“science fiction”

So yesterday afternoon I popped over to T. C. Boyle’s office before class to chat, and the first thing he said was, “So … you’re a sci-fi guy.” Crap, my cover’s blown. (T. C. Boyle doesn’t read and doesn’t have any affection for quote-unquote science fiction, as may be gleaned from interviews like this.) I tried to explain that it was all my parents’ fault for reading me all those Madeleine L’Engel, Robert Heinlein, and William Sleator books when I was a kid. I said, “Did you look at my website?” and he said, “No, James told me.” (James is another student who knows me.) So, with some trepidation, I showed T. C. Boyle a copy of the issue of Realms of Fantasy with my story “Save Me Plz.” He looked at my story and remarked, “Great first paragraph.” I said, “Thanks.” He flipped a few pages and read some more. After a minute he said, “I just read the beginning and the end. You seem to have a good story sense.” I said, “Thanks,” again. So then I talked about some of my experiences reading fantasy & science fiction and reading literary fiction, and my impressions of them, mentioning Kelly Link and Jonathan Lethem and Aimee Bender. That discussion carried over into class, in which we discussed Fiskadoro, a postapocalyptic novel by Denis Johnson. Toward the end of class, T. C. Boyle brought up the issue of whether the book was “science fiction.” The other students are mostly English PhD candidates. One guy said he’d call it more of a “literary thought experiment,” and that the book wasn’t science fiction because it didn’t deal with stuff like “clones and brain swapping.” Someone else opined that the novel couldn’t be science fiction because it dealt with “serious themes.” I finally put in, “Well, you know, I’ve read hundreds of science fiction novels, and I guess I don’t see anything that makes this book somehow categorically different from any of dozens of other science fiction books that I could name. I think any story set in a semi-plausible imaginary future, whatever other categories the story might fall into, has to be read as a work of science fiction.” No one challenged me on that. I had the strong impression that none of the detractors had ever actually read any science fiction, and were therefore at something of a disadvantage when it came to arguing the point. Then T. C. Boyle brought up the issue of whether writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges should be considered “science fiction.” I pointed out that Borges had acknowledged that his biggest influence was H. G. Wells, so obviously Borges’ work at least had something to do with science fiction. After class, T. C. Boyle told me that my comments were brilliant. All in all, not a bad afternoon.