The Two Cultures of Fandom

Over at the Scalpel Magazine Taverna for Uppity Young SF Critics, Gabe Chouinard has posted an interesting quotation :

"We've got to stop skulking around playing by ourselves, like the kid everybody picks on. When an SF book is reviewed, in a fanzine or a literary review, it should be compared with the rest of current literature like any other book and placed among the rest on its own individual merits. When an SF book is criticized, in print or in a class, it should be criticized as hard as any other book, demandingly, with the same expectations of literacy, solidity, complexity, craftsmanship. When an SF book is read, it should be read as a novel or a short story -- that is, a work in the traditions also employed by Dickens and Chekhov -- not as an artifact from the Pulp Factory."

The quote in question comes from a speech made by Ursula Le Guin called "The Stone Axe and the Muskoxen", and it was written in 1976, the year I was born. What Le Guin is trying to articulate is the idea that genre writing deserves to be judged by the same critical standards as mainstream literature. That one should not pull one's punches because "You know... it's horror... it's fine" (as critic Mark Kermode is prone to saying). SF is literature and as such it should be engaged with in the same manner as intelligent people would engage with Joyce's The Dubliners or Bukowski's Women. The problem is that genre, by and large, does not get this level of engagement. It did not get it then and it does not really get it now, as the numerous complaints I have made about the state of reviewing suggest.

Why is this?

As the Eastercon 2007 Panel on reviewing suggested, there are essentially two waves of "writing about writing" that people seem to want. Initially they want short, evaluative reviews that tell you what a book is broadly about and whether it's any good. Then there's a desire for longer, more thoughtful pieces in which critics explore what the book really means. The problem is that these two groups of demands are from two completely different sets of audiences.

Authors always want people to engage fully and intelligently with their work because it provides a nice ego boost to have someone intelligent talk about how complex your work is and such writing tends to avoid the entire evaluative process. Most critical pieces are less concerned with selling you the book than they are with talking to you as someone who has, presumably, read the book too. So criticism flatters authors and does away with the whole nasty business of people talking about whether your work is any good.

Meanwhile, audiences want primarily to know whether a book is worth their money and their time. They don't want to know about the finer points of a writer's prose style and how behind the action there's a leitmotif of innocence lost. This is why mass market SF magazines such as Starburst, SFX and SciFiNow have review sections full of 400 word pieces that are largely plot synopsis and a brief evaluation coupled with a joke or two to sugar the pill and make the reading experience more pleasurable.

Authors in the 1950's, the 1970's and now have all cried out for intelligent criticism some, such as the great M. John Harrison, not only have fantastic track records as writers but also as critics. In fact, with each new generation of SF fan there's a clarion call for better, more intelligent writing about books. It's a universal refrain in fandom.

The problem is that the two different audiences for different styles of writing simply do not change. Critics still write for each other and themselves in august journals only available on subscription and short and shallow reviews still completely eclipse criticism when it comes to writing for genre fans as a whole. In fact, if you look at the comments on this very blog you'll notice that the same names keep popping up and you'll find my name on their blogs too by and large (unless they're Livejournal because... you know... it's not 2001 anymore). Alternately, when I wrote a review of Tad Williams' Shadowplay it got picked up by a couple of fantasy sites that I had not even heard of and they were largely appalled at the idea of someone who was not a fan of fantasy reviewing fantasy. Compare this mentality to the one discussed above by Le Guin and you'll get a feel for how there are in fact two cultures of genre fandom.

The term "Two Cultures" refers, of course to the famous speech "The Two Cultures" by C.P. Snow. In that speech, Snow argued that our collective culture was splitting into two distinct groups that shared so few beliefs and frames of reference that they were practically, as Thomas Kuhn would later put it, incommensurable. While Snow's fears were largely exaggerated, they were correct in predicting how little later generations of scientists would study the humanities and how scientifically illiterate most humanities students would become. Indeed, in some ways Snow pre-empted the split between analytical philosophy and science on the one hand and continental philosophy and literary criticism on their other. This schism was ruthlessly exposed and mocked by the physicist Alan Sokal who managed to get an article full of scientific misunderstandings and meaningless sentences published in a peer reviewed journal called Social Text. A piece of satirical horseplay that launched the academic slapfight known as the Science Wars.

Let me clearly state that I do not think that the split within fandom is as bad as the one between postmodernism and realism. In fact, it's nothing like it and it isn't headed in that direction. The problem is a much more limited one and it is that critics talk to critics and authors in the great conversation that is the evolution of genre while most genre fans simply want purchasing advice.

