Book Life: The loathing of Sci-Fi.

So many of our customers declare that they hate Science Fiction! Ally dips her toes into the genre, and finds that it's actually very good.

Every night closing up the shop, I walk past the bursting pin board, full of names looking to belong to bookclubs. I turn out the lights, and they glow slightly in the phosphorescent lights from the window, etching out the scribbled descriptions of names and preferences, and the occasional drawing of a cat.

Mary Green: Loves: fiction. Loathes: Sci-Fi

Belinda Chan: Loves: everything. Loathes: Sci-Fi

Gloria Singh: Loves: fiction. Loathes: I will not join a book club if any of its members like Sci-Fi. Does not say good things about the individuals.

Wylie Thompson: Loves: books! Loathes: Sci-Fi

Amanda Hansen: Loves: Sebastian Faulks and de Bernieres. Loathes: Sci-Fi rubbish

And so the sad pejorative pattern would go on. I started to wonder why Sci-Fi deserved so much loathing. What had it done wrong, to make so many people hate it so? To me they seem rather harmless; they sit quietly and unobtrusively on the shelf, keeping their hands and feet to themselves. True, some of them take up more than their fair share of the shelf and clearly need to work on their diets, and others are in need of a makeover. Some are getting old, and their skin is starting to peel. Some are gaudy and overly decorated. But compare them to the fiction shelves. Again, some have excess weight, some are old and tired, and some have covers which cry out for judgement, though you know you must never judge a book by its cover. But no one blames the fiction books for being fiction. They are, on the whole, admired, and are accepted by the general reading public as the norm. Sci-Fi is weird. It’s masquerading as literature. It’s unloveable. Nobody likes Sci-Fi.

So I started to question my own beliefs about Sci-Fi. Sure, I didn't like it either. Because it’s a bit odd. If you do like it, like Taylor Swift, it’s one of those dirty little secrets only your cat and your credit card should know about you. But had I really bothered to get to know Sci-Fi? Or had I simply accepted the status quo, and made assumptions about what really lay on the over-populated, poorly maintained and unknowably alphabetised ghettos of the Sci-Fi shelves? I decided to make it my personal responsibility to start getting to know Sci-Fi a little better, before I joined the majority ranks of those who, not wanting to accept difference, put it in the ‘loathes’ category.

I looked for the most stereotyped Sci-Fi novel I could find. Trawling the shelves for old, geeky, yet surprisingly often sought out (no doubt by unsavoury types). Ernest Cline's Ready Player One seemed like a good start. There were references to video games (which I understand about as much as the Theory of Relativity), it

was set in the future, and there was a male protagonist. I knew from the moment I turned, the first page, we were not going to get along. Yet try as I might, I was sucked into a world, which seemed not so very different from the slums I had visited in developing countries today, I sympathised with the characters who could only find some positivity in their environment inside a video game, and I silently cheered on the feminist love interest (although I would have argued with some of the insinuations both about sexuality and obesity). Overall, I enjoyed hanging out with the characters in Ready Player One to an embarrassing extent. So much so, that I thought I should attempt to understand the genre a little more.

I’m not very good at the whole ‘not judging books by covers’ etc. thing. I purely chose JeffVanderMeer’s Annihilation from The Southern Reach Trilogy based on its ridiculously pretty cover. What can I say? It was shiny. One of the weirder books I've read. You don't learn the names of any of the characters, you don’t know why they're there, which co-incidentally, where is there? Nothing is fully described, there are no clear goodies and baddies, and by the end, you feel totally disorientated and questioning your own reality. 

But give it a chance. It is beautifully written, haunting, disturbing and, given we know nothing about the form that anyone takes, very human. And anyway, no one understands Murakami, but everyone pretends they do, just because it’s fiction. And everyone loves fiction, right?

The next in the instalment was an attempt at convincing others to join my campaign to learn before you loathe. Station Eleven was bought as a Christmas present for my sister, who discarded it almost immediately in favour of John Green and Khaled Hossieni. 

Seriously, is it so hard to get to know someone who is a bit different from your normal friend group? But let’s be honest, it was what I'd been hoping for all along. I snaffled it up quickly, and started to read. Based on a group of travelling Shakespeare performers, about 20 years following a flu that wipes out the majority of the human race and their lives immediately prior  (keep reading though, there are no aliens.) It explores the meaning of friendships, how certain people can touch your life in a small way and stay with you forever, and the types of people we become when we have it all, and lose it again. Emily St. John Mandall shows an exquisite understanding of humanity, the importance of art, and make the perfect Star Wars references. What more could you want?

It is always appropriate to (somewhat) respect your elders, so I binged on Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, Madaddam and The Handmaid’s Tale and John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids. I know Margaret is an acquired taste, but I'm pretty sure that’s just because it can be hard to contemplate the fact that women have been second class citizens for the majority of history and what if that never changes? 
The point is, Atwood is an amazing feminist writer, who forces the reader to think about the future that we might create, and the people that we want to be in the future. Her writing is clear and deceptively simple. If it sounds a bit scary for some of you ‘loathers’, I'd start off with The Edible Woman. Nothing futuristic, and lots of metaphors for fiction lovers to enjoy. Wyndham was one of the first to conceptualise a post apocalyptic world, and though it is fairly one dimensional and simplistic, it still offers interesting and important messages about human society, especially in the cold war period and the delicate structures of our world, which could so easily be undone. (It’s pretty much historical fiction wrapped up in one big metaphor, if you'd rather not frame it as a futuristic novel.) 

I still have a long way to go on my adventure to understand the less adored shelves of the bookshop. I still don't really know the difference between ‘dystopian’, ‘post apocalyptic’, ‘Sci-Fi’ and ‘futuristic fantasy’. I still don't understand the allure of books that discuss improbabilities such as the human race populating the entire galaxy, women evolving to have massive tits that shoot silver bullets (no one thought about practicality or comfort obviously), or picturing humans living in harmony with alien creatures which are essentially green 3 eyed creatures of us. But these intelligent, thoughtful, often haunting, and (usually) well-written books above have forced me to consider my place in the world, the type of future I want for myself and generations to come, have led me to battle through Naomi Klein’s brick of a book “This Changes Everything” and to become more open minded about today’s reality. Who knows? Maybe I'll start to investigate why everyone hates maths so much, by getting to know it a little? Then again, maybe I won’t.