Why are sci-fi, fantasy and other action oriented genres considered low class in the world of literature...

Why are sci-fi, fantasy and other action oriented genres considered low class in the world of literature? What makes them pleb material?

Pic related given the latest release

It's a pretty great game.

Lack of respect of publishers for fans of the genre. They could be discriminating, selecting quality over quantity. They could look for the needle in the haystack. I would love to see Dalkney or NYRB create a sub-publisher that looks for classic, overlooked works of fantasy, western, scifi.

But as of now, go to a barnes and noble book store. The massive shelves of books where you either recognize the first book in a series like Dune, you recognize the brand but not the books like Star Trek, or you dont recognize them at all. The publisher thinks that the only people who will consume them are undiscerning greasy star trek nerds, and unfortunately they are probably right much more than half of the time.

I personally reject the argument that world building, plot, and character development are less important to prose, but some would also make the argument that for genre fiction to work, you sort of have to focus on that stuff more than prose.

>Why are sci-fi, fantasy and other action oriented genres considered low class in the world of literature?

these genres are basically multi-generational fandoms where becoming an author is an extension of being an obsessive fan. so works are judged and understood in terms of how deftly they reference the nostalgic canon. this deus ex game you posted gains legitimacy from endlessly referencing the original game from 2000, which in turn was legitimized by nods to prior canon of cyberpunk and conspiracy fiction. you'll notice that the fans don't care about the meaning of the game itself, but rather authenticity and fidelity to tradition: is it a TRUE deus ex game? or a mere impostor? much like back in the day there were debates over whether the original deus ex was PROPER cyberpunk: "cyberpunk has to have X, Y, Z and deus ex only has X and Z! oh, maybe it's post-cyberpunk, maybe that would make it ok to not have Y."

once you realize science fiction is a fandom, a social phenomenon, you can see that this exclusion, real or perceived, from the world of "high art" is in itself necessary for the functioning of the fandom. back in the 70s stanislaw lem noted that the american sf scene loves stroking its ego, inventing new awards to give to themselves, accepting those awards with speeches full of hyperbole; but the second serious criticism is applied to sf, the writers and fans recoil: "it's just a fun story about rocket ships! silly crap for kids! did you expect shakespeare? leave us alone!". so there is this old tradition of the sf fandom embracing its exclusion from "high art" whenever it suits them. a defense mechanism, like a dog baring its throat: don't kill me, i'm worthless! when danger passes, the sf scene goes back to awarding each other the golden supernova of literary excellence or whatever.

more broadly, this exclusion is what gives the science fiction fandom its group cohesiveness. complaining about the imagined ivory tower keeping you from sitting at the big boy table, about the dumb old english teacher that doesn't get that sf is better than whatever he wants you to read, about the injustice of it all: those are the social rituals of the science fiction fan. the attitude shifts wildly depending on the moment: you're proud that kurt vonnegut "made it" in the literary world, you're bitter than your favorite author didn't, or maybe it's all bullshit and you never really wanted these grapes. so on one hand you have this desire for acceptance and a bitter disdain for a real or imagined authority that keeps it from you, but on the other hand strong pride in being this "oppressed minority" and a fear that mass acceptance is the death of "authenticity". in the tension between those feelings the identity of a science fiction fan is born, and there is nothing more to science fiction than being a science fiction fan.

tl;dr: a sense of exclusion is the lifeblood of science fiction, not an injustice visited upon it by an external foe

Its like asking what makes a midget small. Genre fiction is considered pleb becuase, generally, its pleb. fwiw sci-fi has some (albeit few) genuinely good books. Crime has fewer and horror almost zero.

Being action-oriented. Action is interesting for small minds, but if it contains no underlying thoughts (which is usually the case), not really interesting for anyone else.

>these genres are basically multi-generational fandoms where becoming an author is an extension of being an obsessive fan. so works are judged and understood in terms of how deftly they reference the nostalgic canon. this deus ex game you posted gains legitimacy from endlessly referencing the original game from 2000, which in turn was legitimized by nods to prior canon of cyberpunk and conspiracy fiction. you'll notice that the fans don't care about the meaning of the game itself, but rather authenticity and fidelity to tradition: is it a TRUE deus ex game? or a mere impostor? much like back in the day there were debates over whether the original deus ex was PROPER cyberpunk: "cyberpunk has to have X, Y, Z and deus ex only has X and Z! oh, maybe it's post-cyberpunk, maybe that would make it ok to not have Y."
how is this actually different to the references found in literary fiction? all works are open to interpretation as being in conversation or relationship with other works

same for the rest of your post really... word replace "science fiction" with "literary fiction" and you would find analogous ego stroking, defense mechanisms, and in-group biases

science fiction, fantasy, and action oriented games are taken seriously by some kinds of people, but from the perspective of english academics such genres probably hold little value precisely because of their popular appeal...

english academics have incentives to increase the barriers-to-entry into their social group (increasing their authority, prestige, perks, etc), and so can be expected to contrive forms of appreciation and to read certain types of texts which allow them to identify themselves as part of a distinguished intellectual class

The diversity of literary fiction is immense, and academics dont put up barriers to entry, they just review the works in appropriate reviews.

