Science fiction: too nerdy for its own good?

You see, when it comes to the genre wars, science fiction is at a very curious disadvantage. As soon as someone writes a really good sci-fi book it nearly always seems to get reclassified as something else. It’s a bit like the way members of the Ireland cricket team become English once they reach a certain level.

To see what I mean, try drawing up a list of the best sci-fi authors. If it’s anything like mine when I started thinking about this subject, it will be topped off by names like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick. There’s nothing wrong with any of those writers, of course, no matter what Philip K. Dick himself may say to the contrary. Often they are profoundly interesting. However—and here’s the catch—they’re not half as impressive as the authors on the second list I drew up: Kurt Vonnegut, Angela Carter, J. G. Ballard, and Thomas Pynchon.

The thing here is that it took a real shift in thinking to include the latter four writers as sci-fi. Their books all include strong elements of science fiction. There are parallel universes, time shifts, robots, people with names like Zog, Zoyd, Brock Vond, and Dr. Hoffman. There are strange machines and philosophical musings on the nature of reality.

Even so, my first instinct would be to give them some other label, as if their beautiful prose alone has made them transcend the genre.

I think a lot of serious readers often struggle with “overcoming” genre hurdles—I happen to be one of them. For years, I’d dismissed science fiction as “geek lit,” sneering at any novel depicting a planet, alien, or spaceship on the cover. But over the last year or so, my respect for the genre has grown considerably: I loved Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (it’s one of the funniest and oddest books I’ve ever read) and, in rediscovering Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and the fiction of H. G. Wells, I’ve realized that science fiction, far from being a haven for Star Wars nerds, can actually be more fun and thought-provoking than literary fiction. And why shouldn’t it be? Perhaps more than any other genre, science fiction is in a prime position to make us think while inspiring awe and wonder in its nearly-limitless scope.