Sci Fi <=> Country Music? That’s interesting. Perhaps publishers don’t want to “taint” a work by labeling it Sci Fi (The Road for example). Was Taylor Swift tainted by originally identifying as a country singer? (noting your obsession with her)
I was reading the other day about how when Canticle for Leibowitz came out the publisher went out of its way to try to and declare it _not_ sci fi, even though it is very much a science fiction novel, was serialized in science fiction magazines, and was written by somebody who only wrote science fiction. It seems like that was partly because at the time, science fiction was a smaller market and bookstores were reluctant to stock it. I don't know if that same kind of logic operates now, but it might. I do sometimes see arts grants and such that say straightforwardly if your work is genre you are not a candidate. So… there is some incentive to say you're writing literary fiction that just happens to look like science fiction.
Anyway… my impression is that country music sort of exists as its own ecosystem… the labels, the radio, etc. That is part of why "crossing over" is hard to do and often fails. But, like science fiction with its own award structure and so on, it also (maybe?) makes it more resilient. But in practical terms what is "country" is stuff that plays on country radio and comes out of Nashville. (Somebody reading this comment probably knows more about this than me.)
Anyway… I think Taylor benefited from starting in country because it was a smaller world in which stuff like songwriting is (was?) more valued. In that sense she's like any SF writer who ends up becoming a crossover writer, where they're nourished by a smaller world of writers and readers before they try to make it in the bigger markets. So you could say she is like the Ursula K. Le Guin here, where at a certain point in her career she's placing stories in the New Yorker. (Also like UKLG in that lots of people are very jealous of her.) I wouldn't say she was tainted but she was definitely limited. At a certain point, I want to say around Red, she started paying for everything that a label usually pays for because she couldn't get them to buy in.
But Taylor's ultimate big appeal was to girls her own age and so in crossing over she didn't really risk losing her core audience in the same way as other artists who have tried to do the same thing. UKLG similarly did not ever disassociate herself from the SFF community really, and would get cranky about literary authors who wrote fantasy or science fiction but disavowed doing so, like Kazuo Ishiguro: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/95-are-they-going-to-say-this-is-fantasy
btw I meant to say that detail about the date in The Stand was very creepy… it would get me to buy it! Also sorry for any incoherence in my comment my brain feels very mushy…
I have now put both Moderation and Age of Innocence on my to-read list (which I might actually make a dent in, if I can get them on my ereader- I find it hard to hold physical books while breastfeeding.)
This makes me not only want to read Moderation but also Age Of Innocence and Middlemarch, not to mention Arrowsmith which I have had on my list for a while. I am very interested in speculative fiction, and wondering if something that is set in the future is automatically sci fi. (1984? Brave New World?) as a side note I was in a bookstore looking at The Stand and the date King uses to start the story (in his future) was exactly the date on which I was looking at the book!!
I feel like anything set in the future is probably speculative fiction but not necessarily sci fi bc you could be picking a future in which we all found out magic is real, or something. But 1984 and Brave New World are both sci fi, to me. Brave New World maybe moreso since I can't remember if there's any tech in 1984 that couldn't have existed for Orwell (it's been a long time).
This thought is very half assed but I also think sci fi is kind of like country music in that you can define sci fi by subject matter (the future, technology) but you can also define it through basically its system of distribution (these magazines, these publishers). Those will end up giving you different answers to what is / isn't sci fi, probably.
The point of Wharton explaining this mysterious society to her reviewers in an almost science fiction way is interesting. Jo Walton actually wrote a review of Middlemarch in which she argued that it is science fiction, for similar reasons to the ones you give. (Though maybe there was something about Lydgate's (unrealized) ambitions to be a doctor who discovers important new treatments, too.) (Which reminds me of Heinlein's claim that Arrowsmith was science fiction (or speculative fiction) because it's about a doctor doing advanced medical research And Sinclair Lewis did give the microbiologist who helped him research the book 25% of the royalties.)
