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Science Fiction not Literature?
I was shocked – shocked! – this week to learn that Tor Books has a blog. Well, not so much shocked that they have a blog as the fact that I didn’t know about it…. especially since its URL is www.tor.com. What really surprised me is that the blog isn’t exclusively about books (the top post on Sunday was about Battlestar Galacica), and that it is not limited to science fiction.
In fact, the post that caught my eye announced the death of John Updike. This, of course, is big news in the world of any fan of literature (speculative or not), but it was an anecdote at the end of the post that really got my blood boiling. You see, one might get away with talking about John Updike on a site like tor.com, if you referenced some of his more surreal work, like The Centaur, which they did, of course. That, however, buys you no credibility among some literati. What do I mean? Here’s the money quote:
"A Harvard professor had said something dismissive about science fiction, and a colleague reminded her that she had taught The Left Hand of Darkness. ‘That’s true,’ she explained patiently, ‘but that’s not science fiction. It’s literature.’”
Oooo…that makes me sooo aaangwy.
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