Bishop on sf

Michael Bishop talks about science fiction and The Sparrow:

Even so, my experience has been that readers who dislike science fiction, who would never willingly challenge themselves with the best that the field has to offer, will devour a fine sf work by accident and then baldly declare that it could not possibly be science fiction because they don’t like science fiction. Fairly recently, in fact, a young woman I know, a fellow resident of Pine Mountain, read The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell and proclaimed it a life-altering masterwork. But she vigorously denied my claim that she had read an excellent example of what a science-fiction novelist can do when she brings the full arsenal of her thought and literary skill to bear.

It just can’t be science fiction, my acquaintance said; it deals with religious issues, theological matters, matters that matter. Yes, I said, it’s about a Jesuit priest who travels to another planet. There, two sentient species, one alarmingly akin to kangaroos, have a weird codependency that the priest fails to fathom until the stronger species mutilates him for his egocentric obtuseness, and he spirals off into madness and a heart-rending loss of faith. Clearly, I told my friend, this novel is a simple but exotic variation on the Mitford series by Jan Karon. She didn’t find this amusing, but I found her denial of the science-fictionality of The Sparrow not only off-putting but as obtuse as the cluelessness of the novel’s priest, with the added black mark that she insistently willed her obtuseness. An additional irony: This woman claimed that The Sparrow had deepened and enriched her nascent Catholicism, and it had done so, she felt sure, because Mary Doria Russell’s own Catholicism pervaded every character and plot twist. But, as I know from a brief meeting with Ms. Russell, she is an ardent convert to Judaism.

from a self-interview at his website.

One does still run into this alarmed rejection of the science fiction label. It has become a fairly meaningless label, to be sure, but I'm not entirely sure why it generates hostility. As Bishop says in that self-interview, for some people it does seem to contain "the subtextual editorial comment, 'Science fiction is spaced-out kiddy lit for losers and nerds.'" So you get literati insisting surprisingly vehemently that The Road, or Oryx & Crake, or The Time-Traveller's Wife are NOT science fiction, because that would of course mean they were thinly-disguised science reporting/loserish wish-fulfillment, written poorly by science nerds for other science nerds. And when a literary author does put out a book like Oryx & Crake, sf authors huff and puff about how it's just rehashing material that science fiction did thirty years ago, and did better. I think it's just dumb tribalism and wish everyone could get over it, though I don't think they will. As Bishop points out, the way your books are presented and received does have important implications for how much money and/or prestige you earn.