The Secret History of Science Fiction by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel

Author:James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel [Kelly, James Patrick & Kessel, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781892391933
Amazon: 1892391937
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published: 2009-10-02T05:00:00+00:00

For what makes SF wonderful and complicated is that mix of speculation and the fabulous: SF is both think-fiction and dream-fiction. For the first 60-odd years of the century American fiction was deficient in exactly those qualities SF offered in abundance, however inelegantly. While fabulists like Borges, Abe, Cortázar, and Calvino flourished abroad, a strain of literary puritanism quarantined imaginative and surreal writing from respectability here. Another typical reflex, that anti-intellectualism which dictates that novelists shouldn’t pontificate, extrapolate, or theorize, only show and feel, meant the novel of ideas was for many years pretty much the exclusive domain of, um, Norman Mailer. What’s more, a reluctance in the humanities to acknowledge the technocratic impulse that was transforming contemporary culture left certain themes untouched. For decades SF filled the gap, and during those decades its writers added characterization, ambiguity, and reflexivity, helping it evolve toward something like a literary maturity, or at least the ability to throw up an occasional masterpiece.

—Jonathan Lethem

My intention was that the book [Sarah Canary] would read like a science fiction novel to a science fiction reader, and that it would read like a mainstream novel to a mainstream reader, which is the point, that you bring your own perceptions to everything in a very compelling sort of way.

—Karen Joy Fowler

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