Publishers put up barriers, but how is that different from any time period. Even Dickens had a publisher.

What the fuck are you talking about. Contemporary literature? You are wrong, the experimental is en vogue.
Classics? Classics are massively diverse
Post Modern works? Doesnt fit.
Literary fiction doesnt require ego stroking or backward references unless you are Cormac McCarthy or making biblical allusion. But referring back to fucking Deus Ex is quite different than making allusions to the Iliad

>all works are open to interpretation as being in conversation or relationship with other works
>you would find analogous ego stroking, defense mechanisms, and in-group biases

of course science fiction does not have a monopoly on basic social phenomena, but my point is that science fiction is a nerd fandom, and a nerd fandom is a specific ideology with specific features. for example, all works are in relationship with other works, but it is a specific feature of fandom to quantify those relationships to an absurd degree in an orgy of pedantic pattern recognition: tvtropes, lore wikis and the like. this is what i'm getting at with the deus ex/cyberpunk example: the most common conversation about cyberpunk that occurs over and over on the internet is to list random props and concepts from neuromancer and judge other works by how many of these elements they contain: does it have ais? hackers? mirrorshades? at least one corporation? implants? gangs? how else are we to know what is PROPER cyberpunk if not like this? the fandom approach to fiction is to treat it not like fiction but like a window into a virtual universe to be broken down in a detailed fashion, with plot continuity and genre "authenticity" as ultimate virtues. this is unique to nerd fandom: i don't think the literary academia builds vast pedantic databases of plotholes in proust or whatever.

another specific feature of nerd fandom is the cultivation of desire, and the shared experience of the frustration of that desire. any star wars fan will tell you the prequels were terrible, and yet the star wars fandom did not dissolve in shame: it grew stronger. it grew stronger because the shared frustration over george lucas "stealing my childhood" or whatever became a powerful cornerstone of the identity of a star wars fan. people like han solo i guess but they FUCKING HATE jar jar binks. the expression of that shared hatred is a powerful social ritual that binds the community together. and george lucas is this chameleon figure a star wars fan will speculate about endlessly: he was a genius, then he went crazy. no, he was always crazy. no, he's actually still a genius and jj abrams is a hack, come back george, we're sorry...!

so the star wars fans have this powerful story they bond over: we deserve [the star wars of our childhood] but that villain [george lucas] stole it from us. and science fiction fans in general have a powerful story too: we deserve [respect and recognition] but that villain [literary academia] stole it from us. we need to stay strong and buy more [star wars merchandise/science fiction novels] and one day we will have [our childhood back/the respect we deserve].

the correct thing to do is to reject that fantasy. "english academics" have not stolen anything from you. they have nothing to give you that could make you happy. english academics have no power over you. you are free.

Homer and many of the classics are full of action. Our current elites are boring people who lead boring lives and make boring literature.

How does your theory account for things like Margaret Atwood claiming Oryx & Crake isn't science fiction, or Ian Banks claiming theres no meaningful distinction between his "literary" novels and his scifi novels?

>stories about magic angel vampires who romance downtrodden girls who turns out to be "the chosen one" and is also trying to defeat an evil witch queen and her army of devils from the eastern lands of Morgovia against stories of the human condition, insights into life, love, philosophy, etc, and commentaries and allegories for present times

hmm...

Bump

>How does your theory account for things like Margaret Atwood claiming Oryx & Crake isn't science fiction, or Ian Banks claiming theres no meaningful distinction between his "literary" novels and his scifi novels?

if the identity of the science fiction community is founded on a sense of exclusion then of course you're going to get authors who gain notoriety for placing themselves on the "wrong side" of the divide, or claiming to straddle it. when atwood tells people she writes literary speculative fiction or whatever, she becomes a traitor figure, a target for the fandom's shared frustration. nobody actually burned their sf paperbacks because atwood said they were silly shit for babies. it's like when shatner told star trek fans to get a life: they fandom didn't dissolve, it grew stronger from the shared feeling of resentment. "we were betrayed from the inside, we are persecuted even by those we adore!". this is a powerful story that brings people together, makes them even more proud of their community, even if just to spite shatner or atwood or whoever.

