science fiction filed elsewhere

I've often enjoyed books that would feel right at home in the science fiction section of the bookstore, but that for whatever reason don't usually get filed there. Some of these books are readily recognized as science (or speculative) fiction that somehow transcends the genre (e.g., 1984, Brave New World). Others get a "get out of the science fiction section free" card by merit of having an author known better for other things (e.g., A Handmaid's Tale, The Road). Still others could be seen as SF or not, depending on your point of view (e.g., Cloud Atlas, Being Invisible). And on the fringes of this category, spanning the remaining gap to completely mainstream fiction, lie writers whose work might not be immediately identifiable as SF, but which draws on common themes and interests (e.g., Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino).

While these books are not all equally successful as mainstream fiction, as science fiction, and as literary fiction, there's a nice quality to them that I think derives from their ability to succeed in multiple contexts. While I wouldn't mind discussing this in the abstract, I know listmaking is a popular pastime around here, and of course I'm always on the lookout for interesting things to read. So I wouldn't mind a few replies even if this just turns into a listmaking exercise. And as an aside, books on this list may be particularly useful to the SF apologist.

But is it just me? Is this an interesting category to think about, or just an offhand observation leading nowhere?

Ooh, a listmaking exercise? We do seem to like those.

Here's one I made earlier.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Aberystwyth Mon Amour by Malcolm Pryce
Lost in a Good Book by Jasper Fforde
Oryx And Crake by Margaret Atwood
The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde
The Cryptographer by Tobias Hill
Last Tango in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce
Mobius Dick by Andrew Crumey
Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde
The Flood by Maggie Gee
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Clear Water by Will Ashon
Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
The Possibility Of An Island by Michel Houellebecq
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Romanitas by Sophia McDougall
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millett
The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce
The Island of Lost Souls by Martyn Bedford
The Glass Books Of The Dream Eaters by GW Dahlquist
The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes
My Dirty Little Book Of Stolen Time by Liz Jensen
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Ascent by Jed Mercuio
Hav by Jan Morris
Cold Skin by Albert Sanchez Pinol
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
Surveillance by Jonathan Raban
The Book of Dave by Will Self
The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas
Bareback by Kit Whitfield
High John the Conqueror by Jim Younger
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
The Pesthouse by Jim Crace
The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua
First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde
The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall
Rome Burning by Sophia McDougall
Don't Cry for Me Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce
The Weight of the City by Will Rhode
Resistance by Owen Sheers
The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson
The Heritage by Will Ashon
Sputnik Caledonia by Andrew Crumey
The Gone Away World by Nick Harkaway
The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt
Everything is Sinister by David Llewellyn
Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pinol
The Butt by Will Self

Dear dankimberg,

I have just linked your letter to another group, to which I belong, (not LT) which was discussing how to "label" a cartoonist. Was he SF'ish or not?
(An Australian/British political cartoonist 1952-70)

I enjoyed you thoughts and analysis and also appreciated the following LIST by HoldenCarver.
My TBR pile has just increase x%

As a SF'ista of many years (approx. 50) my problem, once was, where do I store Ghormengeist
or WE or all the more "literary" works, exactly of the type you describe. Do I file them with fiction or SF?

Sorry I still don't have an answer to that one... But
I am getting tempted to just classify "anything" that is even remotely SF or Fantasy or even just "exotic" onto the same shelves - by author.

Of course this doesn't answer anything about "abstract" classifications, it's a start though.

Yours. Guido.

PS. Where do I file UFOology etc.

edited to add PS.

Much of Vonnegut, though it always annoyed me (back in the day) that he was shelved with mainstream fiction in bookstores. Struck me as a cynical mercenary practice (which still surprised back then!) rather than as an accurate cataloging practice.

I almost missed reading Inherit the Stars and everything else Hogan wrote because it was originally shelved in the 'Fiction' section rather than 'Science Fiction'.

>2 HoldenCarver:: Jasper fforde self-identifies as a writer of the fantastic (as opposed to his sister, whio write pure chicklit). And as you all know, Chabon's 'The Yiddish policemen's union' is a Hugo winner.

>3 guido47:: Guido asks "Where do I file UFOology". Dewey classifies ufology under "spurious knowledge" with other nutcults. It certainly isn't sf... A few years ago, I went to a debate at an Eastercon as to 'why don't sf fans believe in flying saucers?'. My answer was that a) most flying saucer theories are worse than the worst sf, and b) sf fans probably want there to be alien intelligences, but would be quite happy for them to be talking squids, sentient vegetables or hyper-intelligent shades of the colour blue. Most UFO nuts would be mortified if the aliens DIDN'T turn out to be either Greys or Jesus.

i find jasper fforde too cutesy for words.

Thanks RobertDay, I was wondering what to TAG those type of books, I think I tagged some as "nuts" but "spurious" sounds so much better.