One of the reasons why I don't think that the Two Cultures of Fandom are completely separate is because I see similar splits in other forms of media but I see plenty of bridges between the two cultures. For example, film criticism can become academic, complex and impenetrable, or it can be on a par with the simple, crowd-pleasing writing in Empire magazine. These are two different cultures but there are also magazines such as Sight & Sound that bridge the gap by providing intelligent and knowledgeable criticism in an easily accessible manner. Indeed, Mark Kermode, who is arguably Britain's most well known film critic after Jonathan Ross also bridges that gap by talking intelligently and insightfully about the films he sees without ever becoming inaccessible and still managing to recommend other films that people might not know but in which they might be interested in. Indeed, the great 1950's theatre critic Kenneth Tynan wrote his reviews for the Observer newspaper and despite being blisteringly smart he never invoked the names of great theorists or forgot that he was in the business of recommending what people should do on a saturday night.

So what does all of this mean? It means that SF criticism has been around as long as SF but that it is now, and has probably always been, prone to placing itself in a ghetto constituted from an inaccessible conversation between critics, authors and the occasional genre fan who wants to think a little bit more about the books he has read. The way to satisfy Le Guin's demands is not simply by producing more critical writing, it is by making sure that genre criticism is read by as wide an audience as possible.

I think that Critical journals should be written with the consumer, not the critic in mind. I think it's important to use simple language so no jargon and complex ideas expressed in simple language. If someone who has not read the same critical works as you cannot understand what you've written then you're not a good enough writer. Critics must not limit their output to "critical" journals and websites, they must keep one foot rooted in genre's bedrock: the review. By bringing a critical sensibility to the review, the critic shows how informative and well written a proper review can be. If a critical journal is not immediately available to a casually interested genre fan then it is not relevant.

I know that this kind of posting is slightly self-indulgent but I think it's more a question of thinking out loud and inviting comments... so that's my excuse :-)

Comments

[Serdar]

This is actually one of the reasons I've always had an admiration for Roger Ebert and his writing. He loves the movies, in all their incarnations, but wants everyone to at least have a chance of knowing about the best of the movies -- and again, without critical jargon or pretentious diction.

The best of SF and fantasy can be compared with the best literature in any category -- which is kind of the reason why we'd call it the "best". But there's plenty of literature in any category that is written to simply entertain those who seek out something within its confines, and that doesn't make it bad. So, yeah -- it never hurts to remember who you're writing for and what they want out of their reviews, but it also never hurts to try and push the envelope a little as you go.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Roger Ebert's another good critic with feet in both worlds. He can do the heavy lifting but he mainly provides solid accessible reviews.

My approach to reviewing is to try and be that bridge. Instead of providing plot synopsis and crude evaluation it's to try and bring out what's interesting in a novel and point people to other works they might not have heard of.

[gabe]

If I were backed into a corner and told to either cite a model critic or have my facial hair plucked by tweezers, I'd say Michael Dirda of the Washington Post is the ideal to follow, especially for genre critics. His depth of knowledge is amazing, but at the same time he's one of the most accessible critics out there.

Although a healthy dollop of Sven Birkerts wouldn't be a bad thing.

I think I've got a follow-up of my own to post on this, Jonathan.

[MattD]

It's an interesting post, Jonathan. I'm left a little confused, in the sense that your initial two groupings seem to dismiss any significant desire for the reader-focused criticism you end up calling for. It's not that I disagree, so much as I think that what the ends and means of reviewing should be, particularly in the Internet age, could use a little more discussion. My turn to think out loud...

In the past I can imagine that the primary dialogue was between authors and critics. Authors communicated with fans mainly at conventions or book signings, with the odd bit of fan postal mail thrown in. Reviewers and reviews were thus a primary interface between authors and fans. But now, with blogs, forums, newsletters e-mail and such, authors are able to interact with large numbers of fans directly on a much more casual and frequent basis. That leads to cults of personality -- people become fans of authors more than fans of books, and so read the works of that author as a friend rather than critically. At the same time, I suspect many authors have increasingly little care for reviews because product placement at the national book chains and manipulable reader comments and lists at websites like Amazon are now far better drivers of sales than reviews. Many of genre's biggest recent bestsellers have been critically scorned even by reviewers within their genres (Eragon, The Da Vinci Code, anything by Goodkind, etc.) while many of the most lauded have been commercial duds.

Certainly the more thoughtful authors are still treating reviews thoughtfully, looking for ways to improve as writers. But now more people than ever are wanting to quickly become full-time authors, quickly churning out novels rather than working on their craft as writers. It has become seen as something you simply are rather than a craft you work your way up in. Publishers want franchises, names they can showcase repeatedly; quantity becomes privileged over quality. I suspect genre fiction has itself at least partly to blame for this. By holding up so many poorly written books as the master works of the genre, by privileging ideas over such basic elements of fiction as writing, plot and characterization, genre gatekeepers gave license to anyone to believe that they could write acceptable genre fiction. Ideas, after all, are like assholes: everyone has them.

