An author. Some of her work is SF, some even ScienceFiction, but she is one of those who refuse to accept it. See MargaretAtwoodVsSF. An outsider asked "What's the issue with Margaret Atwood?"; two responses were: "The issue with Margaret Atwood is not her writing; A Handmaid's Tale is a greatly respected piece of science fiction. The issue is that she claims that it is not science fiction. Specifically, she says that her work work is speculative fiction - a term we agree with - but not science fiction because that's all "robots and monsters"." "She's denigrating science fiction and denying that she has written it. She continues the intellectual snobbery that science fiction suffers under, despite having written a very good piece of it. If she didn't deny the genre that she has written in, perhaps it would help remove some of the stigma that genre still possesses. Instead, she's too stuck up her own literary arse to understand what the fuck she's talking about." "None of this changes a damn thing about her books, or her skills as a writer, but basically, yes, she has insulted the SF community." And: "She's a good writer; nobody debates this. She is also an SF writer, and nobody debates this either, except - and this is the point - her. She claims it's not SF, and makes absurd and insulting statements like 'Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen,'. I believe that at some point, she didn't even accept that (some of) her stuff was speculative fiction, although it seems she's now softened her stance." "She's part of a set of writers who write SF, and draw on SF traditions, but who deny their heritage and denigrate SF, because they know that if they're labelled SF, they won't be taken seriously by the literary establishment. The irony is that these writers are to a large extent responsible for the ghettoisation of SF that they seek to escape; if all really high-quality (note that i am talking about literary quality - style, structure, all that gay stuff - rather than quality of story or ideas, which are often very good in SF) SF writing is labelled as not SF, then that which is labelled SF is only the trash, and so SF gets a poor reputation. A lot of SF readers are angry about this, and so to some extent Atwood gets tarred with a brush that may be broader than is justified." On the other hand, a writer has got the right to name their creation as they choose, I think. If she wants to call her books SpeculativeFiction, Westerns, Romances, Travel Guides, or whatever, that's her business really. Regrettable, but not something we've got a right to tell her not to do. -- WJR CategoryAuthor