestly, me neither. I think speculative fiction actually fits better. To me there's a difference between fiction that imagines a society in which there is a focus on adjusting to change and fiction which focuses on a society wrestling with control. the latter can definitely be a consequence of the former, but they're not the same philosophical principles to me.

Speculative fiction is a type of scifi, though. Scifi is a huge genre. It encompases anything set in the future, involving aliens, or involving technology not invented yet.

Everything in say, The Handmaid's Tale, has happened to women somewhere before. It's just putting all of these horrors together.

I don't think science fiction fits; it's like a novel about slavery or the Torquemada, but updated.

Now if it was space slavery, or female slaves controlled by nanobots, I'd consider that scifi. The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian novel based on culture and theology.

Corey Doctorow writes a lot of stuff that’s just contemporary issues pretending to be future, and he’s sci-fi.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-08-06 01:03 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2023-08-06 02:25 (UTC) - Expand

I would argue the opposite, that speculative fiction was created as a term because sci-fi's as generally understood didn't quite fit everything people were putting out, and that science fiction is a type of speculative fiction. for instance, your definition would exclude alternative history, and there is plenty of alt history which is clearly science fiction...and some which like Handmaid's Tale isn't really about encountering change, which I think science fiction requires. speculative fiction encompasses the distinction.

strictly speaking it just doesn't make sense to term anything "set in the future" as science fiction lol, like i think you mean a future where society is materially different. it is however, the quality of material difference I think matters.

but again, genre to me is about themes and concepts, not strictly character or setting.

Most of her books weren't, but around that time she wrote some that are absolutely SF.

So, I'm really old. I remember when fanfic was called specs, cause it was all "speculative fiction."

She did an interview in New Scientist in 2008 about how she categorized science fiction. And she wrote something about it in an essay collection about how she sees her books (speculative fiction, rather than science fiction). Then Ursula K. Le Guin had an article in The Guardian in 2009 reviewing a couple of Atwood's books, where she called Atwood's categorization an "arbitrarily restrictive definition designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn't want the literary bigots to shove her in the literary ghetto."

I got this from the Introduction in Atwood's In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (https://books.google.com/books?id=8hOBecTcjtcC&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false)

Well Le Guin was a pompous, judgmental hack, so.

"Hack"?? No.

You get Ursula K Le Guin's name out of your filthy lying mouth.

What???

Shut up.

that meme which is "I'm not replying to that; that's someone with a fetish for being yelled at"

I'll be so relieved if the worst that can be said about her is that she's dismissive about genre fiction.

Once upon a time authors didn't have twitter so all we knew about them was from literary interviews. This is the sort of stuff we got mad about. It was a gentler age.

I found my original comment in the secret thread, so I'll paste it here:

"There was one popular post on tumblr that said she was racist because her dystopia excluded POC by a brief mention that they were killed or shipped off to camps, and it was triggering for the OP to have to read the book in English class so they should stop teaching it in English class, and OP was a mindreader who knew Atwood wrote it that way because she hated POC (not, you know, because she wanted to show how dystopic her dystopia was toward groups that are already marginalized in the real world).

I do think there is a conversation to be had around using marginalized groups as essentially cannon fodder to prove a point, and the side-effect that it results in, which is that they don't get to have stories of their own in the world the author created. On the other hand, Atwood had no obligation to go into detail and the specific struggles WOC would have faced if they had been permitted to live in that world. (And if she had, she surely would have been torn into for "getting it wrong" somehow.) It's a story from the perspective of one woman, who is white, and that's valid."

Here's my best bet. This isn't researched, but I'm a long-time fan of MA who also finds her stance of SF to be curiously under-examined:
More than once Magaret Atwood distanced herself from scifi as a genre, specifically because she doesn't think it's a genre that can comment on the thing she's interested in. She's right about the Handmaids Tale, it's not really SF but because dystopian fiction is "unreal" it was often shelved with SF. The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985, so she's spent literally decades being asked about this.
Cut to the early 2000s where she publishes Oryx & Crake, her first book since winning the Booker prise (after many noms), which has a (mildly?) post-apocalyptic setting with flashbacks to modern times. Is it SF? Maybe! We can split genre-hairs - it's set five minutes in the future, the technology in the book largely existed at the time. Magaret Atwood describes it as "speculative fiction", and you can argue endlessly about the difference between the two. Advanced-level debaters may wish to throw in "slipstream" as another is/is-not SF.
The book is widely and well-reviewed in the general press. however! many sf-adjacent bloggers take umbrage at 1. the praise being bestowed on her from literary reviewers for what was for SF reasonably common ideas 2. the fact that if a SF/genre writer had written the same book it would not be having the same coverage 3. Magaret Atwood's open contempt for the sf genre. Blogs are written, complaints are laid - some valid, some less so.
This is repeated for the following two books in the trilogy, coming out in 2009 and 2013. She is seen as a kind of fuddy-duddy figure online, someone who thinks SF means spaceships and is for children and unserious readers. She's also The Establishment, so if you want to spit out some zingers about pop-feminism or so-called "highbrow" literature or, idk, Canadians, she's an easy dunk.

She also, god bless her, simply will not shut up, and doesn't seem super interested in being likeable. So she probably popped off about /something/ that frothed up the fandom corners of the internet, thus inspiring your blog posts.

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