PS. Many of my "spurious knowledge" books came from my Dad. He was a mathematician and a "European intellectual" type. He read them because he found them funny.
I prefere MY aliens to be more of the unexpected type eg. Hoyles Black Cloud.

>2 HoldenCarver:: thanks for the long list, lots of interesting stuff there I didn't know about.

>3 guido47:: These are interesting issues. I've never been a huge fan of absolute labels, but they're a necessary evil. Unfortunately, book classification systems are mostly one-dimensioned, while in reality there are many valid and useful ways to classify books. All the more justification for listmaking, I guess.

This is precisely why I find the "tagging" concept so appealing - metainformation emerges from a cloud of disparate "systems".

Coming at this from the other direction, I gave my copy of Edwin Abbott's Flatland away to someone a few years ago and then, not too long ago, needed to get another copy. I just couldn't find it anywhere looking in the Mathematics sections of bookstores, and then finally, in desperation, I took a wild shot that it might be showing up in sci-fi and fantasy, which is where I finally found it.

Tagging is a flawed concept and near useless. It's an attempt to make use of "the wisdom of crowds" and critical mass, and fails on both counts. I have seen on last. fm a band tagged as "music that makes me want to fuck a goat". How is it that a helpful tag?

#11

The discussion about shapes and geometry might have been mathematical, but what about the talk of other dimensions, religious views and ideology, and aliens?

Flatland is a great book - is there an colour illustrated edition that I might be able to find, and what could I expect to pay for such a find?

i have seen bujold under mainstream fiction. that is just plain weird and i haven't a clue why.

>12 iansales:

surely the "fuck a goat" tag is DROWNED by more relevant associations (or perhaps NOT - as I have no idea what last.fm is...perhaps fuck-a-goat associations are common fare there). The fact that one idiot is an idiot does not negate the aggregate intelligence of others....

#13

Color? Gee, I don't know. I got the two-in-one edition that includes Sphereland by Dionys Burger. I'm not even sure that color illustrations of Flatland would be all that helpful anyway, considering that the illustrations are all line drawings.

EDIT: Though I notice that there's a book tie-in to "Flatland: The Movie (2007)" that supposedly has some color illustrations. But what they would be illustrations of I don't know, since as far as I'm aware Abbott's original book was in B&W.

#15 - you would hope so, but daft tags also gain their own critical mass. Last.fm is a social networking site geared around music - tracks that you play on your MP3 player are "scrobbled" to last.fm. It records what you play, and so creates communities around musical taste.

From what I remember, that goat tag was applied to an obscure band with few other tags. A more common, and equally useless, tag you see a lot on last.fm is "seen live". That's purely personal, and meaningless out of context. That's the problem with tagging - context is implied, never explicit, and without context the tag itself can mean anything. Name-value pairs would have been much more useful.

#17

"Seen live", to me, means that the person cared enough about that band to pay good money and went to the effort to see a band. Admittedly, not the best of tags, but content can be gleaned out of this should we choose.

If I like a particular band, then tags are intended to allow me to find similar bands. "Seen live" is no help in that regard. It is, in fact, completely useless. If a person wishes to use that tag, it has purely personal meaning - that person has seen them live (and that could be for a huge number of reasons; I know I've seen bands perform live that I think are crap), and that person only. Tags are public, not private. So why confuse them with private data?

Tags - all depends on what you use LT for. I've tagged signed copies of books in my collection as such, just for my own interest: and I've just realised that I can use the tagging in LT to catalogue the aviation books I've got so I can find specific aircraft references a damn sight more easily than maintaining large and unwieldy card indexes. I wouldn't expect anyone else to find those tags interesting or useful.

we're kindof w/ Robert..tags are primarily an easy way for US to look for particular books in our house; secondarily of possible public use (though i rather doubt that ours are specific enough to interest others).

Within the categories of books that we've entered (ie, except for writings about music, no nonfiction has been catalogued yet..nor have "non-genre" novels) i enjoy the LT recommender/anti-recommender. But i'm more likely to try a book on someone's review..either here or elsewhere if i'm ordering online. If i'm in a bookstore i just browse and flip through books and it's much more a spur of the moment decision.

>19 iansales:: Many people find purely personal tags extremely useful. I personally consider them one of the most useful things I can do here. By contrast, I have no use whatsoever for other people's tags. Right now my library is private, so it should make no difference to you what I do. I would like to make it public once I've filled it out, but if my use of personally meaningful tags is considered offensive, then I won't. It would be nice if there were a simple way to separate globally meaningful and personally meaningful tags, but it won't be easy to get people to go back and fix things.

To answer your rhetorical question more directly, the reason to confuse tags with private data is that people want to store the information somewhere, and tags are an extremely natural and common solution for many people. If LT had both public and private tags, that would be great too.