What makes a Good Book? What makes a Good SF/Fantasy Book? What makes a Literary Classic? Today we're looking at the differences between these three questions; and discovering which SF/Fantasy books have graduated out of their genre, into the ranks of Literature.
Serious Judgmental Readers (critics, professors and literati) generally look down their noses at SF/Fantasy books, because "they're not really literature". SF/Fantasy books are put in a reputational ghetto, where they may sell millions, but they aren't ever going to win a Pulitzer or Nobel prize.
Occasionally, an SF/Fantasy book manages to escape from that ghetto. It sells and keeps selling, it's well-written, and it's influential on other writers. Eventually those Serious Judgmental Readers allow this ugly duckling of a book to move uptown, where it can be seen as Classic Literature.
Follow me over the fold, to consider our three initial questions, and look at some SF/Fantasy books which have graduated out of their genre, into the ranks of Literature.
Thank You to quarkstomper, for letting me into his playground. If quarkstomper were writing this, he'd say:
I also wanted to throw in my usual blurbs for my Nifty Sci-Fi/Fantasy Index as well as my webcomic at Kurtoons Online and my urban fantasy story Dark Redemption.
What makes a Good Book? What makes a Good SF/Fantasy Book? What makes a Literary Classic?
What makes a Good Book?
Our simplest question already has two answers.
First, a Good Book is any book that you personally enjoy reading. If you like it so much that you read it again, it's a Very Good Book, to you.
Second, and theoretically more objectively: a Good Book is a book that meets wider cultural standards of quality. If your friends or family like it; or reviews say it's Good; or if a book is well-written and plotted, with engaging characters, descriptions and dialog - then it's Good.
There are all sorts of standards of goodness; a Pulitzer counts for more than a good review in the local paper. There is no ultimate arbiter of excellence - Moby Dick wasn't much read or praised for half a century after it came out. But some books get close to a critical consensus on their excellence, and live there for decades or centuries.
What makes a Literary Classic?
Someone defined a Classic as "a book people still read a century after it was published." A very reasonable view. If many readers love a book, and keep reading it, it eventually becomes a Classic.
But is it a Literary Classic? Books still have those Serious Judgmental Readers to contend with, a whole industry that rates and markets books based on widely held and endlessly debated Standards of Literary Excellence. A Classic book is widely read, for a long time; a Literary Classic wins prizes, gets assigned in college classes, and appears on Best Book lists.
Libraries have been written about what makes up Literary Excellence. If we're going to debate endlessly about them, we'd better do it in the comments, not here in the diary. I'll try for a first approximation, a few of the first requirements. For a book to become a Literary Classic it should have:
A text which is readable, and gets its meaning across clearly; a plot which is interesting, convincing, and sometimes surprising; characters who are consistent but not robotic (unless they're actually robots), who have a coherent inner life and make choices; writing which has beauty, power, vividness and style.
What makes a Good SF/Fantasy Book?
A sense of wonder. All the excellences I mentioned still matter - we like to find them in any book. But the heart of SF/Fantasy is a brave, enchanting vision of a world we've never seen.
For me, the heart of the matter is strangeness and originality. I turn to SF/Fantasy for ideas, devices, creatures and worlds I would never have thought of on my own, or found in any other book. At the center is a radical vision of a world fundamentally unlike ours; on the surface are the trappings of science, aliens, weirdness and magic that allow us to see, to grasp, to live between the covers of all this otherness.
What makes an SF/Fantasy Book into a Literary Classic?
I did a study which, while not quite empirical, was surely obsessive. I found 16 different 100 Best Books lists, and I tallied up all the SF/Fantasy Books I found there, and how many lists each title appeared on. Some of the lists were strictly for novels; some were for all-time, and others were for the 20th Century (one was from 1923-2008); some were compiled by individuals or boards, while others were taken from polls of BBC listeners or Waterstones customers; some were British, some American, some worldwide. Not very scientific, but pretty interesting.
This is a very rough measure indeed of what makes a Literary Classic, and it's not as highbrow as the term Literary suggests. Still, it gives a fair sense of which SF/Fantasy Novels are now considered to be among the most respected and widely loved books, of all genres.
In the poll you'll find the SF/Fantasy Books that made it onto the most Best Books lists. I've put the number of lists (out of 16) that a book appeared on, in parentheses after each title. I included a few books at the lower end (the ones from only 4 lists), because I consider them Literary Classics. The only one I left out that made more than 5 lists was Animal Farm (10), since Orwell already had the most-listed 1984.
The other SF/Fantasy Books that made several of the 16 Best Book lists were: The Wind in the Willows, The Little Prince (5); Gulliver's Travels, Winnie the Pooh, Charlotte's Web, Dune, Watership Down, The Stand (4); Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Naked Lunch, Ender's Game, Discworld, The Time Traveller's Wife, Life of Pi (3); Nightmare Abbey, Picture of Dorian Gray, The War of the Worlds, Foundation, Cat's Cradle, Ubik, Mists of Avalon, Neuromancer, Shadow of the Wind (2).
If you just want a list of the Best SF/Fantasy Books of all time, NPR have the excellent Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books
I wanted to do some capsule reviews of the SF/Fantasy Books that rose highest in the canon, the ones that are now solid gold Literary Classics. As I wrote this diary, I realized the most salient thing about those books would be the pith of their literary excellence: just what is so great about their writing, that makes readers and other writers admire and emulate them. I could give you capsule reviews, but I haven't read any of them recently enough to give you a fresh sense of their excellence.
Let me just point to the six SF/Fantasy Books that made it onto 7 or more lists out of the 16 different 100 Best Books lists I looked at: Frankenstein, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Brave New World, 1984, Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There are two things these books all have to an exceptional degree; they are all very well-written books, by literary standards; and they are phenomenally original books, overflowing with that brave and unusual vision which I found at the heart of SF/Fantasy. Every one of those six books was a watershed in literature, and each spawned hundreds of imitators (not that anyone will ever succeed in writing quite like Lewis Carroll or Douglas Adams).
Frankenstein is the first Modern Science Fiction book. Writers had sent their heroes to the moon before, but noone had brought such a troubled, forward-looking dilemma to life, or put such contraptions or scientific attitude into a book before Mary Shelley. She did this in 1818 - about 60 years later, Jules Verne and H. G. Wells started to build from there, and wrote the foundations for 20th Century SF.
1984 borrowed from Zamyatin, but also carved out a bleak dystopia which has informed almost half the SF written since it was published. The Lord of the Rings introduced a new scale and intimacy to epic fantasy: myths finally caught up with the age of the novel. And half the Fantasy written since then is standing on Tolkein's shoulders.
The greatest SF/Fantasy Literary Classics are the ones that are written with a sure and skillful hand, and look further beyond our everyday experience (and what's already been written) than their competitors.
Which of your favorite Books are powerful SF/Fantasy, and also beautiful Literature?