"Oryx & Crake" Won't read it

[Lisa]

For those of you thinking Oryx & Crake might be boring and therefore not reading it - you are not entirely wrong. In fact I think it could have come out after Year of the Flood and that would have made it better but truth be told - it is not necessary to read the book to understand what is going on in the world of Year of the Flood - a much more interesting and exciting book but still part of the dystopian world she created. Keep on not reading it.

For those of you who are not reading this book on principles because you believe she has slammed your favorite genre - you might want to check out her latest book that just came out in October. It falls into the realm of non-fiction or memoir so you may not have seen it yet. It's called "In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination." (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10...) I have not read the book, but from the cover and some reviews it seems as though this book points to SF as a jumping off place for her.

You have to remember a couple of things when working with authors. Genres are marketing tools by which publishing houses sort books hoping for the best profits. When she started publishing book stores had two true genres - Fiction and Non-Fiction. Nan Talese put her in Fiction, rightfully so. Genre fiction was relegated to those pop culture magazines and then eventually to books, but always in the back room. Again - marketing decisions.

The second thing to remember - back when Margaret Atwood started writing, science fiction was Robert A Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Either we left Earth or someone came to visit Earth. Most of those who wrote it were then contracted by companies like AT&T to develop the tech they dreamt up (communications satellites and fax machines all came from "Childhood's End").

What Ms. Atwood was writing was character based novels focused a few years in the future (20-100) and while there was some technology, her concern with these books seemed more to be the political (thus the preachy feel).

So, if Ms. Atwood were trying to get her rather dystopian feeling literary books published today - you are right. They would end up on the SciFi shelves under the secondary label of "Dystopian." Heck - they may even have ended up on the Teen Dystopian bookshelf.

Now, not to stir up more trouble, but this is a true discussion. If this strand is saying that a group of people won't read the book because the author disparages the genre and we now know that she doesn't - would you read the book now?

For those of you who thought it might be boring - remember, it is a literary book...it can get dull at times and I would recommend you don't read it. Read Year of the Flood - much better book.

[Evilynn]

Shomeret wrote: "I enjoy reading novels of ideas. In fact, my favorite books are novels of ideas. But I don't like the didacticism to be too overt. For me, story and character have to come first. "

If story comes first it wouldn't really be a novel of ideas would it? Maybe it's my English that's lacking, I'm not sure if there's a good English term for "idéroman", but the meaning of that term is a novel where a political message or intellectual concept is the focal point, not characters or story. I would argue that LeGuin's SF is idea novels through and through, while Atwood's novels in general are more character driven (can't say about Lessing's SF, I've only read lit!fic by her, but those are often cerebral and while I find them good and very worth while reading, it's not necessarily an enjoyable experience while you're at it). One of the reasons I really like Atwood is that she's great stylistically *and* writes good yarns, but as always YMMV. :)

Re: Harold Bloom, I thought he hated every one (at least all women SFF writers + Stephen King). :P He dissed Doris Lessing getting the Nobel Prize too.

[whimsicalmeerkat]

IEvilynn wrote: "Shomeret wrote: "I enjoy reading novels of ideas. In fact, my favorite books are novels of ideas. But I don't like the didacticism to be too overt. For me, story and character have to come first. "..."

I'm not familiar with the term you used, but I can say with relative certainty that English does not contain any such beautiful way of summing up that sort of book. As for the novel of ideas vs character/story driven. I think what people are saying is that they like books that fall in the middle of the spectrum. Books that contain and are focused on challenging ideas, but which also have highly developed stories and/or characters.

Harold Bloom does not hate James Joyce. This does not make me like Bloom better. I hate the way he goes on about "his" canon as if any one person is a definitive authority.

[MrsJoseph *grouchy*]

Lisa wrote: "For those of you thinking Oryx & Crake might be boring and therefore not reading it - you are not entirely wrong. In fact I think it could have come out after Year of the Flood and that would have..."

I appreciate what you are saying and maybe I'll check out a sample of the new essay of Atwood's...but I call shenanigans on the idea of not wanting to be lumped with SF due to authors like Henlien or Asmov. At the same time that Atwood would have started writing she would have had the benefit of such woman authors in the SFF field as Andre Norton (1st female Grand Master) and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

[Weenie]

I had no idea that Atwood said these things and that she didn't class her books as sci-fi but now that I do know, it makes no difference as to whether I read her books or not to be honest.

[MrsJoseph *grouchy*]

Weenie wrote: "I had no idea that Atwood said these things and that she didn't class her books as sci-fi but now that I do know, it makes no difference as to whether I read her books or not to be honest."

I would have not cared if she never mentioned it. But to make a point to say it reminds me of how I felt as a kid being the oddball out - no one else I knew read SFF. It's a badge of honor to me that I'm a SFF geek...I've run the gauntlet.

