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One of the eternal free-floating arguments that can be guaranteed to pop up from time to time, along with "What does it all mean?" and "Freedom - how much is too much?" is the question "But is it Literature?" - a question that I've mostly managed to ignore except when it's pejoratively directed towards SF (with the implicit assumption that it is impossible to be both science fiction and literature at the same time).
My main reason for ignoring it has been that I haven't had any internal guide as to what 'Literature' was - as to whether there even _was_ a difference between high and low art, or whether the two terms were merely handy ways for critics to declare that their lofty tastes were implicitly superior to the tastes of the hoi polloi.
And then, in a throw away line at today's panel "Is the Centre of Science Fiction at its Margins?" (How have women's, queer and black voices reshaped our ideas of what science fiction is) Geoff Ryman summed it up perfectly when he said "Entertainment leaves the reader innocent."
And that, to me, was suddenly 'it'. One can read any number of entertaining books (or watch any number of entertaining movies/TV shows) and still be left innocent - you've done nothing more than go "Wheeeee!" for an hour or two, frightened and exhilarated as if you'd just ridden the roller-coaster at Disney-World. But literature goes further than that - it educates and enlightens. It strips away our preconceptions, it illuminates our fantasies, it holds up a mirror and shows us what really look like.
Which isn't to say that there's anything wrong with excitement and adventure and really wild things; sometimes I just want to be entertained. But I get something more from literature - I get a definite something from a book like (for instance) We Need to Talk About Kevin or Air that I don't get (for instance) from any number of other books - a feeling of resonance and of uncovering something about the human condition in general and myself in particular.
My main reason for ignoring it has been that I haven't had any internal guide as to what 'Literature' was - as to whether there even _was_ a difference between high and low art, or whether the two terms were merely handy ways for critics to declare that their lofty tastes were implicitly superior to the tastes of the hoi polloi.
And then, in a throw away line at today's panel "Is the Centre of Science Fiction at its Margins?" (How have women's, queer and black voices reshaped our ideas of what science fiction is) Geoff Ryman summed it up perfectly when he said "Entertainment leaves the reader innocent."
And that, to me, was suddenly 'it'. One can read any number of entertaining books (or watch any number of entertaining movies/TV shows) and still be left innocent - you've done nothing more than go "Wheeeee!" for an hour or two, frightened and exhilarated as if you'd just ridden the roller-coaster at Disney-World. But literature goes further than that - it educates and enlightens. It strips away our preconceptions, it illuminates our fantasies, it holds up a mirror and shows us what really look like.
Which isn't to say that there's anything wrong with excitement and adventure and really wild things; sometimes I just want to be entertained. But I get something more from literature - I get a definite something from a book like (for instance) We Need to Talk About Kevin or Air that I don't get (for instance) from any number of other books - a feeling of resonance and of uncovering something about the human condition in general and myself in particular.
