Should genres police who can write them?

This post contains modest spoilers for Klara and the Sun, and The Fear Index.

Some people in the literary world are massive snobs.  They assume that romance, or crime, which sell vastly more than other genres, must be bad.

It is interesting that Austen, Eliot and Dickens were not considered ‘great literary writing’ by the literary greats of their day.

Science fiction and fantasy are considered weird books for unwashed boys despite having enthusiastic readers. The genre feeds a great many successful TV series and movies, and the electronic games industry. And as a lifelong reader, it interesting to see journalists wrestling with issues of ethics and technology which I first met in ‘books with rockets on the cover’. John Brunner for example wrote books which kind of got how fast, disjointed, and alienated modern life might become. Where wars are fought online.

People who write in genre can be quite prickly about it. A big chunk of the literary world puts it down. It can lead to them getting protective when people breeze in and talk rubbish about it.

For example, a literary author – let us call him Ian – who has stopped having much interesting to say decades ago – decides to write a book about a robot who develops feelings.  To do this he has to explain that he is writing literary fiction and therefore addressing things much better than (sniff) science fiction. In further defensive interviews it appears he has not read any SF published in the last twenty-five years or any by a woman.

The science fiction world is scathing. Including me.

The moral question of what we owe a being we created is the theme of Frankenstein and its myriad successors.  The issue of what happens when an artificial person develops feelings and seeks independence drives the plot of Rossum’s Universal Robots, the 1920s Czech play which gave us the word Robot. And myriad successors.

This and similar debacles fuels the idea that, say, science fiction is a body of knowledge only the adept should tackle.  Enthusiasts say no one should write it unless they read it widely and know its canon and its roots.  Perhaps we should go so far as to say you should read terrible writers because they were once ‘important’. We are a guild, with sacred mysteries, and people should stay in their own lane.

I think this is a mistake.  It conflates three issues.

Should writers tackle themes they think are of interest? Yes. The creative imagination shouldn’t be full of demarcation disputes. It is good if people see the role of artificial intelligence and want to write about its possibilities for good and ill.

Should writers be informed about the existing works on that issue -, whatever that is? Obviously, that’s helpful.  Is it essential? No. There are so many books on some themes I couldn’t hope to read more than 5% of them.

Should writers puff themselves about their originality with no knowledge of the genre?  Well, that’s a belly flop into the cold custard.  

A better author, the late, great Iain Banks, wrote in both literary and science fiction worlds, and he said that anyone can write a detective story. To have the butler do it as a brilliant twist, they must expect and deserve mockery. (1)

It’s a good sign of someone not having read widely if they claim originality for ideas which turn up constantly. (“Magic and science in the same book” and “orcs are good really” being two of them.)

I have just read Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, whose narrator is an Artificial Friend, brought into the home of a teenage girl.  It is science fiction because it asks – what are the consequences of scientific advances?

In this book Klara is a wonderfully off-centre narrator, and clearly sentient. The introduction of AI has led to widespread economic disruption.  It is also revealed that society allows some children to be mentally ‘lifted’ – a process which is clearly imperfect – and which creates a divided society between those families which can afford the process and the rest. (Just because we could, should we?)

Many writers would have written big symbolic clashes about these issues. What we have is a story of how it affects a couple of families, seen through a sympathetic but otherly observer, and where we readers have to fill in the gaps. It’s science fiction in a literary mode. And like Frankenstein it asks what we owe the people we create?

Another example I quote is Richard Harris’ the Fear Index, a thriller about an AI which trades on the stock market which develops sentience. It is a wonderful monster, because it figures out a better way to do what it needs to than its creators. (Just as computers which play Go develop werid moves no human ever thought of, driving the human players to re-engineer their own game as they play.)

So science fiction is good and matters. I don’t think as a writer I should tell people what they can write.  I reserve the right to mock them if they claim originality for well-trodden ideas. After all, science fiction writers often revisit well-trodden ideas themselves.

My own books sought to reach a wider audience than convinced science fiction readers. I don’t think I have ever been guilty of running the genre down. It’s a big galaxy with room for a great many approaches.

(1) It is interesting that the first comment that the butler being the murderer is a terrible cliché appears to predate any real work in which this was the plot.

Photo of robot bewildered by literary snobs by Alex Knight Pexels