In 1961 Joseph Heller wrote Catch 22, which is now required reading in most high-schools. But most people don’t know that he wrote a sequel more than thirty years later: Closing Time (1994).

Wikipedia link to Closing Time.

On a reltated note, someone mentioned that some people see a ‘literary’ tone as affectation or pretense. I’m one of those, broadly speaking. I don’t think there is such a thing as a ‘literary genre’. I find theres a stronger arguement for a ‘literary’ book to actually fit another genre; mystery, horror, crime, whatever.

I can’t think of any shared conventions or iconography for literary fiction. I could be wrong, but as it stands it seems to me that the literary label is just a way to distance your work from the junk assosiated with the genre that actually matches it.

I consider Ray Bradbury a good crossover author (and really he always considered himself a fantasy writer than a sci fi one). His stories will remain readable over the centuries. (His Zen in the Art of Writing is quite clever and autobiographical; it makes clear the wide ambitions Bradbury has always had.

It doesn’t bother me that editors transmit that attitude to you. They’re on the lookout for potential bestsellers. Novelists always have to struggle to assert the right of their novels to exist and be noticed….

By the way, one very esteemed sci fi critic is Matt Cheney, aka Mumpsimus . I see on his blog he has departed from doing strictly litcrit, but he’s generally a reliable critical voice that “gets” the ways speculative fiction can aspire to profundity.

Speaking of sci fi, here’s a trivia question: can you name the author of a sci fi novel in verse who won a Nobel Prize for Literature….because he served on the Nobel prize committee? And killed himself 4 years later? I’ll give you 2 hints: 1)he shared it with somebody else, 2)during the year he won, Graham Greene and Nabokov were considered to be the year’s favorites.

Personally I find most sci fi boring (even highbrow sci fi). I think almost all storytelling has to start inside a niche, and sci fi is as good (or as bad) as any.

Ironically I think the reason a lot of sci fi is junk is because the genre is so commercially viable.

[partly in response to your follow up post as well]

I find a fair amount of this discussion bewildering. I’m not remotely convinced that there’s any problem. Perhaps that’s why it’s so difficult to solve. The literature industry serves to churn out large amounts of literature that the market will find bite-sized and digestable. Books serve different functions in people’s lives, and High Art, or Literature is only one role a book may take. When I’m taking a hard math class, I read no less than 3 cheesy fantasy novels a week. It’s part of my basic emotional survival. This drive is what the bulk of the literature industry serves. And occasionally, when I have the time, I like to sink my teeth into some Serious Literature, or maybe some Philosophy. It takes longer to read. I certainly don’t need a thousand pages a week of it. This ratio is reflected, reasonably, in the industry. So I guess I agree that to some degree, yes, the audience wants it this way. But what’s so wrong with that?

I have a hard time giving credence to notions that a fluff-dominated literature industry can pose any serious threat to Literature. Perhaps I’m being a naive San Franciscan, but it seems that genius eventually gets harvested wherever it grows. As prior commenters have noted, there are a quite respectable number of scifi novels that are well crafted Literature. As he hasn’t been mentioned, I would add Vonnegut to the list, although Gibson, Brunner, Bester, Dick and Le Guin all came to mind when reading this. And frankly, I’d be hard pressed to come up with a comparable list of mainstream writers. While that probably speaks more to my taste than the mainstream, I have noticed that there’s quite a lot of crap out there masquerading as Literature. At least scifi has the guts to be frank about itself.

I’m quietly marveling to myself at finding that I seem to have faith in the system. But so far, that seems reasonable to me. I see no “general trend toward the lack of literary merit in science fiction.” I certainly feel confident in saying that scifi is well represented up into the 80′s. I hesitate to make claims about recent works, because I find that it takes a decade or two for the cream to float to the top, and that I’m less certain in my opinions of books that haven’t had a chance to age gracefully (or gracelessly as the case may be) but I think that there’s enough potential that I’m not concerned about the last decade or two.

And I’m going to really go out on an optimistic limb, but if there is a problem, I think you’re already part of the solution. We’re here, we give a shit. We support the excellent literature that does get published. And we write long, rambly blog posts on the internet about it.

I consider myself to be pretty ignorant when it comes to science fiction–my genre interest lies primarily with horror (which has a significantly worse reputation than science fiction). But I do know that a lot of the most powerful–and respected–writing produced within the genre is done in the short forms. That’s where a lot of the language is, where a lot of the best ideas are… but of course, there’s no real money to be made writing short form fiction. So you gotta be sincere to do it.

The other problem is that some of the best science fiction is being published by small presses. Because, as the agents pointed out, they can’t sell a book that isn’t a trilogy or 100,000 words.

Note two things, and this may be useful: the science fiction publishing world is still small and somewhat friendly, and you CAN submit novels to some of the big houses without an agent–something you can’t do if you’re a mainstream author. Also, submit your book to the small presses that publish science fiction. Give up–for now–your dreams of wealth and get the work out there.

I edit New Genre, a journal of horror and science fiction. The website address is in the form I filled out before I posted this comment; visit if you’re curious. I came by your blog from Quid plura (I’m translating Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, which is what led me to that blog). Good luck with your book.

If he didn’t, that would explain why the novels are so bad. However, his name appears on them as one of the authors, implying that he at least approved whoever of their contents.

DensityDuck, do you have any citations for your assertion regarding authorship?