Literary Snobbery

When I saw a story in The Guardian the other day saying something along the lines of 'M. John Harrison becomes first science fiction writer to win Booker Prize', my first reaction was to think, 'well, at least they aren't scared to use the term 'science fiction'.'  Unlike the BBC - a few weeks ago, I heard an interview with Harrison on some pretentious BBC Radio Four arts programme, as I was driving home one evening, during which the interviewer tried to use every description of his work but science fiction.   'Fabulation', 'Speculative Fiction', anything but science fiction - when the interviewer was finally forced to use the term, having seemingly run out of synonyms, she sounded incredibly apologetic, as if it might cause offence to the supposedly high-brow Radio Four audience.  (I've got news for you, I thought, the only people listening to this are probably, like me, in their cars driving back from something as 'highbrow' as an evening of looking at secondhand Tri-ang locomotives at the local Toy and Model Train Fair).  Gratifyingly, Harrison himself used the term science fiction to describe his work throughout the interview, to the interviewer's obvious discomfort.

I really would have hoped that we'd got past this sort of literary snobbery which regards any form of genre fiction as populist trash, unworthy of serious attention.  Whenever anything deemed 'good' does appear as a piece of genre fiction, the 'legitimate' literary world moves to reclassify and co-opt it as quickly as possible, likewise if an author classified as 'literary' has the audacity to write something that falls within a genre.  I well remember the nineties, when there was lots of talk of 'magical realism', or, as us peasants would call it, 'fantasy'.  It's all elitist nonsense, of course, predicated upon the idea that what is popular cannot be 'good' or have any kind of artistic merit.  Which is entirely false.  Whilst much popular fiction undoubtedly doesn't reflect the highest of literary standards, quite a lot of it does.  All of it, good, bad or indifferent, is also accessible to the widest possible audience.  Which, of course, is its crime in the minds of the 'elite', who, like all cults, wants to think that only its members are clever and sophisticated enough to understand literature - so if something is well-written, then it can't be genre, even if its author and publisher thinks that it is.  So, I'm very happy to see the Booker Prize - usually restricted to 'serious literature' - won by an author who is, quite possibly, the last of that generation of British science fiction writers who were associated with New Worlds magazine and the SF 'New Wave' in the late sixties and early seventies, still standing.