I just read through China Meiville's list of Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Novels that Socialists Should Read, and although its a bit dated, it seemed worth linking. Now, Mieville is by all accounts a good writer, his politics are as far as I can tell more or less my politics, and I like the "New Weird" label (which manages to simultaneously evoke 1970s "New Wave" SF a la Michael Moorcock and 1920s "weird fiction" a la H.P. Lovecraft, both of which are Things I Like.)

Still, the list captured some of my unease about the sort of p.o.v. that Mieville seems to represent. For a self-respecting bolshie, the guy seems to be entirely too fixated on a very silly sort of bourgeois "literary respectability." No, he doesn't use the phrase, but the obvious lust for it practically oozes out of his comments...."see, see, we can be brutally unsentimental and explore Important Themes. We don't all just write escapist trash!"

Now, don't get me wrong, quite a few of these are great books, and at that great books with interesting political or intellectual background themes but which aren't boring or preachy in the least--e.g. Emma Bull and Stephen Brust's "Freedom and Neccessity," a book I absolutely love...Secret chartist meetings, long discussions about Hegel, Fred Engels appearing as a character, all within the context of an extremely entertaining plot.

I might object to putting it in a list of "Fifty Science Fiction and Fantasy Books that Socialists Should Read," not because its not a good book or of interest to socialists, but because--and, granted, its been several years since I've read it--I don't recall any explicit speculative element. (Am I remembering that wrong? It's possible. I couldn't recount the entire plot at this point.) Yes, Bull and Brust are fantasy writers, and yes, it was sold to that market, but that syllogism doesn't necessarily produce the conclusion that it was a fantasy novel.

In any case, one of the many problems with "literary respectability" is all too often on further inspection it contains a lot of ideological baggage that should be troubling to both socialists and speculative fiction fans...who I'd argue are closely spiritually aligned types, making it unsurprising that there's been so much cross-over between them from H.G. Wells onward, since both are deeply committed, albeit for mostly unrelated reasons, to denying the assumption that the way things are is the only way they could be. (This despite, of course, the fact that there are loads of people on the far left who don't like sf and loads of sf fans whose politics lie somewhere in between Robert Heinlein and Dick Cheney.)

The origin of the kind of literary snobbery that Mieville is so clearly bothered and defensive about, that looks down on what it vaguely imagines to be the literature of "rocketships and monsters" because of its foundational dogma that the one and only legitimate purpose of literature is to illuminate "the human condition." (I remember being taught this in English classes back in the day, not as one view among many, but as obviously true by definition.) Now, that's a mighty vague term, "the human condition," one that could mean anything or nothing and if broadly enough interpreted could include everything ever written. However, to the extent that it does mean something specific, it tends to mean that the only valid purpose of literature is to explore human psychology, preferable at as micro a level as possible. Even mainstream literary notions of Social Relevance (or cinematic ones, judging by Sunday's Academy Awards) sneak this idea in, since the important bit is held not to be the circumstances themselves but their micro-level impact on people trying to get by in a world they "didn't make and can't control." (Yawn.)

Now, there's nothing innately wrong with exploring human psychology or human responses to adversity. There are certainly lots of great books that do so, and do so while remaining true to the infinitely more important virtue of being entertaining and interesting. Still, why sue for membership in any club with such limiting membership requirements? The greatest glory of speculative fiction, it seems to me, is its failure to limit itself to those sorts of parameters, its ability to encompass a much larger canvass. (I think "every society that every has or ever could be, plausible or implausible" was I think John Campbell's worked out definition of the appropriate range subject matter of science fiction. For the more inclusive term "speculative fiction," that goes double.)

China, dude, take a long look at the origins of the literary disrespectability of sf and ask yourself, is it really such a bad thing?