When sci-fi went mainstream

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 19:54:00 +0000

THE COVER OF THIS past summer’s special science fiction issue of The New Yorker depicts what, for at least some of the magazine’s loyal subscribers, must have been a horrifying scene. In the tableau, drawn by cartoonist Daniel Clowes, a gap has ripped open in space-time during a genteel cocktail party. A smiling man in a space suit, a robot, and a green alien with tentacles are poised to step through the portal, over a pile of books, knocked from a tall bookshelf, into a room of well-dressed literary intellectuals who, it goes without saying, look less than pleased at the pending invasion.

The trope of invasion is doubly brilliant, first because the invasion plot is a mainstay of SF and second because the trope captures quite neatly what it must feel like for some literary intellectuals to be forced to confront the increasing cultural cachet of SF, to face its meteoric rise over the last thirty years from lowbrow genre to literary respectability. The genre now comfortably occupies university syllabi, best-of lists, and handsome Library of America editions — though some hardened highbrows might suspect its popularity is more a function of marketing than of quality.

Salon.com > A Clockwork Orange

When sci-fi went mainstream