...At The Earth's Core!! _Based on a journal entry made by NiallHarrison at _ It has for some time been 'common knowledge' amongst SF fans that MargaretAtwood, author of TheHandmaidsTale, is a prime example of the 'literary establishment' that derides SF and recoils in horror should you suggest that their work might fall within the remit of SF. This opinion seems to be based on various interviews Atwood has given, like this one from a few years back: Q: "It's hard to pin down a genre for this novel. Is it ScienceFiction?" A: "No, it certainly isn't ScienceFiction. ScienceFiction is filled with Martians and space travel to other planets, and things like that. That isn't this book at all. TheHandmaidsTale is SpeculativeFiction in the genre of BraveNewWorld and NineteenEightyFour. NineteenEightyFour was written not as ScienceFiction but as an extrapolation of life in 1948. So, too, TheHandmaidsTale is a slight twist on the society we have now." Now, quotes like that fairly make my blood boil, because it looks exactly like the worst kind of literary snobbishness: SF is ray guns and spaceships, and serious fiction can't possibly work that way! Not to mention that extrapolation from and twists on existing society are exactly what SF does best... But then I came across this review of UrsulaLeGuin, written by Atwood, in which she says the following: "'ScienceFiction' is the box in which [UrsulaLeGuin's] work is usually placed, but it's an awkward box: it bulges with discards from elsewhere. Into it have been crammed all those stories that don't fit comfortably into the family room of the socially realistic novel or the more formal parlor of historical fiction, or other compartmentalized genres: westerns, gothics, horrors, gothic romances, and the novels of war, crime, and spies. Its subdivisions include ScienceFiction proper (gizmo-riddled and theory-based space travel, time travel, or cybertravel to other worlds, with aliens frequent); ScienceFictionFantasy (dragons are common; the gizmos are less plausible, and may include wands); and SpeculativeFiction (human society and its possible future forms, which are either much better than what we have now, or much worse). However, the membranes separating these subdivisions are permeable, and osmotic flow from one to another is the norm." Quibbles about her highest-level definition (I'd go for 'SpeculativeFiction' as the bridging term, with the various science fiction and fantasy subgenres nested below that) and the vaguely pejorative use of the word 'proper' aside, she actually seems to have gained a fairly mature understanding of the genre, its scope and what it is about. A charitable man would even suggest that what appears in the early interview to be disdain for science fiction comes not from disdain, but merely from the application of what was initially an overly narrow definition of the term. Disclaimer: concerns about the validity of classification by genre are left for a subsequent post, or possibly as an exercise for the reader. :-) _Note that the two things she's written aren't even internally consistent; first she says that "[TheHandmaidsTale] certainly isn't ScienceFiction ... TheHandmaidsTale is SpeculativeFiction", then she says that "[ScienceFiction's] subdivisions include ... SpeculativeFiction". So, if TheHandmaidsTale is SpeculativeFiction, and SpeculativeFiction is a subdivision of ScienceFiction, then TheHandmaidsTale is ScienceFiction, which she says it is not._ _Note also that one of the foundations for TheHandmaidsTale is purely scientific: the story absolutely requires a fall in fertility levels. If that isn't ScienceFiction, what is? NineteenEightyFour has no such scientific basis (does it?)._ Could I suggest that both SF and SpeculativeFiction go under the banner of AlternativeRealityFiction or AltFic ? (either what happens might have happened, or it may happen in the future...) It's the only way that I can file in the same collection of my books the many different genres they cover. Is _A Clockwork Orange_ to be counted as SpeculativeFiction ? --TL Atwood has been reading StephenBaxter! "A__S O__T__H__E__R__S S__E__E U__S. As a service to the editor's sanity, further outbreaks of Margaret Atwood have been censored. Oh, all right, just the one. Science fiction, as opposed to what she writes, is distinguished by `talking squids in outer space.' (BBC1 Breakfast News) [NLW]" (From TheAnsible 192) Favourite new/old genre definition, this one courtesy of everyone's favourite post-modernist Anglo-Croatian Marxist SF theorist, Darko Suvin; SF apparently belongs amongst the 'limitrophic' genres. Go figure.