Oh, Michel Basilières's column on SF makes...: "

Oh, Michel Basilières's column on SF makes my brain hurt. Where to begin?

"Perhaps the most admired and influential American SF writer is Robert A. Heinlein." Really? After I read that, I asked some hardcore geeks who they thought the most influential American SF writer was, and no one replied Heinlein. When I asked if they thought he was admired, the standard answer was, "Well, he wrote some good stuff, but most of it is just fascist pulp." (Their answers on who is? Ellison, Dick, and Asimov were mentioned most often.)

He goes on to quote from a Heinlein short story (not one that is held up as even being groundbreaking or influential) and concludes, "The above is an example of the kind of stupidity (or, let’s be generous and say Error of Common Sense) that turns many people away from science fiction." This is about as ridiculous as the Globe & Mail article that concluded people don't read SF anymore because the book 2001 didn't come true. There are reasons people don't read SF. They're probably along the lines of "Nobody in the mainstream media writes intelligently about SF on a regular basis, leaving readers to fend for themselves, and when they do write about it, they write crap like this."

Of course, he is right about a few things. SF needs to open itself up a bit. It has the same problems as the comic book industry: it's not so nice to the newbie readers. (Of course, Basilières also wrote: "Critical histories and encyclopedias insist on completeness in their listings instead of importance, to the point of wasting time on television shows and comic books.") But the problem seems to be that this column treats SF as if it's precious (and not in the good definition of the word), and as if SF is so much more different than any other genre. Just replace some names (Stephen King for a column on horror; Nora Roberts for a column on romance; Steve Niles for a column on comics; Zadie Smith for a column on literary fiction) and you've got yourself a year's worth of columns. Of course the hacks outsell the quality. Of course many talented writers tend to write a lot of crappy filler in order to pay the bills. Blah blah blah, we've heard it all before.

So just a note to magazine and newspaper editors: can you please hire people who are knowledgable about a genre and actually like the goddamn genre to write about it? You've found some for mysteries. Now find some for SF and comics.

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(Via blog.)