Calling Utopia a Utopia
Ursula K. Le Guin
Writing about the death of J.G. Ballard for the New York
Times (21 April 09), Bruce Weber spoke to Ballard’s American editor at
Norton, Robert Weil. Mr Weil said of Ballard: “His fabulistic style led people
to review his work as science fiction. But that’s like calling Brave New
World science fiction, or 1984.”
Every time I read this sentence it suggests more parallels:
“But that’s like calling Don Quixote a novel.”
“But that’s like calling The Lord of the Rings a
fantasy.”
“But that’s like calling Utopia a utopia... “
It is shocking to find that an editor at the publishing
house that had the wits to publish J.G. Ballard (as well as the Norton Book
of Science Fiction) can be so ignorant of what Ballard wrote, or so uninformed
about the nature and history of the science-fiction genre, or so unaware of the
nature of literature since the 1980’s, that he believes — now, in 2009! — that
to say a writer wrote science fiction is to malign or degrade his work.
To define science fiction as a purely commercial category of fiction,
inherently trashy, having nothing to do with literature, is a tall order. It
involves both denying that any work of science fiction can have literary merit,
and maintaining that any book of literary merit that uses the tropes of science
fiction (such as Brave New World, or 1984, or The Handmaid’s
Tale, or most of the works of J.G. Ballard) is not science fiction. This
definition-by-negation leads to remarkable mental gymnastics. For instance, one
must insist that certain works of dubious literary merit that use familiar
science-fictional devices such as alternate history, or wellworn
science-fiction plots such as Men-Crossing-the-Continent-After-the Holocaust,
and are in every way definable as science fiction, are not science fiction
— because their authors are known to be literary authors, and literary authors
are incapable by definition of committing science fiction.
Now that takes some fancy thinking.
If Mr Weil allows H.G.Wells’s stories any literary quality
or standing, he’d have to declare that “The First Men in the Moon” and “The
Time Machine” are not science fiction — invoking, I suppose, their “fabulistic
style”.
Knowing those stories differed in certain respects from
other fiction, and having a scientific mind and training, H.G.Wells himself
sought a classification for them. He called them “scientific romances.” The
term “science fiction” hadn’t yet been invented and adopted.
When I read such nonsense as Mr Weil’s, I could wish it
never had been.
But “science fiction” is the term we’re stuck with. And in
any reasonable definition, it is an accepted literary category, usefully and
adequately descriptive of such works of literature as Brave New World, 1984,
The Man in the High Castle, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union,
and all J.G. Ballard’s major stories and novels.
Editors, critics, and others who use it not as a description
but as a negative judgment are wrong to do so. And they do wrong. They are
gravely unjust both to the science fiction of literary value that they refuse
to admit is literature, and the science fiction of literary value they refuse
to admit is science fiction. Mr Weil owes Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell,
and his own author, J.G. Ballard, an apology beyond the grave.
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