i already mentioned that there is a sour grapes contradiction at the heart of all this: the science fiction fan craves "literary recognition", but also believes "literary recognition" to be a lie, an intellectual conspiracy aimed against him. so where atwood draws ire for joining the conspiracy, ian banks is celebrated for undermining it: the divide between sf and literature is revealed as fake, a malicious invention. the science fiction fan is of course correct in that the divide is merely a shared fiction; he is however wrong about its origin and function. there is no conspiracy against him, the sense of exclusion he feels was not produced by an external enemy, it is in fact cultivated by the fandom itself, and the fandom is its real beneficiary. it could not exist without it: if the exclusion disappeared overnight, the literary academic would remain, but the science fiction fan would be destroyed. the fandom would lose all meaning, and what would the science fiction fan be if he wasn't a science fiction fan? he would be nothing.

lack of real depth and an over abundance of tacky pseudo- intellectualism.

Take for example Drizzt from the forgotten realms series. From the books i've read in the series, the character comes off as one note. He is a man at odds with the nature of his people and is ostracized by all as a result of his race and indifference to his native culture.
And that's it. Nothing changes. Humans never ever accept him, only his close friends (predominantly not human) tolerate him. And he is just ok with that. He never cares what others think of him and goes throughout the story, not wanting anything. As a secondary character this would be ok, but he's the primary protagonist of the series.

This kinda leads into a lack of conflict. Drizzt doesnt need to be accepted, so he doesn't pursue acceptance. And any physical conflict that is thrown his way is easily dispatched because of his incredible martial prowess. Not to mention, naming your series "The legend of X" removes a lot of tension from any physical altercation the character is involved in because the reader is aware that X character will not die. He can't die because the series is named after him and this isn't the last book in the series.

And then there is the "intellectualism." Throughout all fantast stories that copy tolkien, there is the ever present message of "the age of man is coming" and that "humans are racist, ruin everything, and suck over all when compared to the other races." This get's real old after a while and just ends up ticking me off because
1. I'm human
2. their argument is based on a whole nation of racist strawmen that they put little effort into humanizing.
another specific example of this philosophy stuff would be from Drizzt who says
"an animal backed into a wall will fight with all his might because he has nothing left to loose."
Which to me doesn't make sense. Wouldnt it make more sense to fight with all you got because now that your back is against the wall, you have everything to loose?

I dunno man, that's just my take on it.

to sum my last point up, it seems that these messages they try to send (or codes for the characters to apply and live by) seem poorly thought out, cliched, or phoned in.

>this basically
had a friend flip out on me when I used the word "drake" to refer to a smaller dragon in a short story i wrote as opposed to a small wingless lizard.

You could change every instance of science fiction with metal and it would apply 100%.

Shit, now I want to write a sci Fi short story illustrating this.

Whoever considers sci-fi pleb stuff is an asshole: popularity and quality doesn't correlate in any way (Pink Floyd is not a shitty band, unless being popular means otherwise.) And being an uptight asshole seems to be part of literature "academics", who consider everything under they value, for some unknown reason.

WTF?, have you ever heard about Ursulan K. Le Guin, for example? Goes way beyond just "action", unless you have no idea what you are talking about.

sci-fi and fantasy go well beyond that. Unless, of course, you focus only on that trend. By the way, Los Detectives Salvajes is relly famous among academic people around here, and because is full of reference to other academic works. Also, where is the fandom in A Fire Upon the Deep?, The Windup Girl?, Starship Troopers?, The Dispossessed?

Some kind of nerd nerd here

>WTF?
I don't even know why I read this far.

The way you write bleeds with the resentment people were talking about earlier in the thread. You also have fuck-awful reading comprehension, at least in the case of the first person you responded to. He says most action based literature is pointless, implying there are exceptions.

>i don't think the literary academia builds vast pedantic databases of plotholes in proust or whatever.

This is an incorrect assumption. What do you think lit crit profs endlessly research and write papers about?

>"english academics" have not stolen anything from you. they have nothing to give you that could make you happy. english academics have no power over you. you are free.

I'm not entirely certain what you're trying to say in this post but the characteristics you're ascribing to "nerd fandom" aren't isolated phenomena. They can be applied to any social group who feel so strongly about [subject] that they incorporate it into their identity.

Are you attempting to liberate sci-fi fans of that notion that they're unjustifiably persecuted for their preference in literature? Do you have a chip on your shoulder about what kind of literature you read most frequently?

The entire debate surrounding the pleb/patrician false dichotomy is purely masturbatory. I think you're suffering from some sort of persecution complex that's entirely illusory. Stop browsing these boards, lol.

