In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [23]
Jules Verne, a granddaddy of science fiction—in its broadest sense—on the paternal side, and the author of such works as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, was horrified by the liberties taken by H. G. Wells, who, unlike Verne, did not confine himself to machines that were within the realm of possibility—such as the submarine—but created other machines—such as the time machine—that were quite obviously not. “Il invente!” Jules Verne is said to have said, with vast disapproval. He himself invented too, it must be said. But not quite so wildly.
Before the term science fiction became generally used, in America, in the 1930s, during the golden age of bug-eyed monsters and girls in brass brassieres, stories such as H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds were labelled scientific romances. In both terms—scientific romance and science fiction—the science element is a qualifier. The nouns are romance and fiction, and the word fiction covers a lot of ground.
In the mid-twentieth century we got into the habit of calling all examples of long prose fiction “novels,” and of measuring them by standards used to evaluate one particular kind of long prose fiction, namely the kind that treats of individuals embedded in a realistically described social milieu. This convention emerged with the work of Daniel Defoe—who tried to pass his inventions off as true-story journalism—and that of Samuel Richardson and Fanny Burney and Jane Austen during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and which was then developed by George Eliot and Charles Dickens and Flaubert and Tolstoy, and many more, in the mid- and late-nineteenth century.
This kind of work is found superior if it has so-called “round” characters—characters with psychological complications and moods and introspections—rather than “flat” ones who run around having narrow escapes and shooting people, round ones being thought to have more of what we call “depth.” Anything that doesn’t fit this mode has been shoved into an area of lesser solemnity called “genre fiction,” and it is here that the spy thriller and the crime story and the adventure story and the supernatural tale and the science fiction, however excellently written, must reside, sent to their rooms—as it were—for the misdemeanour of being enjoyable in what is considered a meretricious way. They invent, and we all know they invent, at least up to a point, and they are therefore not about Real Life, which ought to lack coincidences and weirdness and action/adventure—unless the adventure story is about war, of course, where anything goes—and they are therefore not solid.
The novel proper has always laid claim to a certain kind of truth—the truth about human nature, or how people really behave with all their clothes on except in the bedroom—that is, under observable social conditions. The “genres,” it is thought, have other designs on us. They want to entertain, as opposed to rubbing our noses in the daily grit produced by the daily grind. Unhappily for realistic novelists, the larger reading public likes being entertained. There’s a poverty-stricken writer in George Gissing’s masterpiece, New Grub Street, who commits suicide after the failure of his slice-of-life realistic novel entitled Mr. Bailey, Grocer. New Grub Street came out at the height of the craze for such adventure romance novelties as H. Rider Haggard’s She and the scientific romances of H. G. Wells, and Mr. Bailey, Grocer—if it had been a real novel—would have had a thin time of it with reviewers and readers alike. If you think this can’t happen now, take a look at the sales figures of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi—pure adventure-romance—and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, ditto, and the long-running vampiramas of Anne Rice and the Twilight series, and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. All of them are romances rather than realistic novels proper.
The setting