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Way back in the day there was no such thing as a separate science fiction “genre”. If you go back far enough (sometime in the 19th Century), there were no separate genres at all, just a single, all-encompassing “literature” umbrella.

Then, with the spread of literacy in the “Western World” and the advent of technology for mass-producing magazines (both occurring during the 1880s, if memory serves me right), there was an explosion of magazines - “slicks” being the glossy, upmarket publications for the better-off, and “pulps”, for the poorer lower classes, trashier publications printed on cheap, bad quality paper.

These magazines contained lurid, and mostly badly written stories of all kinds - mysteries, detective fiction, wild adventures set in darkest Africa or other unexplored parts of the world, fantasies and “scientific romances”, to name only a few. They gained great popularity, and circulations went through the roof.

These general fiction magazines quickly spawned newer publications devoted solely to single types of fiction, the most popular being the detective/mystery/crime kind of story. The splintering of fiction off into separate “genres” had begun, although the phenomenon wasn’t accorded any real recognition until much later.

Science fiction remained in the general fiction magazines until relatively late on, only splitting off into its own magazine (and genre) when the first issue of Amazing Stories was published in April 1926. Since that time, and right up to this very day, we’ve had an on-going conflict and friction within SF concerning the genre vs mainstream thing, something that can really get up a head of steam when the literary snobs and wannabies and SF genre-ists (is that a real word?) lock horns.

I’m not going to ramble on too much about the history of SF, the struggle by editors and writers to drag the SF magazines out of their lowly literary ghetto into the rarified stratosphere of higher literary sophistication. That struggle was won a long time ago, and SF is written today at a literary level as high (or higher) than any other genre (or the much-lauded mainstream).

The separate struggle, to get the mainstream to accord the SF genre “respect”, will never be won, and in my opinion is totally irrelevant anyway, a chimera, a mere distraction. We don’t need their respect, and the opinions of any of these non-entities (most of whom would give both arms to have the commercial success and money of a Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett or any other successful genre author) are something I personally couldn’t care less about.

Why should we worry what a bunch of literary snobs and crusty academics think of us? These people just don’t “get” SF, and never will, so it’s no use trying to convince them otherwise. And to the literary elitists within SF who are trying to attain their Holy Grail of reshaping the genre in the image of the mainstream, I have only one thing to say: Get Lost! If you don’t like us, piss off and go shack up with your mainstream buddies instead. Or are you afraid they’ll spit on you for being lowly genre types?

In my opinion, the genrefication of science fiction was a good thing, even if it was a rough experience for many authors for the first few decades. It gave the genre its own hardcore, fanatical readership and culture, and a strong, separate identity and characteristics, things that it would most likely never have developed if it hadn’t been locked away in its little ghetto. The literary sophistication came later, and ongoing improvement is always welcome. But, in my opinion, genre SF is doing quite well, thank you very much!

Phil