Wtf? I hate nerds now

Threads on Veeky Forums where people are incapable of being terse are the worst.

NYRB does publish that stuff very occasionally. Warlock is a western, and they have a few scifi books that I can't remember the name of.

>This is an incorrect assumption. What do you think lit crit profs endlessly research and write papers about?

i already explained what is unique about the fandom approach to fiction, in the post you quoted. if you're actually claiming that literary criticism and wookiepedia operate under the same underlying assumptions about the value and purpose of fiction then you've either never read literary criticism or you've never been to wookiepedia.

>the characteristics you're ascribing to "nerd fandom" aren't isolated phenomena

that's the first sentence of my post and you're presenting it as if you were rebutting me. what's going on?

>They can be applied to any social group who feel so strongly about [subject] that they incorporate it into their identity.

first of all: of course fandoms are similar to other fandoms and some of what i wrote is going to be applicable to, i dunno, comic book fans (probably almost verbatim in that case), but the op did not ask about comic books, did he? secondly, what you're saying here is that all social groups are functionally fandoms which is a pretty bold claim because i've listed many specific features of a fandom that i think you would be hard pressed to find in "any social group [with] identity". i mean i'm sure people who weave baskets have an identity as basket weavers but i don't think the identity of a basket weaver is reliant on the feeling of exclusion from a larger world of arts and crafts, i don't think basket weavers commune over their shared hatred of traitors to basketweaverhood and so on.

>Are you attempting to liberate sci-fi fans of that notion

i am merely writing down some observations about the science fiction fandom. one of those observations it that any such hypothetical liberation would not be a liberation OF fandom but a liberation FROM fandom.

you, on the other hand, appear to be largely agreeing with me, despite the irrelevant complaint of "but others also..." and the creepy fantasizing about my mental health (?!).

>Also, where is the fandom in A Fire Upon the Deep?, The Windup Girl?, Starship Troopers?, The Dispossessed?

you are confused. a fandom is not a djinn, it does not live within objects. it's a social group formed around them. one of the defense tactics of a fandom is bombarding perceived opponents with random titles from the fandom's canon, insisting that all observations that don't address these fandom totems in detail are illegitimate. like when roger ebert said video games were bad, causing the video game fandom to produce endless lists of games that "prove him wrong". the fandom's twisted logic here is that one cannot dislike video games, because not liking video games places one outside the video game fandom and all opinions coming from outside the fandom are automatically illegitimate. it makes even less sense for you to confront me with science fiction novels you like because we're not talking about novels being "good" or "bad".

I see this sort of behavior on Veeky Forums sometimes when the topic of graphic novels comes up. I said that while I wasn't making claims as to the inherent quality of the potential of graphic novels but that the hundred or so hours I spent reading what many call the greatest of the medium (Sandman, Transmetropolitan, Watchmen etc) felt ill spent in comparison to what I could do with novels. The person then sperged out and said I'm the closed minded sort of asshole that ruins Veeky Forums.

I find that people within these fandoms have a blind faith that is also incredibly insecure in their chosen medium. So to add to what you are saying I think that almost everything you have stated comes from a deep-rooted fear that what they like is shit. They have faint intimations of something great about high art that is lacking within most items in their fandom. They wish this was not the case so they overcompensate with their loud talk of the artistic integrity of their medium. I have seen Trek fans compare the show to Shakespeare and people to take The Last of Us to be greater than any work of cinema.

It's not an outright self deception. Since they do not understand what it is that makes high art great (for if they properly did they would be able to enjoy it) they are not sure what it is they are looking for in their own works that would make them great. Their self awareness of this has them latch onto things that to them imitate what makes are great. They are still aware of some discrepancy. So they half believe their interests to be great and are half afraid they they are crap. In a way they remind me of the middlebrow in Adorno's conception of them.

I'm not sure if this is true of all fandoms, or even a majority of people within a fandom but it seems that their is at least a vocal minority in a large number of fandoms.

>this deus ex game you posted gains legitimacy from endlessly referencing the original game from 2000, which in turn was legitimized by nods to prior canon of cyberpunk and conspiracy fiction. you'll notice that the fans don't care about the meaning of the game itself, but rather authenticity and fidelity to tradition: is it a TRUE deus ex game? or a mere impostor? much like back in the day there were debates over whether the original deus ex was PROPER cyberpunk: "cyberpunk has to have X, Y, Z and deus ex only has X and Z! oh, maybe it's post-cyberpunk, maybe that would make it ok to not have Y."
I don't remember any real debate about whether Deus Ex was cyberpunk way back (you might be able to find some archived discussion somewhere but that's the internet for you, I just don't remember it being obvious). The legitimacy of the more recent games is in contrast to Deus Ex 2, which was a terrible sequel. DE2 made very strong references back to DE, it was just a terrible game in comparison. The prequels have some problems, but they're legitimate in that they're not as bad in certain ways as DE2.