Opinions as well, which has made the growth of the Internet tricky from a reviewing standpoint. Anyone can submit a "review" to Amazon; anyone can start a blog. In terms of pure buying advice for the typical genre fan you wrote of, can a single review trump the aggregate information provided by a Google trawling of blog and forum comments, the collective voice provided by dozens of Amazon comments?

Maybe. One possibility for the role of reviews is that there is a "silent majority" of thoughtful, cultivated readers who desire to read mainly the upper echelon of fiction. 350-word reviews are of little use to these readers because they require a more thorough, multifaceted examination of a book to constitute a recommendation. But does such a silent majority exist?

And does it matter? If writers of thoughtful-yet-comprehensible reviews are writing for a minority, does that make what they are doing less valuable?

One of the biggest issues we face that crosses so many boundaries is the speed of idea transmission enabled by the Internet versus the slowness of generational change. People expect that because they can exchange ideas quickly, they can effect change quickly; and that isn't always the case. The key is to not give up just because the rate of change is slow. The end goal is (for me at least) enabling more high-quality books to be written. What are the processes that impact this, and how/where can reviews fit in?

[Farah Mendlesohn]

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction sold 3,500 copies and is the best selling title in that series.

Foundation, edited by the same people, and frequently with similar contiributors, sells 350 each issue.

There are many reasons for this (cost, distribution etc) but I don't think it's the writing per se.

[gabe]

My response.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I don't systematically think it's the writing either Farah. I think it's a problem of access and a problem of marketing.

Most genre fans don't know that the journals exist and if they did know then they'd compare them to SFX and the like. Inevitably prompting them to go "where's the coverage of the new Doctor Who, why aren't there any pictures and these reviews don't do much evaluating do they?"

The point I was trying to make is that people who appreciate genre are split into two distinct groups. There's lots of crossover between the groups but there's no guarantee that if you're a normal genre fan that you'll ever enter into contact with criticism... instead you just keep having your palate slowly murdered by month after month of cut and pasted press releases masquerading as reviews.

Other media have a populist but intelligent middle ground... why not SF? even horror films have that bridge and in France it's popular enough to sustain a whole suite of mass market monthly magazines.

SciFiNow really chilled me as it gave me a glimpse into a future where the mainstream genre fans completely become a separate culture and their publications don't even bother reviewing books anymore.

The point I was trying to get across is that there's a real danger of polarisation and something needs to be done... we need more and better gate keepers to criticism than relying on google.

[Ben Seeberger]

Outside of any intellectual theory about the art of reviewing or what-not:

1) Original SF is incredibly hard to write.
2) People who read SF (in a majority) don't care if its trash.

Even authors like Gene Wolfe, who have managed to gain a bit of that outside respect... still in the end fall under their own blades. Wolfe would never be considered on par with Joyce (or even Rushdie), in any serious capacity. We can make up our own dances and our own rhythms and call them poetic, but the wall is always there.

[gabe]

Ben sez (hi ben!):

Even authors like Gene Wolfe, who have managed to gain a bit of that outside respect... still in the end fall under their own blades. Wolfe would never be considered on par with Joyce (or even Rushdie), in any serious capacity. We can make up our own dances and our own rhythms and call them poetic, but the wall is always there.

I think you're falling into an interesting trap when you say Wolfe would never be considered on par with Joyce, or even Rushdie. Why not? Are you saying the best of Wolfe isn't nearly as good as the best of James Joyce?

Well... is the best of James Joyce as good as the best of Shakespeare? Is the best of Shakespeare as good as the best of Tolstoi? Is the best of Tolstoi as good as the best of Franz Kafka?

When judging art, it has to be viewed on its own terms. Comparison only helps you along partway; it's a starting point. But at some point, you have to judge the art on its own merits, rather than simply holding it up next to other masterpieces to make your decision.

[MattD]

And the other aspect is that what (I think) Jonathan is saying -- what Le Guin said so many years ago -- is that it would be valuable for everyone to have a review that examined Wolfe with reference to someone like Rushdie, to both talk about their differences and to hold up their like parts to like levels of analysis. That both helps to remove the wall from both sides, and helps the fiction on this side (and possibly the other side, too!) get better.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

If you're going to say that there is no ghetto and SF exists in the same universe as mainstream fiction, then you do invite comparisons that aren't necessarily favourable.

Gabe's correct that comparing works of art is an odd thing to do but I think it's fair enough to put Joyce's work in the same bracket as Shakespeare's... Gene Wolfe? not so much.

The interesting side effect of doing away with the ghetto is that there's nowhere to hide.