I have long felt that historical fiction is similar to science fiction in that it plunges the reader into an alien society. (Though by the common definition of historical fiction -- fiction written about a period before the author's birth -- neither Middlemarch nor The Age of Innocence quite fit. But in their effect they do.) It's definitely true that the plot of The Age of Innocence does depend on the vanished rules of a vanished society, and that the book knows that and leans into it, and that makes the great final scene all the more poignant.
(And, yes, Henry's review is great.)
(A counter example of a sort -- science fiction that is NOT science fiction -- might be a once very popular book called Sorrell and Son, by Warwick Deeping, which I have seen claimed as science fiction because it opens pretty much exactly at the time of publication of the book, but then tells the story of some decades of the life of a man and his son. So it's set in the future. But the future doesn't show any changes at all! (It's about a doctor too!))
Oh I'll have to read that… I have her book "What Makes This Book So Great" but haven't cracked it open yet. It looks like the Middlemarch essay is in there!
To me Middlemarch is like War and Peace in that as a contemporary reader you really have to remind yourself it's "historical fiction" and not about the author's own time, but Age of Innocence doesn't let you forget it.
Have you ever read Kristin Lavransdatter? To me it's one of the ultimate examples of historical fiction that really takes the opportunity to submerse the reader into a world of different values. (It is also sort of interesting bc the supernatural actually exists in that book… it's just irrelevant to the plot. This is a touch I always enjoy… Tana French's crime novels also do this. It's always like, "fairies and ghosts are real but they didn't do this murder. They're just real.")
I highly recommend it… get the Nunnally translation. (I usually don't have opinions on translations but in this case it was first translated into a faux old English that is not a reflection of the original's style, apparently.)
this is how I talk myself through when I get violently confused about the rules for left hand turns....ok society has collapsed. there are no laws. your only mandate is to navigate this emergent situation in a reasonable way where nobody gets hurt
Sci Fi <=> Country Music? That’s interesting. Perhaps publishers don’t want to “taint” a work by labeling it Sci Fi (The Road for example). Was Taylor Swift tainted by originally identifying as a country singer? (noting your obsession with her)
I was reading the other day about how when Canticle for Leibowitz came out the publisher went out of its way to try to and declare it _not_ sci fi, even though it is very much a science fiction novel, was serialized in science fiction magazines, and was written by somebody who only wrote science fiction. It seems like that was partly because at the time, science fiction was a smaller market and bookstores were reluctant to stock it. I don't know if that same kind of logic operates now, but it might. I do sometimes see arts grants and such that say straightforwardly if your work is genre you are not a candidate. So… there is some incentive to say you're writing literary fiction that just happens to look like science fiction.
Anyway… my impression is that country music sort of exists as its own ecosystem… the labels, the radio, etc. That is part of why "crossing over" is hard to do and often fails. But, like science fiction with its own award structure and so on, it also (maybe?) makes it more resilient. But in practical terms what is "country" is stuff that plays on country radio and comes out of Nashville. (Somebody reading this comment probably knows more about this than me.)
Anyway… I think Taylor benefited from starting in country because it was a smaller world in which stuff like songwriting is (was?) more valued. In that sense she's like any SF writer who ends up becoming a crossover writer, where they're nourished by a smaller world of writers and readers before they try to make it in the bigger markets. So you could say she is like the Ursula K. Le Guin here, where at a certain point in her career she's placing stories in the New Yorker. (Also like UKLG in that lots of people are very jealous of her.) I wouldn't say she was tainted but she was definitely limited. At a certain point, I want to say around Red, she started paying for everything that a label usually pays for because she couldn't get them to buy in.
