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Originally Posted by Ainulindale That said this has little to do with Orson Scott Card's work, as the IROSF is hardly teh first critical group to denoucne Card as a legitimate SF writer. I personally enjoy Card, but I have seen the arguments and admitteldy there is some validity to a lot of them,... |
I wasn't aware that there is some institution or organization that decides which writers are "legitimate" science fiction (or fantasy, for that matter) writers and and which aren't. I was always under the impression that if a person writes science fiction he or she is, for that partiular piece at least, a science fiction writer. To call someone a "legitimate" writer in any genre and then to say that someone else is not smacks of over-intellectualization. Writers write what they write. Kafka wrote "The Metamorphisis", which could probably be called horror or fantasy, and while I don't think anyone would classify him primarily as a writer of horror fiction or of fantasy, certainly he was a horror (or fantasy, depending on how one looks at it) writer when he wrote that piece.
This whole concept also brings up the question of definitions. In my opinion (and I recognize that is all that it is), to say that some writers are legitimate science fiction writers and other writers are not by extension supposes that there is some hard and fast definition of what science fiction is and what it is not. While there are certainly stories that fall within a definition of science fiction and others that definitely fall outside anything that could be called that, formalized and restrictive definitions are not productive especially in a genre where so many different approaches can be taken. Jules Verne was a science fiction writer. So was Robert A. Heinlein. So is William Gibson. But I would hardly say that their subject matter or their approaches are anywhere close to similar.