A Literary Theory

That's why I stopped reading SF in college. I was tired of the vast majority of the genre insulting my intelligence. But I don't think it's unique to SF, I largely stopped reading fiction of any genre because of a combination of poor writing, poor ideas, and a lack of depth. There are notable exceptions (Pratchett for example) but I haven't read fiction on any sort of regular basis in close to twenty years.

Which isn't to say that non-fiction is significantly better, but has the benefit of being true so I at least gain some useful knowledge from it. I've always believed fiction should be better than non-fiction since it was not constrained by the facts but many authors don't see that as a challenge to rise up to, rather an excuse to not excel.

I think that there's also an issue with the general geekiness of SF readers. People with a geek-mindset tend to be more literal, and less likely to be interested in deeper meanings that weren't put there by the author. And, as you said, in English class, we always talked about those types of things, and so for some, I think it put a bad taste in our mouths for the whole concept of deeper meanings.

I personally have no problem with symbolism that is actually intentional by the author. But having had enough discussions of Feminist or Marxist readings of Shakespeare (No, Romeo does NOT represent the proletariate, I'm sorry) that it's a little hard...

"Rants they USED to uncork on Usenet"?

I haven't noticed any of us changing that much. The rants are the same.

The past tense is because I haven't looked at the rec.art.sf.* groups in years, other than occasionally following links from James Nicoll's LiveJournal. I don't know what the current state of things is.

Well, I'm still quite active, and it doesn't appear to have changed much. As Hans Zarkoff said, "*I* haven't changed". Note that I haven't read anything by Resnick, as far as I know, so while I resemble the general class you describe I don't know if I would actually have voted for any of his stuff in the Hugo category.

I'm not sure your post quite qualifies as a literary theory, though. I think you'd need some more meat to it, or at least dress it up in some more fancy language, don't you think?

I took a creative writing subject as part of my BSc, and at the end of the year an anthology of the class's creativity was published under the guidance of student volunteers (of which I wasn't one). The blurb for this anthology describes it as an "unanalysed and sometime unanalysable impression", which tells me that the students who wrote the blurb, predominantly arts students, were strongly opposed to literary analysis on principle. Further evidence that such an attitude pervades much of culture.

My experiences of literary criticism in school and elsewhere have been mostly positive. Regarding ideological readings of Shakespeare as mentioned by Brian, in my limited experience what literary analysts do is not so much "this represents that", but rather "let's pretend, for a moment, that this represents that, and see if we can illuminate anything interesting". No attempt whatsoever is made to discern the author's intentions, which are regarded as irrelevant.

(There exist, of course, people who are to the best practise in literary analysis as creationists are to seekers of reality.)

I had mixed experiences with lit-crit back in high school. It has its uses, but it is all too easy for the instructor to say that the work contains things that many readers (of which I am one) have to strain to see. As Adrian notes, "No attempt whatsoever is made to discern the author's intentions, which are regarded as irrelevant." He considers this as a feature, but it very easily becomes a bug. Discerning the author's meaning, or one's own private meaning, is one thing. But I would not insist that my private meaning is right for anybody else. That way lies the madness of postmodernism.

To followup on Brian's comment, #2, these sorts of interpretations are important. When we read a text, we do not read it in the culture and times of the person who wrote it. We bring to a text all of our history and knowledge. What we get out of a text is what makes it vital for us, what makes it want to read it. Sometimes, all we get out of it is a good story. Other times, we get out of it the subtleties that the author put into it. And sometimes, we can get something out of a text that the author could never have conceived of.

Being able to get out of a text more than was put into it allows us to keep the text alive and vital. Keeps it read, watched, performed, long after a purely literal reading would have allowed. How does something like the Inferno speak to you today? You probably don't care about the Italian politicians it lampoons. You might care about how the images from Dante changed Christian interpretations of Heaven and Hell. But if you can read it and ask how its text can illuminate your life, how it can inform and influence you as a reader in the 21st century, then you have made it a living text.

And believe it or not, you can't just say anything and get published in a literary review. Just like in science, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If I were to write a paper discussing how Romeo and Juliet can be interpreted in terms of the Cold War between the US and Russia, I better have some good ideas. Sure, there are two competing families who have reached a sort of uneasy truce, but I'd need more than that to hang a paper on.

I'm several decades out of date but by the 70s I had read the standard list of classics. Most of them written int eh 50s and 60s. Enjoyed some of them but less so other. Kept at it out of a slight sense of duty. When I tried the SF titles from the mid 70s it was a disappointment.

The SF novels I tried failed in seemingly every way possible, moral scolds, time warping nonsense, psychedelia, endless fugues on mind states, cardboard cutout characters, insufferable overuse of manufactured languages and terminology just to show the author could do it, needlessly convoluted story lines, knock-offs of the classics, and plot lines that were novel but obvious. The writers seem to have forgotten that the point is to tell a story and that convolutions and characters are there to engage you in and advance the story. This is, of course an incomplete list and most failed in more than one way. Because of this, growing up, and having other things to do, I gave up on SF.

On the recommendation of a friend I tried William Gibson. "Neuromancer" was quite good, just short of great, and I would go on to read most of Gibson's titles but while most were okay, and a few good, none were as good as the first. I also read most of the works by Douglas Adams. Good books but after the first two or three the jokes got a bit worn and, again, none were as striking as the first.