[Becky]

MrsJoseph wrote: "I would have not cared if she never mentioned it. But to make a point to say it reminds me of how I felt as a kid being the oddball out - no one else I knew read SFF."

This is a fair point. Using the term "that stuff" implies a negative connotation. Regardless of whether the quote was misinterpreted, or whether she meant a very specific "that stuff" rather than a more general SF-"that stuff", there's an insinuation that "that stuff" is beneath her, along with the people who enjoy it.

Like I said before, I don't know Atwood, or very much about her, but authors more than anyone should know the potential words have... and therefore make careful use of them.

[Shomeret]

Evilynn wrote: "Shomeret wrote: "I enjoy reading novels of ideas. In fact, my favorite books are novels of ideas. But I don't like the didacticism to be too overt. For me, story and character have to come first. "..."
The first word in the phrase "novel of ideas" is novel. A novel ought to be fiction not an essay. In order to be a novel it must focus on plot and characters. The novels of ideas that I love do that. They bring across their ideas more powerfully because they tell us an involving story.

[Evilynn]

"Shomeret wrote: "The first word in the phrase "novel of ideas" is novel. A novel ought to be fiction not an essay. In order to be a novel it must focus on plot and characters. The novels of ideas that I love do that. They bring across their ideas more powerfully because they tell us an involving story. "

Maybe a better translation for "idéroman" would be parable? It doesn't match exactly, but it's close-ish. I like to get both too, but I would think that if someone reads say, LeGuin's "The Dispossessed", expecting to it to be story driven, they'll be disappointed (it'd probably seem boring and sort of flat), whereas someone who likes to analyse a lot and knows it deals with a political dichotomy will probably enjoy it more.

There are definitely novels that do not focus on plot or characters (stream of consciousness, avantgarde etc), although I actually think O&C is reasonably strong on both character and story for being a type of parable. Jimmy is a fully fleshed out character, whether people like him or not.

[Trike]

Lisa wrote: "Genres are marketing tools by which publishing houses sort books hoping for the best profits."

Nonsense.

As brief examples, three well-delineated genres that everyone recognizes are Westerns, Film Noir and Science Fiction. Each of these occurred organically, arising from the abiding fascination of culture at the time of their creation.

Westerns grew out of dime novels telling adventure stories about a particular time and place, namely the American frontier. These stories were readily adapted to the earliest movies. It was only after 60-some years of these books did the notion of a genre called "The Western" become codified in society's collective consciousness, and it was named after movies such as The Great Train Robbery were smash hits.

When the major American film studios were making film noir genre pieces, no one knew they were making them. They were just responding to what was going on in society at the time. It was only when WW2 was over and the French cinema critics saw all these American films in one huge gulp did they recognize common themes of darkness and despair running through all of them.

Like the first two examples, Science Fiction (originally "scientifiction") arose organically from the adventure stories which morphed into tales revolving around the sudden surge of scientific progress and the Industrial Revolution. Advances in science and technology captured the imagination, so people started writing about what might be possible with all these new gadgets and all this new knowledge. After awhile a genre coalesced around this theme and Science Fiction was named.

Yes, corporations have tried to co-opt the names of genres for their own ends, because that's what corporations do, but that's not WHY these genres exist, nor is it how they came to be.

Lisa wrote: "The second thing to remember - back when Margaret Atwood started writing, science fiction was Robert A Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Either we left Earth or someone came to visit Earth."

Wow, a whole lot of wrong here. Suffice it to say that Oryx & Crake is not only nothing new, the exact thing Atwood is writing about was written about for decades. Heck, when she was in her early 30s there was this thing called "The Environmental Movement" that happened, which gave birth to such things as Earth Day, the first celebration taking place in 1970 when Atwood was 30.

As already pointed out, Make Room! Make Room! had already come out (more famously known by its screen adaptation Soylent Green) when Atwood was 26. John Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up came out in the late 60s. Asimov wrote a story called "No Connection" that is not dissimilar from O&C when Atwood was 10 years old. That same year, 1949, George Stewart wrote Earth Abides, which is pretty famous. Even Jack London wrote a story like this, way back in 1912. The BBC had a TV series about survivors of a genetically-engineered plague back in 1975.

Just because Atwood is utterly ignorant of science fiction doesn't make her assertions -- or your defense of them -- correct.

Also, she DOES still disparage the genre. She did it at a speech she gave only one month ago.

It's like the recently-deceased Anne McCaffrey said when she and Frank Herbert were arguing over who got the first labeled-as-such Science Fiction book on the best-seller list: this matters because it's about honesty.

Science Fiction isn't anything to be ashamed of, and that's why I'm annoyed by people like Atwood who feel like they're slumming in our ghetto and try to pretend they aren't.