But Taylor's ultimate big appeal was to girls her own age and so in crossing over she didn't really risk losing her core audience in the same way as other artists who have tried to do the same thing. UKLG similarly did not ever disassociate herself from the SFF community really, and would get cranky about literary authors who wrote fantasy or science fiction but disavowed doing so, like Kazuo Ishiguro: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/95-are-they-going-to-say-this-is-fantasy
btw I meant to say that detail about the date in The Stand was very creepy… it would get me to buy it! Also sorry for any incoherence in my comment my brain feels very mushy…
I have now put both Moderation and Age of Innocence on my to-read list (which I might actually make a dent in, if I can get them on my ereader- I find it hard to hold physical books while breastfeeding.)
there must be a project gutenberg epub of age of innocence
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edith-wharton/the-age-of-innocence
based on gutenberg text sources, but these are usually higher quality ebooks made by typesetting pedants
This makes me not only want to read Moderation but also Age Of Innocence and Middlemarch, not to mention Arrowsmith which I have had on my list for a while. I am very interested in speculative fiction, and wondering if something that is set in the future is automatically sci fi. (1984? Brave New World?) as a side note I was in a bookstore looking at The Stand and the date King uses to start the story (in his future) was exactly the date on which I was looking at the book!!
I feel like anything set in the future is probably speculative fiction but not necessarily sci fi bc you could be picking a future in which we all found out magic is real, or something. But 1984 and Brave New World are both sci fi, to me. Brave New World maybe moreso since I can't remember if there's any tech in 1984 that couldn't have existed for Orwell (it's been a long time).
This thought is very half assed but I also think sci fi is kind of like country music in that you can define sci fi by subject matter (the future, technology) but you can also define it through basically its system of distribution (these magazines, these publishers). Those will end up giving you different answers to what is / isn't sci fi, probably.
The point of Wharton explaining this mysterious society to her reviewers in an almost science fiction way is interesting. Jo Walton actually wrote a review of Middlemarch in which she argued that it is science fiction, for similar reasons to the ones you give. (Though maybe there was something about Lydgate's (unrealized) ambitions to be a doctor who discovers important new treatments, too.) (Which reminds me of Heinlein's claim that Arrowsmith was science fiction (or speculative fiction) because it's about a doctor doing advanced medical research And Sinclair Lewis did give the microbiologist who helped him research the book 25% of the royalties.)
I have long felt that historical fiction is similar to science fiction in that it plunges the reader into an alien society. (Though by the common definition of historical fiction -- fiction written about a period before the author's birth -- neither Middlemarch nor The Age of Innocence quite fit. But in their effect they do.) It's definitely true that the plot of The Age of Innocence does depend on the vanished rules of a vanished society, and that the book knows that and leans into it, and that makes the great final scene all the more poignant.
(And, yes, Henry's review is great.)
(A counter example of a sort -- science fiction that is NOT science fiction -- might be a once very popular book called Sorrell and Son, by Warwick Deeping, which I have seen claimed as science fiction because it opens pretty much exactly at the time of publication of the book, but then tells the story of some decades of the life of a man and his son. So it's set in the future. But the future doesn't show any changes at all! (It's about a doctor too!))
Oh I'll have to read that… I have her book "What Makes This Book So Great" but haven't cracked it open yet. It looks like the Middlemarch essay is in there!
To me Middlemarch is like War and Peace in that as a contemporary reader you really have to remind yourself it's "historical fiction" and not about the author's own time, but Age of Innocence doesn't let you forget it.
Have you ever read Kristin Lavransdatter? To me it's one of the ultimate examples of historical fiction that really takes the opportunity to submerse the reader into a world of different values. (It is also sort of interesting bc the supernatural actually exists in that book… it's just irrelevant to the plot. This is a touch I always enjoy… Tana French's crime novels also do this. It's always like, "fairies and ghosts are real but they didn't do this murder. They're just real.")
I haven't read Kristin Lavransdatter, though I do see people recommending it fairly often.
I highly recommend it… get the Nunnally translation. (I usually don't have opinions on translations but in this case it was first translated into a faux old English that is not a reflection of the original's style, apparently.)
this left me craving a five-day Atlantic voyage
I really would love a sea voyage though reading about how cruise ships basically operate under no laws gives me… a degree of worry lol
SEA LAW LET'S GO
you would thrive in a crime free bc no laws environment
this is how I talk myself through when I get violently confused about the rules for left hand turns....ok society has collapsed. there are no laws. your only mandate is to navigate this emergent situation in a reasonable way where nobody gets hurt