Didn’t Margaret Atwood deny that she’d ever written science fiction even tho she obviously had, several times? What she meant was “I’d written literary fiction with clear authorial intent not commercial fiction”
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Yes, she still does!
aug 25, 2025, 2:14 pm • 1 0 • view
Laughable
aug 25, 2025, 2:21 pm • 2 0 • view
The interview that Doris Lessing gave to the Nobel Committee after receiving the Nobel is interesting; that her breadth of writing must have been hard to judge and the interviewer says "that you’ve adopted styles that are perhaps non-traditional." She replies that they didn't like Science Fiction.
aug 25, 2025, 3:32 pm • 2 0 • view
Kurt Vonnegut too, which I think is especially ironic because he's more science-oriented than many self-described sci-fi writers - a lot of his fiction is *about* scientific theories, exploring the social implications of, eg, evolution or the neurotransmitter theory of depression
aug 25, 2025, 8:24 pm • 2 0 • view
Terry Goodkind swore blind he didn't write fantasy, as well. Obviously Atwood is, er, a rather better writer, to put it mildly
aug 25, 2025, 3:09 pm • 1 0 • view
My controversial view is that Atwood is over-rated. As an example, when taking a different perspective on a classics classic, I think Le Guin’s Lavinia is just in a different realm to Atwood’s Penelopiad.
aug 25, 2025, 3:41 pm • 0 0 • view
I agree completely I just think Atwood nonetheless does qualify as “literature” - as does Le Guin
aug 25, 2025, 3:44 pm • 1 0 • view
As much the term means anything (and I note and salute your inverted commas), I agree.
aug 25, 2025, 3:47 pm • 0 0 • view
I think it DOES mean something because I’m not a philistine aka I’m a quality snob (call it what you like) - hence me mocking people who say “Highlander is a work of art” - but I’m not genre snob so it’s obvious to me Le Guin deserves acclaim as literature
aug 25, 2025, 3:49 pm • 2 0 • view
I think we are probably of a mind. I know what I value when I see it. However, I tend towards the view that the concept of ‘art’ is pretty empty, not least because I am quite unable to define it clearly, let alone regard it as existing in a cultural vacuum.
aug 25, 2025, 4:08 pm • 0 0 • view
I think accepting that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum doesn’t mean we can’t objectively ascertain quality And almost all - not you but almost all - conversations I’ve had where someone denies “art” is a category tends to lead to that person saying Aftersun wasn’t good because it wasn’t “enjoyable”
aug 25, 2025, 4:11 pm • 0 0 • view
Yeah, but no, but yeah. My own view is that art as an objective term for created things (films, books, paintings) is redundant. I know it when I see it, but all that means is that I’ve had a personal experience that I call ‘seeing art’. Basically art is a bit like God. (And atheism is an option.)
aug 25, 2025, 4:26 pm • 0 0 • view
No I disagree I think that my sense of Aftersun being art isn’t dependent purely on my personal emotional reactions to it I think an educated adult who is it lacking in aesthetic sense should be able to determine that it is art
aug 25, 2025, 4:45 pm • 0 0 • view
Again, yeah, but no. ‘Subjective emotional reaction’ indeed is rather less than I feel is key to my experience as art. I just balk at ‘objective’.
aug 25, 2025, 7:31 pm • 1 0 • view
Frank Zappa defined art as "something that someone has put in a frame", and I've yet to encounter a better definition.
aug 25, 2025, 4:54 pm • 3 0 • view
I would also add that there is a very very conscious “literary fiction style and subject matter” which we can see amongst derivative and/or otherwise “not any good” books that seek to market themselves as “serious literature” (see A Little Life for an example)
aug 25, 2025, 3:51 pm • 0 0 • view
And because I have, alongside my belief in quality, a taste for low culture & the scatalogical, it seems obvious to me you’ll be using your life better watching Red Dwarf or the Inbetweeners or watching WWE wrestling or playing darts, than reading even one page of A Little Life
aug 25, 2025, 3:53 pm • 0 0 • view