what, no science fiction? please, we're Bookerish

Now that I've found the Blog It button on Typepad, and stuck it on my busy little toolbar - you might still get some news from time to time.

Here, Kim Stanley Robinson quotes a letter from Virginia Woolf to a science fiction writer, while criticising the Booker judges for failing to include any science fiction in the shortlist.

Robinson believes that Stapledon's "strange novels" made a "real impact on Woolf", changing her writing. "Her final novel, Between the Acts ... ends with Stapledonian imagery, describing our species steeped in the eons. Woolf's last pages were a kind of science fiction," he wrote in his article for the New Scientist. "When it came to literature, she had no prejudices. She read widely and her judgment was superb. And so I am confident that if she were reading today, she would be reading science fiction along with everything else. And she would still be 'greatly interested, and elated too' – because British science fiction is now in a golden age."

Comments

[Karen (miscmum)]

I read this piece in my Reader earlier today, but I just had to come on by to say I think that has to be one of my favourite post titles EVER!

[genevieve]

heh, speaks volumes for spontaneity, doesn't it.

I originally had 'please, we're British'...
and I think I've corrupted something else - feeling senior, probably.
'No SF thanks, we're British' is the faint echo there I think.

[kimbofo]

Hehe, great post title!

I read this piece by Stanley Robinson yesterday and thought it was excellent. But then you could argue that loads of different "genres" don't appear on the Booker -- there's no crime, no romance, no horror. On that basis the Booker is for literary fiction. Why doesn't everyone just get over it?

[genevieve]

The appeal for me mainly in that piece of Robinson's is the remarks about Woolf's contemporary and I intend to chase him up. I've read almost no scienc fiction myself apart from the odd Ballard story, so feel somewhat chastened myself to learn that British SF is going through a golden age - if that's so, I'm missing it and that needs to change.
No real intention to beat up the Booker as such on my part, just enjoying a silly title :-D

[Phil]

Check out the current edition of New Scientist for more on this, plus a flash fiction competition!

http://www.newscientist.com/special/sci-fi-the-fiction-of-now

[genevieve]

Thanks, Phil, that's wonderful!! I certainly will.