>Why are sci-fi, fantasy and other action oriented genres considered low class in the world of literature?
Because most of it IS mindless lowbrow that rests on established convention and relies on cooked up plot and setting and tried and true tropes over characters and ideas.

It is possible to write genre fiction that has literary. Blood Meridian, 2001, Most of Vonnegut's novels....

The amount of assholeness in this post is unbearable. And I though that the pedantic attitude of my philosophy teacher I had was impossible to match.

I'm not him, and your post is not an argument.

It wasn't my intention to make an argument

Then why post?
To make it clear that he hurt your feelings with his 'assholishness'?

For the same reason someone posted

The genre has become oversaturated with leftist authors. I'm not interested in reading a 10 page monologue about how virtuous it is to have abortions and evil capitalism and religion is in the middle of a space adventure story. Most of them are much more subtle but it's still irritating enough to not even bother reading newer books. If you look at the top recommended or best selling every one of the authors is a liberal. The sci-fi/fantasy publishing world is just a big leftist circlejerk.

Nothing really, a patrician like Borges enthusiastically read Van Vogt, Stapledon, Heinlein, Lovecraft, Zane Grey, Dunsany, Machen, Meyrink, Wells, Hammett and Bradbury without caring about any 'high literature' meme. The truth is that most works are disappointing in both worlds

see

the truth is that there isn't two worlds, and that scifi nerds continue pretending that they're oppressed because not everyone enjoys "name of the wind".

...

People who study literature obviously believe there is worth in studying literature and tend not to spend time with books that aren't considered worth studying. Books focused solely on delivering entertainment and not on the expression of ideas or aesthetic merit offer little for people like that. This is the proposed goal of the "action" genre: to excite.

Of course not all genre fiction is focused solely on delivering entertainment, but at the same time, not all of it is considered lowbrow. Genre fiction that actually explores ideas with certain depth and has aesthetic merit tends to do well in the literary world, though its proponents often deny that it should be called whatever genre it fits in. Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Stanisław Lem have all been given love by academics.

Mind you, I wouldn't say there the anti-genre stance predominant in academia is imaginary. But I also wouldn't say it has absolutely no base, given what mainstream genre fiction is like. You'd think academics would know better, but well, you've probably never seen those people arguing.

It could be a holdover from the pulp fiction days, where by-the-numbers genre fiction was pumped out, and authors with more literary ambitions could make a fast buck.

>it's an "American projects the sickly state of his own genre fiction onto the rest of the world and generalises an entire field of writing based on that" episode

well said

despite and misidentifying me as american, you raise a good point. is fandom a uniquely american phenomenon? i did mention a polish science fiction writer being able to see past the bullshit.

the answer is no. the reason lem can look at the fandom from the outside in is not because only americans are susceptible to fandom logic, but because he's a feral child of the science fiction scene. he grew up in then-polish lviv reading early science fiction (wells, verne, stapledon etc) but was promptly separated from the world scene by historical circumstance (ww2, then stalinism), forcing him to develop as a science fiction writer in isolation, building a private fantasy of what sf "should be". in the post-stalinist thaw it was finally possible in poland to publish or import foreign sf, which lem promptly devoured and found immensely disappointing. hence his criticism of the english-language scene: because of his isolation, he and the fandom grew apart.

not only does this forced isolation from global pop-culture no longer occur (north korea notwithstanding), the internet ensures unimpeded growth of fandom across any distance or border. and i don't want to suggest that this is a phenomenon that starts in one place and spreads: the local fandoms in various countries developed in analogous manner even pre-internet. you get some national idiosyncrasies, you get competition between local and imported works (a topic for endless debate in the fandom), but other than that you get possibly even a clearer picture of fandom dynamics than in america. some of those markets are so small, there's so little money in writing/publishing in polish or hungarian or whatever and this makes the bitterness rise to new levels. the feeling of science fiction being a beleaguered ghetto is amplified, the resentment is sharper. if the american fan complains despite being fat and pampered, the eastern european fan knows real hunger - and yet his complaints are the same! once again the sf author gets nominated for a "literary" award and does not win: "i hope he wins i hope he wins i hope-- FUCK! well i for one am glad he didn't win, it's just a scam anyway. but maybe next year maybe next year please". pick a country anywhere and do your research. the basic dynamics of nerd fandom recur everywhere.

one more thing that i need to address is your use of the word "sickly". notice that i refrain from using these sorts of health metaphors. the obvious implication is that if fandom is "sick" then somewhere out there one can find a "healthy" fandom, or "medicine" to purge the sickness, restore vitality etc. if a science fiction fan blames his endless frustration on fantastical enemies, you are merely proposing an even more vague source. there is no "sickness", resentment and sense of exclusion are just as inherent to the fandom as enthusiasm, and they make the fandom stronger, not weaker. i'm not talking about fleas on a dog, i'm talking about the dog.

