Ødela Star Wars for sjangeren?
James Morrow er en science fiction forfatter litt utenom det vanlige: “What I’m interested in doing probably partakes as much of social satire and dark humor and philosophical commentary as much as it does what we think of as science fiction,” sier han selv. I fjord sommer leste jeg hans Towing Jehovah, en bok jeg likte veldig godt.
I dag kom jeg over et intervju med Morrow, og jeg likte det han hadde å si om science fiction sjangeren såpass at jeg gjengir det her:
It’s sad to me, though, that there is such a stigma attached to it [science fiction]. And it’s only gotten worse in recent years. There was a time, I would say, in the late seventies, when a lot of university professors recognized that science fiction was a serious and legitimate literature. It accomplished some pretty remarkable commentary, and it was not synonymous with escapist entertainment. It was a literature of ideas, and it was the kind of literature that played with theological, philosophical, and sociological questions.
But then beginning in the eighties, when the Star Wars films became cultural touchstones and movies like E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were mopping up at the box office; that was ultimately bad news for the literature of science fiction, because to teachers at universities, science fiction, once again, became mindless escapism as opposed to a literature of ideas.
I love the fact that science fiction enables me as a writer to take a very broad perspective on the human species and to address these very big philosophical and theological problems. It lets me write about religion in very non-realistic modes. I can actually have a woman character whose problems include that she’s Jesus’s divine half sister and she’s living in a lighthouse in Atlantic City, and doesnÃt know what her destiny is. That book is called Only Begotten Daughter.
And I can do these magical fantastical wonderful scenes. I could have her bringing a dead crab back to life! And she can breathe underwater. She spends most of the novel wondering what to do with her supernatural powers.
Science fiction also lets me do something like bring a literal corpse of God on stage. A writer like Dostoevsky or Nietzsche can talk about the death of God, but in my science fiction, I’m able to have this corpse bumping into a supertanker and causing lots of chaos among the crew. So, I love the genre’s toolkit, as I said. But I wish it got more respect.
Tags: star wars
