April 2009

Is it just me or does it seem like YA fiction is incapable of winning in the lit world? On the one hand there are literature enthusiasts and academics who decry that YA is an unimportant, insignificant, and juvenile form of literature, while on the other there are parents, teachers, religious fanatics, and irresponsible anti-realistic-lit Nazis who throw fits every two seconds if a YA novel so much as talks about a subject that teens are already talking about anyway. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of a support group for YA fiction. I mean, the readers are there, obviously, and they are voracious readers with an unquenchable thirst for YA, but these folks also seem to not have much of a say when it comes to defending YA from the critics. Sure, they can cry and throw a fit all they want, but when it comes down to it, they aren’t really doing much in the way of defending YA from what I see as unfair criticism. Much like science fiction, YA is a serious genre. I don’t understand how we can laugh it off as frivolity one moment, and then have a rectal fit in another when a work decides to talk about sex or drugs. Perhaps this is all a way for us to ignore what YA fiction is really offering. YA is, after all, mean for teenagers, and teenagers really do go through a lot of sh*t. They experience sexual awakening, growth, rejection, confusion, drugs, etc. It all sort of hits them at once. Let’s face it, teenagers know a lot more about sex and drugs today than most of us did when we were that age. Even I can admit that and I’m not so far removed from the new generation of teenagers as others (being only 25 and all). It seems silly to get upset over the content of a book that probably wouldn’t even surprise a teenager anyway. Obviously there’s a lot of YA that is nothing short of fluff–literature that has little to offer in the way of serious discussion about growing up, about life and reality. We can’t keep teenagers in bubble anymore, no matter how hard we try. I’ve always considered high school to be a transitional period into the real world for most kids. There they begin to face some of the harsh realities that make up the world as it really is. But critics and academics are largely avoiding this discussion, it seems. They all want to pass off YA as fluff, even the stuff that happens to be more than fluff–more, shall we say, literary (whatever that means these days). So, perhaps we need a support group for YA, a community of folks willing to give YA the attention it deserves–not necessarily in the sense of trying to sell books or make people see that it is good stuff, but in the sense that we try to point out its importance to teenage readers and literature as a whole. Or is there one already out there? Where’s our YAL(ns)A (Young Adult Literature not-so-Anonymous)? What do you all think about YA? Do you dislike it? Why? Do you hold the same views as those that pass off YA as fluff? Do you love YA? Leave a comment and tell me what you think about all this.

(Originally found this question here). This question seems fitting considering my post yesterday about 1984 and genre fiction. One of the problems I think many of us have with literature is that there’s no consensus on what is good and what isn’t–not one, at least, that can be quickly and adequately discovered. Literary critics may say one thing, academics will say another, best seller’s lists will say something else, and finally readers themselves will say something either in tune with one of those previous groups, or something entirely different–and it’s usually a toss up. All of these, with, perhaps, some exception to best seller’s lists, have, I think, a discernible influence, in the long term, on definitions of “good literature.” It wasn’t too long ago that we all would have thought it impossible to have college courses dedicated to science fiction or fantasy, let alone high school or college courses that at least included in their curriculum at least one novel in those genres. Now we are seeing them in more regularity, even if programs focused on these genres are scarce at best. This is, to me, an example of how these three groups (literary critics, academics, and readers) have unintentionally worked towards redefining “good literature.” I don’t think that there is any one group that gets to make this decision. I also don’t think that there is really a way for the three to intentionally work together. Literature has to progress on its own, without people from diametrically opposed positions meeting in the middle and attempting to work it out on their own. Readers must state their opinion, and so too must literary critics and academics. In time, we’ll see those statements shift and adjust to accommodate new literature into their circles. This is how science fiction and fantasy have found their way into literature curriculum and into the hands of serious literary critics who, in previous generations, would have scoffed at the idea of treating genre fiction with any seriousness in the first place. As an example: one of the courses I am currently taking has The Road by Cormac McCarthy on the syllabus. Clearly this is an example of how the public can have influence on everything else, and how the times are changing. But the public didn’t decide that McCarthy’s novel was good; they formulated an opinion while another group started to pay attention, and without either intended it to happen, The Road achieved its “good literature” status–with sufficient help from Oprah, of course. Literature simply evolves and works that were once considered of low quality suddenly gain attention. This has happened numerous times in history, and I don’t think many of the most staunch and stubborn of “literary” readers realizes this. Some of the works we consider to be classics were, at one time, the equivalent of what genre fiction is to the literary community: trash. This is particularly so of some of the romantic poets in France and other areas of the world, yet we now devote academic study to such work and treat it with the utmost seriousness. We don’t really think twice about the rise of such work from the catacombs of “trashiness.” This is the same path science fiction and fantasy is taking, and will continue to take as they work their way into every circle. I think I’ve rambled quite enough. What do you all think? Do you agree that no one group decided what good literature is and that it is an unintentional process involving the groups I mentioned above? Or do you have another opinion? Whatever thoughts you have, feel free to leave a comment! Anywho!

