It’s a strategy that’s rich in possibilities, so much so that it hasn’t just been used to brilliant effect by the great science-fiction writers but has been borrowed, not just once but again and again, by supposedly “non-genre” writers in books that appear on those general fiction shelves: Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Kazuo Ishiguro, to name a few. (I once came across one of those people who “don’t like SF” whose favorite book turned out to be George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: set in an imaginary society, with imaginary technology, some way off in the future!) Not all science fiction is good, or serious, or equal in weight to the great works of literature, but the science-fictional mode is as capable of generating great works as any other.

Why should some books get to be seen as “non-genre?” It seems to me that the word “genre” is a bit like the word “ethnic”: While in theory we all belong to one ethnic group or another, in practice the word is used—and sometimes pejoratively—almost entirely for minorities. It so happens that in our culture at the moment the dominant, “majority” form of fiction is realism—no matter how well futuristic, dystopian Young Adult fare like The Hunger Games and Divergent sells. This is so much the case, in fact, that you can sometimes hear fiction spoken of as if its actual function was to provide a kind of record of how life is lived now. “How does the novel become new again?” wrote Rachel Cusk in a recent review. “One way is by its movement into fields of life not yet documented.” I was struck by the word documented. As if novel-writing were necessarily a form of record-keeping!

It can be, of course, but it doesn’t have to be, and I suspect it’s a very recent conception of the function of literature. Look at Shakespeare’s plays, and it’s difficult to see any of them as an attempt to document or record the present. They do reflect the time they were written in, of course (just as the “futures” imagined by science-fiction writers also tell us a great deal about the time period in which they were written), but I see no evidence that they were written with the intention of documenting those times. Many of the plays are nominally set in foreign cities (like Athens or Verona) but without any attempt to portray those cities as they actually were. Quite a few of them would be categorized as “fantasy” if their plots were presented now as proposals for novels. Go back further into the classics of literature—Beowulf, the Iliad, the Journey to the West—and you find even less realism. Almost all of them are fantastical to some degree.

Science fiction, I’ve always felt, is part of that fantastical tradition. It’s a modern variant of it, for a world in which things that once would have been thought of as magic are now part of everyday life. Currently it’s a minority interest, but a time may well come when realist fiction is cordoned off in its own little corner, and the fantastical is once more the dominant form.

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