[gabe]

To be fair, I think what Le Guin was saying at the time was that we've given sf far too much room for poor writing, by excusing it from the standards of literature. I think I mentioned this to Jonathan before; that too often, critics make excuses for the poor writing in sf by saying "Oh, but it's sf, and it needs to be judged by criteria other than its prose skill", or some such flaccid argument. Which just isn't true. Looking at Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, for instance, on a line-by-line reading, his actual writing is spectacular. Add on top of that the sfnal premises and ideas and metaphors, and what you end up with is a soup of damn goodness.

But then, this all ties into Delany's propounding of the 'protocols of reading sf', which is useful on one level - that, indeed, sf has to be read differently than straight fiction - but, on the other hand, it's also been used as an excuse for saying sf has different standards than mainstream fiction. I, on the other hand, don't see it as "different" standards, but as "additional" standards. A book or story ought to succeed first and foremost as a successful piece of prose, and then the sfnal aspects should be addressed. Because even if the sfnal aspects are excellent, crap writing is still crap writing, and the story therefore fails as literature.

Finally, I think that making all of these excuses for sf simply reinforces the ghetto mentality. It projects the aura that sf doesn't have to be as well-written as mainstream fiction. It says "we don't care if the writing is crap, as long as there are cool ideas!", while I'm over here saying "cool ideas just aren't enough; the writer also has the responsibility to produce good prose as well". Which, I guess, makes me an elitist bastard.

So be it.

[Martin]

I agree with your conclusion, I'm just not sure I agree with how you got there...

I am a reader first and foremost. I might also be a critic but I am not writing for other critics, I am writing for other readers. The fact that my criticism might not appeal to some generic fan is irrelevent. Many good writers won't appeal to the same generic fan but you wouldn't claim they were writing for other authors.

There might well a split between those who read only for entertainment and those who read for something else but I don't think this is a fan/critic distinction. Unless you take "critic" to be so broad that it encompasses any engaged reader even if they have never written a word (a definition I am not necessarily adverse to.)

I would dearly love to see an SF equivalent of Sight & Sound. This would be a wonderful thing. The pool is not deep enough though. This is why you see the same names on your blog. Its not just a circle jerk, most people aren't interested. SF is a minority interest and "the occasional genre fan who wants to think a little bit more about the books he has read" really is pretty occasional.

You ask why "other media have a populist but intelligent middle ground" and SF does. As I seem to remember saying in the Interzone thread on Torque Control books cannot really be compared to film or music. They are both popular enough forms to sustain genre-focussed magazines. Books just aren't.

I also have some thoughts on the quality of SF versus non-SF and the idea of comparing best and best but they can probably be saved for another time. Nowhere to hide is a pleasing idea though.

[gabe]

I would dearly love to see an SF equivalent of Sight & Sound. This would be a wonderful thing. The pool is not deep enough though. This is why you see the same names on your blog. Its not just a circle jerk, most people aren't interested. SF is a minority interest and "the occasional genre fan who wants to think a little bit more about the books he has read" really is pretty occasional.

This is true, and this is also untrue.

The blogosphere, and especially the comments on blogs, are not a good representation of the actual readership. For example, yesterday two people commented on my post, but my stats say that over 600 people read the post. That's a lot of non-commenting readers, and I think that's pretty much par for the course. Most people want to read the stuff, but don't necessarily want to talk about it.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I don't see why SF would be too small for a middle of the road critical tradition.

It isn't Sight and Sound's writing that makes it a niche product, it's its devotion to foreign language and art house film. It just so happens that the people interested in art house film are also, by and large, the kind of people that are interested in more than 350 reviews.

If we were to completely disappear up ourselves and do nothing but review obscure works then obviously we'd be going after a niche of a niche.

But what we're interested in are genre fans as a whole and other people who don't even pigeonhole themselves as genre fans.

The reason why it's the same names appearing in comments is because the blogosphere is all about networks. I had this blog for 18 months before I got into contact with you lot... but that doesn't mean I wasn't interested... I just didn't know that all of this was out there.

[gabe]

The reason why it's the same names appearing in comments is because the blogosphere is all about networks. I had this blog for 18 months before I got into contact with you lot... but that doesn't mean I wasn't interested... I just didn't know that all of this was out there.

If you write it, they will come....

Or, put another way, you started writing and created your own audience. Hmmm. Sounds familiar.

[A.R.Yngve]

There is another group that reads criticism: Critics.

And, as Bob Dylan pointed out, critics are failed artists. So the audience you should cater to is Failed SF Writers.
;-)

[gabe]

And, as Bob Dylan pointed out, critics are failed artists. So the audience you should cater to is Failed SF Writers.

I'm probably not the only one that takes exception to a statement like that. Even as a joke.

[A.R.Yngve]

It was a joke. I read SF criticism, so I might be a failed writer...