I managed to nuke this blog earlier. all of my links are gone and so are the tags. *long-suffering sigh* It’s the beginning of the semester and I’m already fried.

Today’s major disappointment came in the mail with my copy of New Scientist in which one of my favorite writers, Jeanette Winterson, got all snotty on genre and actually said, “I hate science fiction.” She then went on to praise Margaret Atwood (I’m assuming she was referring to the incredibly scififfic Oryx and Crake) because we all know that she’s NOT scifi. Perish the fucking thought. Why oh why…do I care?! It’s not like I’m publishing in Asimov’s. But I do get a little testy when ‘real’ writers talk about the dangers of hacks writing fiction based on ‘bad science’. Or is it that it’s bad writing about science? I can never get it straight. I do know that my least favorite of Winterson’s novels involve her ham-fisted attempts to incorporate/jam theoretical physics into the narrative. It just didn’t work for me. Then again, neither does the vast majority of scifi, but I’m not going to make blanket statements about an entire fucking genre while simultaneously removing a few precious tomes (that involve many scifi themes and tropes!) because they’re somehow more special! Then again, I’m not Jeanette Winterson.

Then I read Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” for seminar in which she names several scifi authors (including Octavia Butler and Tiptree!) specifically and refers to them as ‘theorists’! Memo to the academy: tell your flunkies to get their stories straight! Scifi as pseudo-science/masculinist/ colonizing fiction. Or scifi as liberatory/futurist/feminist theory. Oh. Wait. I have a suggestion — it’s both! So shutup with the generalizations already! Jeez!

[/rant]