So Margaret Atwood *does* write SF?

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Claudia Gray

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About time she faced facts. I hope this is a genuine change of heart, not just her realizing she's been sounding ridiculous for quite a while.
 

Shweta

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Actually my bad, that article is like 3 years old.

I just never saw it before.

But still, I hadn't heard anywhere else that she had changed her tune, before or since.
 

Dawnstorm

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Last I heard, she's using SF in this way:

Blanket term: science fiction

Devides into:

1. Science fiction proper (gadgets and bug-eyed monsters; "talking squids in space")

2. Science fiction fantasy (epic fantasy + sword and sorcery, mostly)

3. Speculative Fiction (social SF, utopias and dystopias...)

That's quite different from the market designations:

Blanket term: Speculative fiction

Devides into:

1. Science Fiction

2. Fantasy

3. Horror (as long as it contains "speculative" elements)

She hasn't changed her tune, really; she's just tagged a blanket term over her original distinctions, as far as I can tell. It's important to note, that to her "science fiction" (or now "science fiction, proper") was never a dirty term. It just wasn't what she thought she was writing.

I doubt you can hold with that definition, if you're an avid magazine reader. But if you're basically caught up in the mainstream-publishing world, and you read the occasional genre classic (which you tend to put into a longer tradition), and then you'd also remember the b-movies and pulps from your youth (Creeping Eye anyone?), I can kind of see how you'd come up with that. The rest is mostly a matter of old habits die hard.

My impression is that she's living in a world of her own and has trouble pushing through to genre audiences. She's trying, occasionally, but not very hard, since they're not her target readership anyway. She's not hostile to SF, not even to "SF proper" (it's just not what she thinks she writes). That's very different from the sometimes-encountered claim that "I don't write SF; I write good stuff!" I never got that impression with her.
 
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AMCrenshaw

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She writes a lot of dystopian literature, a subset of sci-fi. The Blind Assassin is more of a meta-fiction than a sci-fi.

Because of the un-literary connotation of Science Fiction, it wasn't her idea alone to deny the genre, however silly it seems. Do remember that few sci-fi authors have creeped into the literary genre. But some have. My opinion is that she should have spoken up sooner and reinforced the genre's credibility as more than 'mere' entertainment.

AMC
 
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