A sucker for a fantastic story

-Often dismissed as low-brow, science fiction and fantasy deserve a far better rap, argues Louise Schwartzkoff.

Barely five minutes into the first class on my first day at university and already I have blown it. As part of the preliminary chit-chat, the tutor asks about our favourite books. Others list serious tomes by serious authors: Michael Ondaatje, Umberto Eco, James Joyce.

I pluck one at random from a long list and name a book with a spaceship on its cover. It is as though I have confessed to eating my own earwax. I can see them wondering where I stash my Star Trek memorabilia.

Another year, another English class and the book, Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, appears on the set reading list. To my delight (OK, smug self-satisfaction), the doubters zip through the story of Shevek, a brilliant physicist from the planet Anarres, a place where organised anarchy is the only system of government. In lectures and tutorials, we babble about dystopias and science fiction's potential for social commentary.

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Graduation and employment do nothing to quash my hunger for imaginary universes but the real world is full of sceptics. When asked, I talk about the other books on my shelves. Not the ones with spaceships. Or dragons or telepaths or wizards. Nevertheless, these are the books that keep me up at night. The ones I read in the bath. The ones I hold in front of my nose as I walk home from the station because I can't bear to put them down.

But in literary circles, science fiction and fantasy novels have all the credibility of Spot's First Walk. It is easy to see why. Walk into Galaxy Books on York Street and you will see cabinets full of plastic Star Wars figurines. A cardboard Gandalf stands near the stairs. It does not look like a place for grown-ups.

On one occasion, a woman came in with her grandchild, ran an incredulous eye over the shelves and said aloud: ''You'd have to be kind of strange to like this stuff.''

''Those were her words,'' says store manager Mark Timmony, an affable tattooed bloke with chunky silver rings on his fingers. ''I made a joke out of it. I said, 'Yeah, one of my colleagues is pretty strange but he was strange before he got here'. Some people are always going to assume you're a nerd with no friends if you read this stuff. It's a cross we have to bear.''

The thing is, there aren't enough lonely geeks to account for the sales. At HarperCollins Publishers, science fiction and fantasy novels make up 20 per cent of all fiction sales. Last month, fantasies by John Flanagan, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson featured on the bestseller lists. Not that popularity is a reliable sign of quality - just look at the anaemic teenage vampires taking up shelf space in homes all over the world.

Those who say 90 per cent of the genre is crap are quite right. But so was the author Theodore Sturgeon when he famously retorted, ''90 per cent of everything is crap''.

More than any other genre, science fiction and fantasy are judged by their worst examples. Those who despise the stuff leap instantly to the three-breasted martians and chicks in chain mail of the 1950s.
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LINK - - -
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/a-sucker-for-a-fantastic-story-2010122...