Science Friction

It’s sci-fi, stupid! How shiny silver aliens can fry your brain cells.

ROLLING STONE used its front cover to call Philip K Dick (Martian Time-Slip, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) “the Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet”, adding that by the 1970s he was “widely regarded as one of the greatest living American novelists”. JG Ballard (The Drowned World, Myths of the Near Future) was garlanded with the affectionate, unofficial title the Seer of Shepperton and hailed by ever hip novelist Will Self as “the most important British writer of the late 20th century”. Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Heart Goes Last) is a recipient of the Booker Prize and the Arthur C Clarke Award.

The best science fiction, in all its guises, even when someone of Atwood’s standing prefers to call her work “speculative fiction” (broadly, having no acid-dripping monsters is the difference; or, as she has put it, because her books don’t concern things “we can’t yet do”), can be as affecting, challenging and authoritatively written as literary fiction. Literary fiction is the highbrow, reality based, serious stuff that usually wins the big prizes, as opposed to genre fiction, of which science fiction is a sub-set. Confused? You will be. This is not the place for a discussion of what is and what isn’t literary or genre fiction, or whether literary fiction fans are merely bookshop snobs with no imagination. Rather, it’s the place for a response to a startling, recently published American study that equates reading science fiction with stupidity. Yes, you read that correctly. As The Guardian put it: “reading science fiction ... makes you read more ‘stupidly’, according to new research”.