dirty little secrets

[rone]

In the Other Place:

ROGER BURTON WEST: [William] Gibson has said [...] that not only is he not an SF writer, he has never written SF.

REBECCA ORE: It's a career move. People do have documentation that he not only used to go to cons, he costumed.

Comments

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes; the proud man's costumely.

[erikred.livejournal.com]

Who would fardels bare?

Yiff, yiff!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hold it. William Gibson did the "I never wrote SF" backflip? Also known as the Vonnegut Maneuver, or Philip K. Dick's Tenth Greatest Peeve?

That's kind of flabbergasting.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, RBW said it was during an interview around the time All Tomorrow's Parties was released.

[omarius.livejournal.com]

I also read somewhere recently someone (I guess it could have been you, and then I'll look like an ass) saying they hated the term "SciFi" and declared that SF should be called "Speculative Fiction."

Which struck me as being the same as saying JGD is done injustice by being called "John Garnett Drummond" and should properly be "Johannes Galahad Dostoyevski" instead.

-JGD

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Definitely not me. I find the term "speculative fiction" highly risible, because it makes me want to write fiction that isn't speculative at all.

[omarius.livejournal.com]

I'm sure the Devil's Dictionary for "Speculative Fiction" would read something like, "The manuscript your publisher has been waiting on. The one mentioned in your contract. For which they paid you $5000 in advance. Get to work!"

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I'd say it's something closer to, "Science fiction written by someone with a sack over his head."

[omarius.livejournal.com]

IHNJH,IJLS "Two-Kroger-Bagger Fiction!"

[eagle]

The speculative fiction thing has been around for a long time; the first time I heard it, it seemed to be a back-formation to answer the question "what does SF stand for if it's not just science fiction"? In order to include all the fantasy literature into the same category, you know.

I can argue with all of the terms in different ways. These days, I mostly use "SF" without expanding it, making it one of those acronyms that just is, rather than standing for anything any more. (I do think that fantasy and science fiction, while quite distinguishable at their extremes, blur together in the middle in ways that make distinguishing them not always that useful -- for example, what's Pern?)

Apparently (per a Baycon panel discussion), "science fantasy" is not unheard of in the UK. Not sure what I think of that, but it's at least not any worse than the terms we use in the US.