Google alerts brought to my attention this short, interesting, and annoyingly snobbish post about why 1984 shouldn’t be stuck in the science fiction category and, being the science fiction nut that I am, I couldn’t leave it well enough alone.  The author certainly despises science fiction as a genre and I can’t help thinking that his problem isn’t with science fiction itself, but with what Harlan Ellison considers to be the difference between “science fiction” and “scifi,” which are, for better or for worst, pretty distinguishable variations of the same thing. Still, I feel it necessary to tear into this argument, because it’s just so wrong. Let’s start with this: It most certainly does not deserve to be degraded to the point of being a sub-genre of science fiction. Science fiction is just that, fictional. It carries no meaning, no message and usually, no words with more than five letters All fiction is fictional, even literary fiction. There’s no such thing as fiction that is non-fictional. It’s not a possibility. Once something becomes true–to a certain degree–it ceases to be fiction. Historical fiction only gets away with it because it has to make up things during an even that actually happened, thus providing fictional dialogue and sometimes nonexistent characters to real scenery. Furthermore, why exactly is it degrading to be placed in a sub-genre of science fiction? All science fiction is not devoid of meaning or message; some science fiction is even highly “literary,” whatever that means. In fact, most science fiction has some sort of meaning or message. Some of the best science fiction novels ask us to question our humanity, or consider the “what if” of a certain scenario. It’s a genre that speculates on what could be. True, there are entire sections of science fiction devoted entirely to adventures in space, with no discernible message beyond a simplistic “the hero wins” one. But what about the work of Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, etc.? Their work does not fit into the author’s lesser form of science fiction. They fit into a different category of SF that is still SF, no matter what you do or say. But this continues with the author claiming that: Science fiction has never produced a single thing that the ordinary person would not consider offensive, senseless drivel. And yet there are those who waste their time reading this nonsensical garbage What exactly is an “ordinary person?” Ordinary implies discernible as part of the average, so, is the author ordinary? Am I? I don’t think either of us are particularly ordinary. In fact, if we want to be realistic, the ordinary person doesn’t even read (much). They’re the vast majority who rarely, if ever, reads a book or newspaper, or anything according to polls. They may still read, but they aren’t the ones who will have an opinion on literature that will matter in this context; the ordinary person watches more television than they do read a newspaper article or magazine. So, in all fairness, I don’t think the ordinary person finds anything offensive or senseless in science fiction literature, because they don’t read much anyway. The piece concludes with the following: Nineteen Eighty Four achieved something few science fiction novels ever have, publication. Besides this, Nineteen Eighty Four was well written, meaningful and above a third grade level, all of which distinguishes it from science fiction. Call Nineteen Eighty Four what you will, dystopic, a cautionary tale, anything but a sub-genre of science fiction. What exactly does the first sentence mean? A lot of science fiction novels have been published. That statement is absurd, because it applies to any genre. Pick a novel, any novel, and you can say that it achieved the same goal while most others in that genre did not. It’s not something that applies to only one genre. It’s universal. The same can be said of literary fiction. I’m also not sure where this assumption came from that science fiction cannot be well written. Why not? Every genre has its weak spots, even literary fiction. Science fiction happens to be a popular form of literature, and therefore much of it is written in that more popular vein. But that doesn’t mean that all of it is, and it’s not always necessary for a piece to be written like it was meant to be analyzed for word use. Sometimes a piece can be about the ideas, about the characters and what is going on. Science fiction can be on the literary side, it’s just not nearly as common as the more popular side. Either side can have value though, and neither should be discounted or removed from the genre for the sake of personal dislike of one or the other. This whole post seems like an attempt to make science fiction something it isn’t. If we remove all the examples to the contrary, then it becomes so. How many novels would this person suck out of the genre in order to make his vision of science fiction a reality? Is Fahrenheit 451 not science fiction because it happens to be really good? Seems absurd. The point is, 1984 is a science fiction novel. You don’t have to like it, you just have to accept it. It’s set, at the time of its publication, in a theoretical future dystopia. As much as you might consider quality to be a judgment on the genre of a particular work, quality has absolutely nothing to do with it. A really good book can also be a romance, or a western, or whatever. That’s just the way it is. Get over it. What do you all think?