Sci Fi Ghetto/Quotes

"I don't write fantasy novels. I write stories with important human themes."

—Terry Goodkind, fantasy writer in denial

"It is not interesting enough for the general reader, and not thorough enough for the scientific reader."

—Publisher rejecting H.G. Wells' book The Time Machine

"SF's no good", they bellow 'til we're deaf,
"But this looks good."
"Well, then, it's not SF."

—Robert Conquest

"But you've also got to read in the genre, because we all know what science fiction written by someone who doesn't know about science fiction is like. They've got these 'really great ideas' like Margaret Atwood had -- bioengineered organisms, that's a new one! And the reviewers fall for it because they don't know any different, assuring us that if it's by Atwood or Crichton it's not really horrid science fiction. That infuriates me beyond measure. Oryx and Crake has got the science fiction sticker on it all the way through (though it's not particularly original), and yet because she wrote it, it's 'not science fiction.'"

—Terry Pratchett, interview circa 2004

"[The Handmaid's Tale] is certainly not science fiction. Science fiction has Martians and space travel to other planets and things like that."

—Margaret Atwood

"Here is a woman so terrified of sf-cooties that she'll happily redefine the entire genre for no other reason than to exclude herself from it."

—Peter Watts, on Margaret Atwood, "Margaret Atwood and the Hierarchy of Contempt"

"The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular."

—Tim Brooks, an executive at the channel now known as Syfy.

"If no cultural barrier prevents a public that clearly loves its superheroes from picking up a new "Avengers" comic, why don't more people do so? The main reasons are obvious: It is for sale not in a real bookstore but in a specialty shop, and it is clumsily drawn, poorly written and incomprehensible to anyone not steeped in years of arcane mythology."

—Wall Street Journal's Tim Marchman on why superhero comics are such a niche property

"The whole association of fairy tale and fantasy with children is local and accidental. I hope everyone has read Tolkiens essay on Fairy Tales which is perhaps the most important contribution to this subject that anyone has yet made. If so, you will know already that, in most places and times, the fairy tale has not been specifically made for, nor exclusively enjoyed by children. It has gravitated to the nursery when it became unfashionable in literary circles, just as unfashionable furniture gravitated to the nursery in Victorian homes."

—CS Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing For Children

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since [publishing Player Piano], and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

—Kurt Vonnegut

"[My agent] said "You have a murder mystery up there, you have a horror book up there, you have all kinds of genres on the bestseller shelf, why not Terry Pratchett's book? And the response was 'we don't let them out of the science fiction section'"

"James was right. Try taking a lot of stuff considered the best literature, put some dragons, magic, psychic powers, zombies, werewolves, vampires, elves, or dwarves in those and see how many awards they get."

—From an IRC chat after The Angry Video Game Nerd's Monster mania vid.

"Pssh. I still can't believe that there were aliens in what was clearly supposed to be the next Once Upon a Time in the West. I'm sorry, but the stick up my ass prohibits me from enjoying a movie called "Cowboys and Aliens".

—The Cinema Snob, mocking pretentious film critics

Nevertheless, there can be circumstances that frustrate this process of natural selection. In biological evolution the result will be retrogression, degeneration, or at the very least developmental stagnation, typical of populations isolated from the outside world and vitiated by inbreeding, since these are most lacking in the fruitful diversity that is guaranteed only by openness to all the world's influences. In culture an analogous situation leads to the emergence of enclaves shut up in ghettos, where intellectual production likewise stagnates because of inbreeding in the form of incessant repetition of the selfsame creative patterns and techniques. The internal dynamics of the ghetto may appear to be intense, but with the passage of years it becomes evident that this is only a semblance of motion, since it leads nowhere, since it neither feeds into nor is fed by the open domain of culture, since it does not generate new patterns or trends, and since finally it nurses the falsest of notions about itself, for lack of any honest evaluation of its activities from outside. The books of the ghetto assimilate themselves to one another, becoming an anonymous mass, while such surroundings thrust whatever is better downward toward the worse, so that works of differing quality meet one another halfway, as it were, in the leveling process forced upon them. In such a situation publishing success not only may but must become the sole standard of evaluation, since a vacuum of standards is impossible. Hence, where there are no ratings on the merits, these are replaced by ratings on a commercial basis.
Just such a situation reigns in American SF, which is a domain of herd creativity. Its herd character manifests itself in the fact that books by different authors become as it were different sessions of playing at one and the same game or various figures of the selfsame dance. It should be emphasized that, in literary culture as in natural evolution, effects become causes by virtue of feedback loops: the artistic-intellectual passivity and mediocrity of works touted as brilliant repel the more exigent authors and readers, so that the loss of individuality in SF is at once a cause and an effect of ghetto seclusion. In SF there is little room left for creative work that would aspire to deal with problems of our time without mystification, oversimplification, or facile entertainment

—Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans

I’ve long ago said the “new blood” in established science fiction fandom (not that new, not that young, they’re maybe ten years younger than I) are liberal arts graduates who found it tough to get anything published much less noticed in “literary fiction” and thus moved to the larger pond of science fiction, all the while lecturing us about our pulpy short comings.
They arrived among us like missionaries from England, landing in Papua New Guinea (Hi Joe) in the nineteenth century and demanding all the natives wear pants, as that would greatly improve them.
They ignore everything that went on before […]
And once they’re published, these bunnies decide they’re the cool kids. They’re civilizing the savages, after all, and making science fiction “respectable” and “Socially relevant.”

—Sarah A. Hoyt, It’s Always the Gulag!

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