Since then I just haven't had time. For pleasure I read non-fiction historical accounts. Mostly of war and most often, so far, focused on WW2. I fondly remember curling up with a good bit of SF but with literal thousands of things to read, not to mention the internet, the SF I have recently tried has been a disappointment. Then again, maybe it is me.

in my limited experience what literary analysts do is not so much "this represents that", but rather "let's pretend, for a moment, that this represents that, and see if we can illuminate anything interesting". No attempt whatsoever is made to discern the author's intentions, which are regarded as irrelevant.

Yes, I would say, after a degree in English literature and one in applied rhetoric, that that is precisely the point. You can put any text (any text at all) through one, two, four, ten, or infinitely many types of analyses (pick your poison -- feminist, Marxist, New Critical, postmodernist, modernist, deconstructionist, Coleridgian, semiotic, discourse analytic, Keynsian, Transcendentalist, Empiricist, et cetera et cetera) and you're probably going to find something useful. In certain subject disciplines, changing one's frame of reference entirely goes a long way to allowing you to shake out the facts of any given situation -- after you've run your known-biased text through three or five or however many different analyses, you know that the stuff within that text that has stayed the most unchanged is probably within spitting distance of the facts.

On the other hand, personally, in terms of literary craft (as opposed to literary theory and criticism), I'm not a big fan of the idea of unconscious symbolism; unless such analyses are conducted carefully, you probably are reading too much into things. (Besides which, any writer worth their salt put that symbolism there in the first place.)

I used to devour SF books, but my reading dropped in college, and dropped exponentially after graduation, then job, then wife, then kids...

I still find a little time here and there. Charlie Stross's stuff is mostly good (and you can try it out for free; look up "The Concrete Jungle" for a novella that combines information technology, espionage, and magic... and somehow it works).

Eric Flint (and a myriad collaborators) have an interesting alternate history going on in the "1632" series, the first bit of which is also available for free. (It's an optimistic storyline, mostly - sometimes a bit implausibly so - but it's very well-thought-out and the tech is mostly reasonable; both what can be done and what can't.)

One of the best $5 I've spent is a remaindered compendium of "What If?" and "What If? 2", edited by Robert Cowley. Not SF exactly, but has eminent historians writing essays on their favorite 'pivot points' in history. Still working my way through that, but I've learned a lot...

As someone who reads a lot of fiction and non-fiction (and teaches a "Sci Fi as Literature" college course), I have to agree with Chad. Many students' "rejection of the very idea of thinking about what's going on beneath the surface level of a story has left them incapable of spotting [...] actual literary virtues." I believe the Lit. Crit. academic establishment itself is partially responsible for these attitudes, as are many literature teachers who, in the grips of a particular theory-du-jour, force nonsensical interpretations down the students' throats. Students are confused into thinking all interpretation is purely arbitrary and not worth their time. The situation with Sci Fi is aggravated by its long history as an "easy reading," if not a "trash reading" genre. Notice how Sci Fi is never shelved with "Literature" in our bookstores? These and many other cultural reasons conspire to categorize Science Fiction as somehow unworthy of serious study. (And a lot of students think that's a *good* thing when they sign up for a Sci Fi course in college). The fact is, however, that good books are good books, regardless of genre. And good books deserve good readers. If readers are unwilling or unable to read critically and enjoy literary virtues, it is a great loss.

"There is a fairly prominent strain of SF fandom which vehemently rejects all but the most superficial forms of literary analysis."

This is true of virtually all readers of fiction. In fact, most readers of fiction, even "literary" fiction, do not engage in deep literary analysis of what they read. In fact, it would be a sad state of affairs if readers had to do that just to enjoy a novel.

What SF (and fantasy) readers tend to reject is stories with certain categories of literary qualities, and embrace stories with other qualities. In this, they are not much different from readers of other literary genres. As Brian notes, many sf readers are geeky and literal: they like stories written in a style they perceive as "transparent." They like sentences that do not appear to play games with perceptions of what is being described. Ambiguity is bad. American sf readers in particular like their stories optimistic, the hero always wins and gets the girl. British readers, on the other hand, because they live in a post-empire culture, are more comfortable with bleak stories with irresolute endings.

I do not believe that academia has much to do with this. After all, most sf readers pick up the habit in early years before there is much exposure to any ideas of literary analysis or literary quality.

Beyond that, various forces in the market in the last 10-20 years has effectively narrowed the genre. The market for category sf books has changed so that only readers who want the narrow category are catered to; others are driven away.

Once upon a time, for a lark, I deconstructed "deconstruction". I got:

de = "depart"
con = "convention"
st = "Star Trek"
ruction = "noise"

thusly: Go take this noise to a Star Trek Convention.

Of course this was a joke, but there is a point therein, namely that if you ignore the author's intent entirely and push hard enough you can get whatever you want out of whatever text you study.

Me, I'm an engineer. A field in which it's relatively easy to get way too much soup from one bean if you aren't careful, but very much not a good idea. If your measurements are to the nearest centimeter, your results are NOT good to the nearest square millimeter no matter what your calculator says. Engineers and scientists are generally trained in this manner, and a lot of us are SF fans. This affects what we'll put up with in our reading.

I've also noticed a lit'rary penchant for pretentious unpleasant stories about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to each other in the most unpleasant surroundings the author can find or imagine and then everything gets worse (yes, this also appears in SF - nearly drove me out during the New Wave). That's enough to put anybody off the subject with the possible exception of those with a penchant for schadenfreude ("Whatever kind of day you had, Peter Parker had a worse one.")

The above discussion has merely confirmed something that I've suspected for years - that literary analysis is basically a game. Not a bad game, probably a great deal of fun for the participants. A nice tool for meditation and the devising of new insights, but still a game. It might be a good idea to not sneer at non-participants, since judging by observation, they're likely to return the favor.