Why Is Science Fiction Snubbed By Literary Awards? (galacticbrain.com)

Slashdot reader bowman9991 quotes an essay from GalacticBrain: Science fiction authors have long been outcasts from the literary world, critics using the worst examples of the genre as ammunition against it. Unfortunately though, at times even science fiction authors themselves can turn on their own kind: "Science fiction is rockets, chemicals and talking squids in outer space," mocked Margaret Atwood, one of her many attempts to convince people that she is not a science fiction author, even though one of her most famous novels, A Handmaid's Tale, is exactly that...

Considered by the literary establishment, and frequently by non-SF award-giving institutions, to be trashy, pulpish, commercially driven lightweight gutter fiction, it's no surprise that very few works of science fiction have won major literary awards... Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the award-winning (not "literary" awards obviously) Mars novels, [in 2009] hit out at the literary establishment, accusing the Man Booker judges of "ignorance" in neglecting science fiction, which he declared was "the best British literature of our time".
The article ends with a simple question. "Will science fiction authors ever escape the publication ghetto?"

Comments

Do literary awards matter?

[Ambassador Kosh]

Do these awards even matter? My understanding is that science-fiction sells pretty well.

Before you buy a book do you check to see if it has won awards? Do you even care?

It certainly seems that amazon doesn't use awards when recommending books that would interest me.

I understand that people want to receive recognition but in the end does it actually matter? It seems to me that just like other award ceremonies they just matter less and less. Kind of like when the Oscars don't represent the actual movies that people really liked they stop mattering to people.

In the end read what you want and let computer algorithms figure out what you are more likely to want to read and ignore the silly awards.

Re:Mass appeal

[rudy_wayne]

In the same vein, no comedy has every won an Oscar for best film. Because the people who make that decision are pretentious, pseudo-intelectual snobs who think that comedy is beneath them.

Re:Science Fiction is busy destroying itself

[ravenshrike]

That's not entirely true. While the SJW infiltration that started in the late noughts certainly didn't help matters, the Hugos had been struggling for relevancy as an award since the late 80's. This is because they basically shun YA Sci-fi and the thought of bringing in new readers. The average age at Worldcon has to hover at least between 40 and 50 if not higher.

Fantasy is also Shut Out

[careysub]

Peter S. Beagle and Ursula K. LeGuin have each written a number of superb essays on the clear discrimination of English speaking critics (at least) against science fiction and fantasy -- which strongly overlap (although hard SF and sword-and-sorcery fans often disagree with this).

A good resource on this is Beagle's The Secret History of Fantasy which contains an nice forward by Beagle about this, as well as an excellent essay by LeGuin and David Hartwell on the subject. I can't lay my hands on his best essay on this at the moment though.

It wasn't always this way. Fantasy and science fiction literature from the 19th century and before are well regarded ("The Faerie Queene", "Frankenstein", for two random examples). Fantasy literature, if written in Spanish ("magic realism"), is adored by English speaking critics.

Part of this can be traced to one extremely influential critic - Edmund Wilson - who hated fantasy literature in all forms with an undying poison pen passion. He had a very restrictive notion of what constituted "literature" and most of English speaking criticism has absorbed his personal preferences as core principles of literature. Wilson dominated U.S. criticism for about 50 years, until 1972, which has yet to recover from his opinions.