The Poor Cousin's Defence updated

Back in 2018 I wrote an article for the Royal Literary Fund called The Poor Cousin's Defence. In it, I pointed out the way that literary types have always treated science fiction as second-rate writing, so when they produced SF it had to be labelled as something else, denying that they had dirtied their hands with it in the first place. Infamously, Margaret Atwood, a serial offender. is said to have claimed in a BBC interview that science fiction was limited to ‘talking squids in outer space.’

I was revisiting the article to check something I'd mentioned about C. P. Snow's 'two cultures' observation from the 1950s when I noticed that something seemed to have changed. I had written: 'When has a science-fiction novel won a major literary prize? There’s no sign of SF on the Pulitzer or Booker lists.' Of course, the 2024 Booker Prize winner was Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Does this make my comment out of date? Not really.

Harvey herself, true to form of such writers, has described her book 'not as sci-fi but as realism'. Leaving aside that painful insult of a term 'sci-fi', the reality is that, as science fiction books go, Orbital was at best mediocre (see my review). Every year there has been far better new SF than this. So though science fiction has made it to the Booker, there remains a long way to go, as those involved still clearly don't get it.

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