That game is the literal epitome of "how liberals see themselves."

The reality is that they're boycotting bakeries on Tumblr/etc for not baking pro-gay marriage cakes.

Never understood why that series was so loved.

low cohesion of the worlds and very few small scope stories.
>That game is the literal epitome of "how liberals see themselves."
What do you mean?

>Fighting le totalitarian regime for freedums

well that is most games.The same way empire evil, republic good but totalitarian does not = republican. dreamfall would be a better fit

Pls rewrite into English my word-salad friend.

The original I don't think fits what you're saying either but what are you saying?

Oh I butted in on the wrong comment.

The """"good"""" ending is you become a computer enhanced totalitarian ruler. And the people you fight aren't generally totalitarians.

Good sci-fi is generally closer to philosophy than literature.

>decide to come back to Veeky Forums
>a thread about Deus Ex Machina and sci-fi is the first thread

Yeah, I think I'm done here.

But I'm English and I can safely say we don't have that kind of 'genre ghetto' talk over here at all. We have retarded wiki-obsessives and weirdo fanboys and all the other modern capitalist stuff, but this bizarre US-centric cult of persecution you're so set on making a key part of science fiction literature is just not a thing in my country.

They're inherently speculative and don't "write history". It's also a new genre.

Good post
Because there's no action in Pynchon, McCarthy, Bolaño, etc?
Pink Floyd is a shitty band. You could have said the Beatles and made your point, but Punk Floyd sucks other than their first few albums which are ok.

Nice sweeping statements, but you don't do much to actually make your argument beyond insults

That's probably why so many metal fans are also sci-fi nerds (myself included).

So because there are embarrassing people who dress up and act like bards I can dismiss Shakespear? It is pretty ridiculous to think that your guilt by association is even an argument.

Pedantic debates about authenticity and fidelity to tradition are pretty common in literary circles.

Also your point about SF booster complaining about serious criticism is misplaced, not because they think it just fun stories but because literary critics often don't get it (I would throw the overrated Lem into this group as well). Most "high art" critics are unworldy and only see merit in a limited set of themes or by the deployment of various literary devices. They just don't get literature which is less about the why and more about the how.

all of your points have already been addressed. please read the thread.

>Why are sci-fi, fantasy and other action oriented genres considered low class in the world of literature?
Predictability.

Manchildren are pathetic.

only the first point has been addressed

Lol filename ref

make-believe/unrealistic.

okay, i will elaborate. your post is not a rebuttal, but an example.

i wrote that the science fiction fandom focuses their frustrations on an imaginary foe, a intellectual conspiracy to shame them. in your post we have

>literary circles
>literary critics
>Most "high art" critics

who

>often don't get it
>just don't get [science fiction]
>are unworldy
>only see merit in [not science fiction]

so i think it's fair to say that, as a science fiction fan, you feel misunderstood and undervalued by this oppressive authority. that's sad, but it's crucial to establish that this enemy is imaginary and does not correspond to things like actual academic institutions, which, as a quick search shows, publish books like these:

>Classical Traditions in Science Fiction (Oxford University Press)
>The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (Oxford University Press)
>Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (Oxford University Press)
>Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation (Harvard University Press)
>The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (Cambridge University Press)
>Suicide and Contemporary Science Fiction (Cambridge University Press)

i also outlined the mechanism by which the fandom excludes writers that they perceive as having betrayed the fandom and joined the "side" of the imaginary conspiracy, which you helpfully illustrated with:

>I would throw the overrated Lem into this group as well

and your opening line about hypothetically dismissing shakespeare because of shakespeare impersonators (?!) initially seemed like a non-sequitur: i am telling you to dismiss fandom logic, not specific works or authors. but of course from within the fandom there appears to be no difference between the two. i write posts saying there's no conspiracy to dismiss science fiction, but you read them as justification for dismissing science fiction. this is a kind of garbled approximation of the truth: when you reject the myths of the fandom, science fiction itself dissolves. All that's left is some books.

