"SF's no good", they bellow 'til we're deaf,
"But this looks good."
"Well, then, it's not SF."
"But this looks good."
"Well, then, it's not SF."
—Robert Conquest
It is not interesting enough for the general reader, and not thorough enough for the scientific reader.
— Publisher rejecting H. G. Wells' The Time Machine
The whole association of fairy tale and fantasy with children is local and accidental. I hope everyone has read Tolkien's 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.
—C. S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing For Children
English people of the present day are apt, I know not why, to look somewhat down on incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to write a story with no plot at all, or at least with a very dull one.
It is far easier to believe in a million fairy tales than to believe in one man who does not like fairy tales. I would rather kiss Grimm instead of a Bible and swear to all his stories as if they were thirty-nine articles than say seriously and out of my heart that there can be such a man as you; that you are not some temptation of the devil or some delusion from the void. Look at these plain, homely, practical words. 'The Dragon's Grandmother,' that is all right; that is rational almost to the verge of rationalism. If there was a dragon, he had a grandmother... Can you not see that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforwards; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible?
—G. K. Chesterton responding to a critic who believed fairy tales were for children, "The Dragon's Grandmother"
I don't write fantasy novels. I write stories with important human themes.
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.
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'.
—Terry Pratchett (quoting his literary agent), interview with Mark Lawson
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.[The Handmaid's Tale] is certainly not science fiction. Science fiction has Martians and space travel to other planets and things like that.
I'm not saying anything new here, but mainstream fantasy tends to be a socially conservative genre. Go grab any of the obvious Moorcock or Mieville essays, and I'll basically agree with them. And frankly? Science Fiction writers are just much cooler. I tended to think of myself as a speculative fiction writer until a particularly wise ex called me on my bullshit. If your speculations are basically "what if music were magic?" you're a bloody fantasy writer, dick.
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.
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 & Aliens.
—The Cinema Snob, mocking pretentious film critics
Where Hawke’s criticism of superhero movies is misguided, and damaging, is in his dismissal of the idea that a movie about “people in tights with metal coming out of their hands” can rival the films of Bresson or Bergman in artistry. He’s criticizing fantasy and prioritizing realism, which isn’t the same thing as reality. [...] Some of the best movies of all are fantasies, ever and now. (Four of my top-ten films from 2017—Get Out, Slack Bay, A Ghost Story, and Sylvio—are fantasies.)
from 2017—Get Out, Slack Bay, A Ghost Story, and Sylvio—are fantasies.)The ease of realism, the psychological illusion that reality is given to the filmmaker by the mere fact of pointing the lens and shooting, has led to the critical delusion that a movie filmed realistically actually gets at more of reality than one that involves the imagination and the creation of fantasies. The result is an ongoing, endemic indifference to inner lives (whether those of characters or of filmmakers), a repudiation of characterization and context that leaves much of the current “realist” cinema—whether studio-made or independently produced—more deadening than some mediocre superhero movies. Realism is overrated, not only by Hawke but by critics who fear that they are devoting their lives to frivolity as much as they fear charges of élitism and snobbery. In pointing out the absurd critical enthusiasms for some uninspired and bloated fantasy movies, Hawke has diagnosed an authentic phenomenon, but his proposed cure may be worse than the disease.
—Richard Brody, "What Ethan Hawke Gets Wrong—and Right—About Superhero Movies"
"There's no denying the truth of it. These assholes gave a Best Picture award to Titanic, a loud, big budget film depending on overcoming technical difficulties and populated by character ciphers that broke all box office records, but gave half as many awards and no Best Picture to Star Wars, a loud, big budget film depending not only on overcoming technical difficulties, but pioneering the techniques that other films would use to overcome them, populated by character archetypes that broke all box office records, and helped to shape many aspects of the film industry. They also snubbed the classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind that same year. And let's take 1982, where we had E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, that drove critics to compare Steven Spielberg to Renoir for the incredible achievements of his film, and then gave the award to Gandhi. Why Gandhi? Well, the same reason Titanic won, because at that age, only a bit of historical pathos can cause these twisted old farts to achieve an erection.
I know, I know, the term all the smart people are using these days is "post-modernist" or "magical realist," but those phrases are bullshit. They're parsley on a Hot Pocket: They exist only for pretentious folk to try to fancy up something they like but think is beneath them.
