"legitimacy"

[truepenny]

[This originated as a comment in coffeeandink's blog, responding to her citation of Mary Papke quoting David Ketterer talking about Pamela Zoline's "The Heat Death of the Universe":

David Ketterer, for instance, in his New Worlds for Old, insists that like the work of J.G. Ballard, Zoline's story merely borrows "a science-fictional conception only for its metaphoric appropriateness." While her description of one woman's ennui in relation to universal entropy is perhaps "apocalyptic in a psychedelic or surrealist sense," he argues, "because the reality is grounded in a housewife and her kitchen and because of the lack of plausible scientific rationale connecting the end of the material universe with her state, Zoline's piece cannot legitimately be classified as science fiction."

And I realized that I feel strongly enough about both Ketterer's use of the word "legitimate" and my response to it to want to stick my comment over here where I can find it again.]

Can we take that word "legitimate" out behind the chemical sheds and shoot it, please?

Because it implies that somebody somewhere has the authority to validate a story. YES, you are sfnal. Three cheers! Here is your propeller beanie. NO, you are not sfnal. Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

And, no. It doesn't work like that. The story is a story that works, or a story that doesn't work. Genres are not members-only clubs, and it doesn't actually say anything useful about either genre or story to get into niggling technical debates about whether it's a "legitimate" member of the club or not. The story may work/not work due in part to its relationship to a multiplicity of genres, and it may work/not work for a particular reader based on her relationship to a multiplicity of genres. But it will not be a better story for having the word LEGITIMATE stamped on its forehead.

And if you're not writing "legitimate sf," what are you writing? Illegitimate sf?

Actually, I'm quite sure that's what I'm writing. But that doesn't mean I'm not writing sf.

Comments

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Given that Ketterer once sent me a 34,000 word aricle about the significance of Wyndham's relationship to his cousin/wife, and took an hour to explain to myself and chilperic why it was so vital to know when Wyndham had changed his typewriter ribbon, I wuldn't fret over his pronouncements for one second.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

Up with the Bastard Stepchildren of SF!

[libskrat]

Okay, so using a scientific construct solely as a metaphor disqualifies a story from being SFnal. Am I hearing that right?

Because that's just, I don't know, a weird idea. Almost Borgesian. I started a list of all the brilliant sf it would disqualify, and I had to stop because I, you know, have work to do and stuff.

And I certainly do think Ketterer's looking for excuses to disqualify fiction by and about women, yes, I very much do. I wish he'd left that story alone. It's one of my favorites ever, one of those stories that knocked me on my ass with its utter brilliance, a "wow, I'm so glad somebody wrote that!" story.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

You might like the Pepke essay, which is getting lost in the chain of telephone; it has lots of insights into the Zoline story and its political and literary context.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

If science as metaphor isn't sf, it should be. Connie Willis does it so well ("At the Rialto," "In the Late Cretaceous").

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have been paid $200 for some of my sfnal stories, but no one has ever given me any kind of a hat for one, much less a hat with a propeller. SIGH.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Well, you see, there is this boy, he's a member of the Lumpies, and he's a nice boy aspiring to get out of the ghetto, dumb as a box of hair though. And there's this girl, her brother's a Splittie and she't totally under his thumb and is even dating one of her brother's friends because that's what she thinks she ought to do.

And then, there's this school dance (where Papa Addams plays emcee, I a so not kidding you), and the music suddenly falls away as Lumpy Boy and Splittie Girl see each other from across a room...

[cherylmorgan.livejournal.com]

Farah will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that "Heat Death" was written while Zoline was staying at John & Judith Clute's house in London. I don't think you can get any more legitimatly SFnal than that.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I forget who said that obviously, science fiction is about things for which there's some scientific evidence, such as ghosts.

And fantasy is about things for which there's no scientific evidence, such as faster-than-light travel.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's very neat; I may have to steal that!