Oh boy. It's NOT science fiction, eh?

[salanth]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/atwood-have-i-ever-eaten-maggots-perhaps/article1284530/

What the book absolutely is not, she insists, is science fiction - a statement she has made repeatedly since the 2003

Comments

[tisiphone]

oh her

[karenjeane]

Staying out of the sci-fi ghetto to remain in the Can Lit canon . . .

[blueheron]

A shame really.

I like her near-future speculative apocalyptic writing. Too bad for her it sits on my shelves with all the other SciFi that I read. :p

[anton_p_nym]

Much as this disappoints me, I can't say she's acting wrongly here for her own interests anyway. Atwood as a reputation for being literary, and the publication pigeon-holes for "Can-lit" and "literary fiction" are more lucretive than the one for "SF".

-- Steve wonders how much of her denials come at her own behest, and how many come from her agent's.

It's just part of the overall Canadian literature disease

[beable]

http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=1991007

I see the stuff that is acclaimed as "great Canadian literature" on the bookshelves regularly. As far as I can tell, the bulk of it is soul-sucking drivel in which a group of people "just like the reader" (but nothing like me or any of the people I know) go through the most banal crises possible for the most banal of reasons.

Give me genre fiction and fantasy - whether it's light-hearted space-opera romp, or subversive books about something important - any day.

I honestly can never figure out what people like most of the acclaimed Canadian can-lit writers are writing about. It's like looking through the window at a cocktail party full of people who hate life, and want everyone around them to hate life too.