Boskone 47, Saturday Morning

SF/Mainstream Convergence?
James Patrick Kelly, Moderator
Kathryn Cramer
Steven Popkes
Vandana Singh
Melinda Snodgrass

What's interesting about this subject is not topic but the opinions held. This panel is all about boundaries, who's in favor of keeping them, who's in favor of abolishing them. Whether the boundaries are marketing ploys, whether they reflect a difference in audiences, etc.

Notes:

1) Convergence can only be good: We get Michael Chabon/The Yiddish Policemen's Union, they get Robert Jordan/The Wheel of Time. We get Salman Rushdie/The Satanic Verses. They get Terry Brooks/The Sword of Shannara.

2) Convergence seems to run only with fantasy. SF novels, by and large, remain genre-fied.

3) Robert F Jones/Blood Sport, Salman Rushdie's first novel, John Gardner/Grendel

4) The big danger of a genre is commoditization. At that point we all engage in a race to the bottom.

5) Genre writing is often safe writing. But much of the fantasy that is coming out of mainstream is edgy and often of higher quality.

6) Genre fiction shows lack of nerve. Chabon, for example, imagines a world without a Holocaust and shows us that many of the things would still be the same. Alternate world stories try to tell us what will be different, neglecting or ignoring that which will be the same. Turtledove's reimagining of R. E. Lee, for example, turning into an apologia for Lee.

7) Tom Disch suggested that SF/Fantasy was really children's literature in disguise. The emphasis on individual revolution, Good and Evil, and clean resolutions.

8) The word "comfort" fiction was bandied about. An analogy to "chocolate" was used. I don't think fiction should be comfortable. Or, perhaps, I find discomfiting fiction comfortable. Fiction should change the reader in interesting and/or profound ways. When we engage in "comfortable" fiction we create the opportunity for commoditization. Then, it's back to the race to the bottom. The "bottom" being sf/fantasy being sold as a commodity for a unit price like beans, peas or pornography.

9) Science Fiction may be becoming less popular than Fantasy since it requires the reader to at least be science literate. Something we're losing these days. A far cry from when Theodore Sturgeon was included in the best short stories of the year for The Man Who Lost the Sea.

10) New term: Revisionist Aesthetics. When we change what we think is good because of marketing or other means of popular voting.