Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Nerds of the world unite!

An excellent post with good comments about genre hating - specifically, how science fiction has been ruined by Star Wars.

This is one of those issues that really gets to me because sci-fi - along with its kissing cousins, fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction - gets a bad rap. After all, only pimply nerds and 40-year-old geeks who live in their parents' basements and watch reruns of Star Trek all day read sci-fi and fantasy, right?

Well, uh, yeah, sometimes, but so has most of the literate population.

Let's just look at a few titles, shall we?

1984 - Orwell
Brave New World - Huxley
Handmaid's Tale - Atwood
Frankenstein - Shelley
Dracula - Stoker
Lord of the Rings - Tolkien
Gulliver's Travels - Swift
Atlas Shrugged - Rand
The Chronicles of Narnia - Lewis
Harry Potter - Rowling
The Odyssey - Homer
The Bible (okay, that's a stretch, and I'll probably go to hell for this one, but if you take away the faith part, The Book is a collection of really fanatastic stories)
Farenheit 451 - Bradbury
Dune - Herbert
Alice in Wonderland - Carroll
Jurassic Park - Crichton
The Wizard of Oz - Baum
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Verne
Slaughterhouse Five - Vonnegut
The Time Machine - Wells
A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Clemens (aka Twain)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Stevenson
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Miller

...and so on. For a "complete" list of the "classics" of sci-fi, go here, and look here for more details.

I might add that 8 of the top 10 all-time grossing U.S. films are sci-fi or fantasy based. Same goes for worldwide grosses, though the titles differ slightly. Notice how kids' fantsy content ranks fairly high worldwide - so sci-fi and fantasy must be doing something right ifthe kids like it so much.

So what is it that turns people off about the genre? And why does it consistently get shelved with the romance, erotica, or Westerns section? (Yes, there's a Westerns section in some libraries and bookstores.)

The same question goes for graphic novels, (or as I prefer to call them, kah-ah-mics!) Since the spate of comic books-turned-blockbuster movies, critics have been acknowledging the graphic novel as a legitimate piece of adult fiction and not treating it merely as the adolescent piece of ass-wipe paper featuring a superheros in tights. Even school libraries are getting funds to infuse their collections with these much-deserved pieces of literature.

Even so, the stigma remains, even among "educated" school librarians who turn their noses up at any book whose pictures aren't either drawn by Beatrix Potter or A. A. Milne. The sheer snootiness baffles me. Have they ever even read a comic book, or is Judy Blume the be-all and end-all?

I could go on, but let's face it, the bottom line is this: go read a book. Genre-hating is like any other form of discrimination, and it only goes to show how ignorant you are.

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