When The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood won the first Arthur C. Clarke Award, in 1987, the author was not pleased at being tarred with the sci-fi brush. In interviews, Atwood said that her novel had been written in the literary tradition of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). But to the more open-minded reader, such futuristic dystopian visions are science fiction at its best, firmly grounded in contemporary concerns and asking, “what if?”
In America, science fiction developed in low-brow pulp magazines. But in Europe authors such as Huxley, H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon did not ruin their reputations when they wrote about imaginary worlds or the distant future. Only later, after the huge success of Star Wars and subsequent films, did the genre’s possibilities become limited, at least in general perception, to adventures featuring spaceships, aliens and explosions.
In fact, literary science fiction is still published. Examples include Air (2005), in which Geoff Ryman presents a compelling vision of humanity transformed by communications technology, and this year’s winner of the British Science Fiction Award, Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House. McDonald’s style is challenging and effective — very different from the bland demotic of popular fiction — and it immerses his readers in a vividly depicted Istanbul in the 2020s. There are also books that escape genre labels, such as Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro or Oryx and Crake (2003) by Atwood, who again refused to admit that her apocalyptic fable could be science fiction, because that was all “talking squids in outer space”.
Actually some of it is. Stephen Baxter’s Manifold series, beginning in 1999 with Time, features a genetically enhanced, intelligent squid that is created to pilot a starship. Baxter’s book is one of many fine examples listed on Vonda N. McIntyre’s website, talkingsquidsinouterspace.com. Science fiction can be serious, but sometimes it’s just for fun.