Sure there are parts of academia that actually engage with science fiction on fair terms, but there are also significant part that don't. It is a fair for them to skip over science fiction for whatever they value, the issue is when people comment on or criticize what they don't engage with or only on a superficial level. Of course there is no intellectual conspiracy, but to say that snobbery and narrowness is not common is to be in denial.

>Sure there are parts of academia that actually engage with science fiction on fair terms, but there are also significant part that don't.

and the fandom will not rest until all academics engage with science fiction at all times. in fact, the fandom will not rest even then, because "we do not feel respected" is not a problem any action of any actual academic could solve. but i wrote this already.

>the issue is when people comment on or criticize what they don't engage with

in other words, the fandom considers legitimate only the positions that originate within the fandom, another thing i already wrote.

at this point i have to ask you to not respond to my posts until you have, to use your own term, "engaged" with them, because i'm tired of repeating myself and reading weird potshots like how i "deny narrowness". for clarity, my posts in this thread are these:

Can you think outside of the term fandom? You use the word 'fandom' as a catch all, to point I could see you legitimizing some English professor's cranky proclamations on Physics as valid simply because they refuse to legitimize the fandom of scientists. The expectation that a critic actually read and reasonably understand the texts they criticize is a universal expectation not one of a fandom.

so what you are saying is that academia just another fandom with its own rules and legitimized positions

It's excessively vulgar in its action and fantasy.

There's also fantasy media like Haibane Renmei which has strong similarities to more modern morality tales, more smallfolk-orientated and adolescent-orientated Romanticism (I felt a lot of Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, in it) and some Eastern cultural aspects applied to the Western form of the angel, as well Western culture somehow permeating an extremely xenophobic and traditionalist town.

Which, in turn, can also be differentiated from many forms of YA by its cautious use of vulgarity and its storytelling through the lives and history of the town, and the lives and histories of the Haibane.

Also, lots of action-orientated fiction has a very shallow self-insert rather than one or many 'relatable' character which are given their respects and are able to develop. In sticking to the same media, the self-insert can be seen often in Shounen, where they follow typically something among the lines of "bad people are bad and I have to stop them" and; "im going to stick to my ideals no matter what and they'll somehow save me when i thought they have gotten me killed" and; "i somehow make friends with everybody, even with people I didnt like at one point. also girls are all over me".

This could be reduced to 'challenging' versus 'reinforcing' whatever part of the character the viewer is meant to associate or empathize with. And again, sometimes it's just a matter of subtlety that action-orientated fantasy often lacks.

I hope this helped, if you haven't seen Haibane Renmei you can probably start it now and finish in a few days, it's one-cour and fits the Autumn mood. It also lacks pretense, something which often makes popular media feel very inauthentic. I feel it's impossible to dislike since it lacks much that can be disliked.

>anime
Stop.
We're taking about books.

We're talking about genre fiction, actually.

just stop posting muh man, these retards are to bitter to accept the truth. all they are going to do is either ignore your points, or actively misinterpret them.

that's ok, i only write this stuff to organize my own thoughts. it's fine if people disagree.

>so what you are saying is that academia just another fandom with its own rules and legitimized positions

you can certainly try to prove this by identifying the major features of a nerd fandom in an academic institution of your choice. be aware that you need to be specific and accurate. good luck. i'm not being sarcastic.

>Can you think outside of the term fandom? You use the word 'fandom' as a catch all,

no, i have outlined specific features of fandom behavior that i then refer back to. and i talk about fandom because this a thread about fandom, whether the op knew it when he started it or not.

>I could see you legitimizing some English professor's cranky proclamations on Physics as valid simply because they refuse to legitimize the fandom of scientists. The expectation that a critic actually read and reasonably understand the texts they criticize is a universal expectation not one of a fandom.

this is what i mean by potshots: randomly attributing absurd opinions to me, like "arrogance does not exist" and now "english professors are always right about all things". notice that i never defended any actual academic's actual ignorance: partly because nobody provided any concrete examples of it, but more importantly because my basic point is that actual english professors are irrelevant to the discussion. bemoaning the failings of hypothetical professors is an obfuscatory tactic of, you guessed it, the fandom. notice your own retreat into more and more elaborate hypothetical scenarios. first it was "the academia" persecuting you, then just some parts of it, now it's just "professors expressing negative opinions on science fiction books they haven't read". where does this shrinkage end?

it ends like this: somewhere out there, a professor is wrong. the science fiction fan does not know this, because the professor is being wrong in an academic publication the science fiction fan does not read. thus the life of a science fiction fan is not impacted, and yet he continues his litany of complaints: "the academics are disrespectful, they are ignorant, they exclude us". look past the imaginary scapegoat and what you are left with is: "i feel disrespected, i fell ignored, i feel excluded". why is the science fiction fan so profoundly sad?

well I've always hated them

>IAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMARTIAMSMART
You know if you pull on your penis just right it'll feel even better than making stupid posts like this one without costing you as much effort.