—Robert Brockway, Cracked, The Five Most Unjustly Overshadowed Sci-Fi Classics
BBC Exec: Science Fiction — is it really that popular?
Sydney Newman: Last time I looked.
BBC Exec: For the juvenile boys, perhaps.
Sydney Newman: (under his breath) I like it...
Sydney Newman: Last time I looked.
BBC Exec: For the juvenile boys, perhaps.
Sydney Newman: (under his breath) I like it...
"Science fiction is the lowest of all possible literary genres," said ICE-500 into the hover-mic, as he slowly rolled past the vast hordes of mutant alien book critics.
—Justin Goudey, Newton, NJ, The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2016
You can, if you wish, class all science-fiction together; but it is about as perceptive as classing the works of Ballantyne, Conrad and W. W. Jacobs together as ‘the sea-story’ and then criticising that.
—C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
"It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be...Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence...has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all."
—Isaac Asimov, 1978
Man: Someday... Someday we will unite the separate realms of the humanities and sciences, and make a new form of creation never yet dreamt.
Woman: We have that. It's called science fiction.
Man: But that's for NERRRRDS!
Woman: We have that. It's called science fiction.
Man: But that's for NERRRRDS!
"Mervyn Peake's sublime Gormenghast trilogy, sniffily excluded from the accepted canon of worthwhile English literature for reasons probably not dissimilar to those that you attribute to the Journal piece, is a portrait of the ritual-bound emotional dream life of England in the forties and fifties, a haunting and meaningful snapshot that could not have been formulated as anything but fantasy. If we are to exclude anything beyond the chain-link fence of traditional realism from that which we accept as serious and worthwhile art, then in one sublime stroke we shall have utterly gutted the entirety of world culture. Goodbye Swift, Rabelais, and all art or literature based upon a classical or mythological theme. Goodbye Pynchon, Burroughs, Blake. Wilde has to go, or at least Dorian Gray. Hawthorne for The Marble Faun. Henry James for The Turn of the Screw. As for M.R. James, W.H. Hodgson, Wells, Verne, Eddie Poe, and other similar genre-bound losers, they haven't a hope. While we're setting fire to the curtains, let's not forget the utter lack of human, emotional, or conversational realism in most eighteenth-century literature, and torch that as well. Then we can presumably all wander up the same irrefutable real and gritty cul-de-sac as Hemingway and fellate our father's Webley with as much verisimilitude as we can muster."
"Vonnegut and Hersey were never within the science fiction ghetto. A few rare writers like Bradbury and LeGuin have transcended the boundaries without compromising the elements of fantasy within their work. But most of us find that the better we do as speculative fiction writers, the less interested publishers are in our non-sf, non-fantasy writing."
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"
""We're not science fiction, we're in fact science fact."
—Albert R. Broccoli, describing Moonraker
Dear Terrence,
Thank you for sending along a copy of your newly published book. An author's first published manuscript is a momentous occasion. I read it this afternoon.
I certainly recognized my son in the subject matter. An author's work is the externalization of that which he holds dear (and that which he fears), and in this respect I believe your work was successful.
But the lens through which the personal shone was needlessly clouded by genre cliches and implausible dimestore science-fictional dei ex machina. The great authors speak of their life's milieu in clear and honest tones, the lens crystal that refracts their thoughts without distortion.
I congratulate you on surviving the great ordeal that is publication, and rest assured that readers of your chosen genre will lap up copies hungrily. But I urge you to shed artifice.
You can do better.
Thank you for sending along a copy of your newly published book. An author's first published manuscript is a momentous occasion. I read it this afternoon.
I certainly recognized my son in the subject matter. An author's work is the externalization of that which he holds dear (and that which he fears), and in this respect I believe your work was successful.
But the lens through which the personal shone was needlessly clouded by genre cliches and implausible dimestore science-fictional dei ex machina. The great authors speak of their life's milieu in clear and honest tones, the lens crystal that refracts their thoughts without distortion.
I congratulate you on surviving the great ordeal that is publication, and rest assured that readers of your chosen genre will lap up copies hungrily. But I urge you to shed artifice.
You can do better.
— Richard Greenbriar in a letter to his son about the latter's book, Gone Home
