> Margaret Atwood furiously resists the idea that her stuff is Science Fiction because "SF is talking squids in outer space".
It was a little more nuanced than that. Her argument was that The Handmaid's Tale wasn't really science fiction because it was set in a dystopian "now". Recall there wasn't anything particularly advanced about the technology in the story and its timeline forked from ours sometime in the 1970s (the book took place in the 1980s I think). She instead preferred if the story were called "speculative fiction".
While some of that could rightly be attributed to not wanting to be shelved as science fiction, that's also not the full story. Pre-internet, Margaret Atwood's audience was primarily a literary audience. So it makes sense that she'd want this new book to be shelved in the same place her old books were shelved. Otherwise she might lose out on some of her core audience.
Atwood being a repeat offender of looting "the treasury of SF ideas" is baseless hyperbole, and your entire rant falls on a throwaway comment she made 30 years ago. She looted the "treasury of SF ideas" in the same way Delany looted Moby Dick to write Nova or Jo Walton looted Greek myth to write The Just City
I had the extreme privilege of seeing M. Atwood speak this year, where she made the same argument as quoted in the OP (with a different example than squids, but the point was the same).
It is not a throwaway remark. It is something she strongly believes.
Did she not maintain that her fiction was "speculative" and not "science fiction"? Because everything I've seen has her being very clear in her description of the two.
She has made the remark repeatedly, over the years, in different contexts. It's not a throwaway.
As for baseless hyperbole, I object to Atwood on this issue because she is 'borrowing' ideas from a genre that she is then disassociating herself from. Delany and Walton could expect their readers to have read Melville and Greek myth, but Atwood is delivering SF a nice little kicking while borrowing the ideas from the genre and transporting them to a more respectable context.
Apparently The Man in the High Castle is still SF, probably because Dick didn't strain at the oars to get shelved out of SF. Probably because he was a repeat offender with talking squids in outer space and worse - telepathic slime molds from Ganymede, IIRC.
Partly it's also a matter of taste. For someone so 'literary', I'd say that Atwood loves herself some serious schlock. It felt like every third character in the Oryx and Crake trilogy was Torn From the Headlines of whatever outrage articles that Atwood had read in the previous year... I keep dutifully reading each book - there's always something interesting in them - but I've got to say I feel both dirtier (Oryx and Crake trilogy) and stupider (the trilogy + Heart Goes Last) after each one.
Not really. If you still buy books at stores, you'll want your Atwoods all shelved together, as opposed to her literary work being in "fiction" and her sci-fi work being shelved in "fantasy & science fiction"
I am trying real hard here and I really can not remember when I last bought a book for myself in a store. Last year in Berlin when I bought some Banks novels for a friend, that was an impulse buy because he did not know any of them yet was the last time I bought books in a store in general, but they were not for my own use.
I'm mostly an online buyer myself. But when I go to book stores I've noticed the sorting associates the genre with the author and not with the work. This is why authors who want to write in different genres do so under pen names. So if Atwood mostly writes literary fiction, it makes sense that she would want her speculative books shelved in their usual space. This is an old mode of thinking, admittedly, but it makes sense in terms of moving physical volumes.
It was a little more nuanced than that. Her argument was that The Handmaid's Tale wasn't really science fiction because it was set in a dystopian "now". Recall there wasn't anything particularly advanced about the technology in the story and its timeline forked from ours sometime in the 1970s (the book took place in the 1980s I think). She instead preferred if the story were called "speculative fiction".
While some of that could rightly be attributed to not wanting to be shelved as science fiction, that's also not the full story. Pre-internet, Margaret Atwood's audience was primarily a literary audience. So it makes sense that she'd want this new book to be shelved in the same place her old books were shelved. Otherwise she might lose out on some of her core audience.
Atwood being a repeat offender of looting "the treasury of SF ideas" is baseless hyperbole, and your entire rant falls on a throwaway comment she made 30 years ago. She looted the "treasury of SF ideas" in the same way Delany looted Moby Dick to write Nova or Jo Walton looted Greek myth to write The Just City