>a sense of exclusion is the lifeblood of science fiction, not an injustice visited upon it by an external foe
What does that have to do with OP's question?

Jesus, are all sci-fi fans this full of /v/ or is it just the people in this thread?

Okay, how does this apply to individual works.

Answer the question or I'm claiming a win on that point by default.

you could change it to almost anything

Yeah, as expressed through books
This is Veeky Forums not /a/, and I say that as someone who loves anime.

I'm not him you autistic fucking faggot
>I'm claiming a win by default
I'm serious when I'm asking if all sci-fi fans are this juvenile. Only one of you has actually engaged the guy's points at all, and instead most have been either intentionally misinterpreting him or throwing a tantrum and claiming that it makes you "win by default".

So I'll ask again, are all sci-fi fans so full of /v/ or is it just the ones in this thread?

yes. all of them. all of them are full of /v/

>autistic fucking faggot
you sure showed that tantrum throwing autistic shitcunt faggot

Whoops, sorry for insulting you, I must have forgot Veeky Forums was a safe space for the differently abled.

okay, i'll write it again, just for you. op asked why science fiction is excluded from whatever a "world of literature" is. i answered by rejecting the premise of his question: there is no such exclusion, what exists instead is a sense of exclusion cultivated by science fiction fans for their own benefit. i'm sorry if you still have trouble with this, i can find no simpler way to express it.

Thank you shitlord. And don't call me 'you.' I prefer to be addressed as 'Zaphod Beeblebrox.'

> there is no such exclusion, what exists instead is a sense of exclusion cultivated by science fiction fans for their own benefit
I don't buy this. Send your allegory about the dog baring its throat rather than be judged as harshly as other literature to Harlan Ellison, he'll read it and then knock on your front door a week later and literally try to rip your throat out.

>I don't buy this.
okay.

>Harlan Ellison will act like an asshole so your wrong
Not the guy you're replying to, but none of your arguments have actually been arguments, and Harlan Ellison is a shitty writer regardless of which genre he's writing in. he's excluded by academics because he's garbage.

>okay
okay.

The point about Harlan Ellison doesn't have to be Ellison. My point was that user was writing in incredibly broad terms that can't really be applied to an entire genre accurately.

>what exists instead is a sense of exclusion cultivated by science fiction fans for their own benefit
Does this not sound like a load of crap to you? Sure OP asked a stupid as shit question but I don't consider this answer much better.

>why does everyone look down on sci-fi/fantasy
>all sci-fi/fantasy fans exclude themselves on purpose
This sounds like a worthless exchange to me.

>science fiction is a fandom
Once we reached this point we lost all hope of discussion getting anywhere. OP is talking about popular perception of genre, not fandoms. The fans aren't the genre. But then they affect how people see it so they are.

Fuck this is a worthless issue. It's too fucking general to go anywhere. Nobody can be right or wrong when we're using such broad terms. When we're throwing around crap like

>the second serious criticism is applied to sf, the writers and fans recoil: "it's just a fun story about rocket ships! silly crap for kids! did you expect shakespeare? leave us alone!"
How can we expect to get anywhere?

so a conversation has been happening for days and here you are, having read it no further than the third post, declaring it futile on the grounds that words are meaningless and human communication is doomed.

the words are fine. communication is possible with a little effort. what is futile is interrupting a discussion of science fiction with a discussion of the possibility of discussing science fiction. that is a worthless exchange.

>words are meaningless and human communication is doomed
Couldn't have put it better myself. Won't brb, cutting my tongue out and moving into a log cabin.

Ignore him. at this point he's either baiting or just posting to keep this thread alive.

>incapable of being terse

That's sci-fi for ya

You clearly didn't read the guy's argument. Without the "fandom" there is no science fiction because there is just a bunch of books. If you try to define sf otherwise answer this question: why is Thomas Pynchon not considered a science fiction author.

>why is Thomas Pynchon not considered a science fiction author
because his books wouldn't sell as well under that label. I consider him a punk/science-fiction author.

I didn't start this thread and have only replied to you twice, so projecting your fandom and persecution theories is laughable. I merely pointed out that one does not have to go far to find snobbery in academia or in various literary circles and that the complaint of science fiction readers is valid to some degree. My hypothetical is apt given your over reliance on the word fandom. Honestly wouldn't care if academia overlooked science fiction, my problem is with ignorant criticism.