Mike Carey on Genre vs Literary Fiction

Continuing with the recent theme of authors defending genre fiction from literary snobs (see my posts on ), a couple of weeks ago I noticed a post by Mike Carey, author of the Felix Castor novels, works for comics publishers Marvel and DC, as well as the “literary zombie” novel The Girl With All the Gifts. The article posted at The Norwich Radical was entitled Literature vs Genre---Seconds Out (Part 1).

Recently, Part 2 of this article was published and so I thought it opportune to review the arguments raised.

Carey starts by noticing that this ongoing debate is pretty one-sided:

One thing you tend to notice after a while, though: it’s almost never writers of genre fiction who are picking the fight. To be fair, it’s often not “literary” writers either – it’s academics taking up the cudgels on their behalf; considerately telling us which stories are worth serious consideration and which aren’t. And I guess we appreciate the help, right? Because it’s a bewildering fictional landscape out there and an innocent young seeker after truth could easily go astray.

He then goes on to illustrate this with the example of Jonathan Jones attach on Terry Pratchett in The Guardian, which we have talked about recently. He then talks about an example from last year:

Last year it was Oliver Burkeman’s turn to tell us – I’m assuming with a straight face – that one way to “be a smarter reader” and “get more from what you read” is to stick to literary fictions. Why? Because a “well-designed study” at a US social research think tank (it’s Kidd & Castano if you want to look it up) found that literary fiction produces more powerful emotional identification with its more fully rounded characters and has a lasting effect on your ability to empathise with others.

The relevant section of Burkeman’s little how-to guide is called “Keep it Literary” – building on the most tendentious of Kidd & Castano’s five linked experiments, in which subjects read selected passages from either literary or genre fictions and then performed a range of tests designed to measure their empathy. The smoking gun here is “selected passages”. The experimenters hand-picked texts which they felt exemplified the differences between the two kinds of text, which is a little like marking the deck before you do a random shuffle. Six passages in all, by the way – three from genre fictions and three from the world’s canonically great literature – so this generalisation about all literary fiction and all genre fiction is based on about a millionth of a per cent of each. And despite being able to skew their sample in this bespoke way, Kidd & Castano reported differences between test and control groups that were barely larger than the margin of error. Mark Liberman dissected these procedural inadequacies very thoroughly in the Annals of Overgeneralisation on Language Log, and he was far from the only one.

So a spurious claim is being worked up out of a flawed study that seriously over-sold the significance of its findings. You can’t help but feel that there’s an agenda here, or at least a presumption – that literature has merit and that what has merit is by that same circular definition literature.

He has some other examples:

Other writers have been less coy about saying exactly this. Here’s Arthur Krystal, writing in the New Yorker in 2012:

“Genre” is not a bad word, although perhaps the better word for novels that taxonomically register as genre is simply “commercial.” Born to sell, these novels stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes. There will be exceptions, as there are in every field, but, for the most part, the standard genre or commercial novel isn’t going to break the sea frozen inside us. If this sounds condescending, so be it.

and

I hate to rake up ancient history, but here’s another example from a little further back – dredged up because in this case it is a writer of literary novels (Edward Docx, in the Observer in 2010) who’s saying this, so the agenda is maybe a little more naked.

Even good genre… is by definition a constrained form of writing. There are conventions and these limit the material. That’s the way writing works and lots of people who don’t write novels don’t seem to get this: if you need a detective, if you need your hero to shoot the badass CIA chief, if you need faux-feminist shopping jokes, then great; but the correlative of these decisions is a curtailment in other areas. If you are following conventions, then a significant percentage of the thinking and imagining has been taken out of the exercise. Lots of decisions are already made.

Carey begins his rebuttal with the last of these:

Yes, of course there are constraints when you write genre fiction. There are also constraints when you write literary fiction. Totally unconstrained writing would be (to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut) gibberish interspersed with exclamation marks. When you write – when you write anything at all – you write on the end of a tether. But it’s a flexible tether, and it’s all about the dance you perform on the end of that thing and how you work with it or strain against it or in some cases tie it into knots that were never seen before.

And then, referring to his own novel, The Girl With All the Gifts

If Docx’s thesis is right, the fact that I was working in a space that had been partially defined for me should have robbed whatever I produced of all or most of its potential value. I think the opposite was the case: being coaxed out of my comfort zone made me take creative pathways I’d never noticed or thought about before, and the results were unexpected and exciting. I realised almost as soon as I’d sent the story in that I couldn’t part company with Melanie so soon. I’d inadvertently written the first few scenes of a much larger narrative. There were events that hadn’t eventuated, other characters waiting in the wings, and a box (Pandora’s) that had finally to be opened.

The constraints were liberating, and believe me when I say that I speak as someone who has no interest in bondage.

Carey then revisits the debate on why some classic works are not considered "genre" pieces despite having all their trappings, as with Hamlet and Macbeth, despite having ghosts and witches in them. aren’t genre fictions, and both were unapologetically designed to get the crowds into the theater.

Lastly, he ends up quoting on of my favorite writers:

If I’m honest, I tend to see the entire “literature versus genre” debate as a dead horse so cruelly and relentlessly flogged that it isn’t even vaguely horse-shaped any more. It lies in a neglected corner of the academic meadow close to the intentional fallacy and the vast midden of post-modernism. But since Mr Burkeman has tried to put a saddle on it, I felt it was probably worth offering an opinion (“It is an ex-horse. It has ceased to be…”). And on top of that, to slip in a reference to one of my favourite writers and her eloquent rebuttal of this whole daft non-argument. I’m referring to Ursula LeGuin, who in the introduction to The Left Hand Of Darkness laments the tendency of people who don’t like or get science fiction to pronounce (ham-fistedly) on what science fiction is and does. Along the way, she has this to say about the relevance and importance of her chosen genre:

All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life – science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words.

I like this formulation very much. I seldom write pure sci-fi, but LeGuin’s words apply just as well to horror and dark fantasy and probably to serious-minded works in any genre. I also like T.S.Eliot’s famous dictum about everything you write being “a raid on the inarticulate”. A genre is a tool you pack and carry along when you go on one of these raids. It takes it place – its honourable, earned place – among the other tools of the writer’s trade.

All-in-all, another well argued response to the dismissal of genre fiction. But also a reminder that many writers working in SFF have a (well deserved) chip on their shoulder.

Tolkien Scholarship

Following on from Ursula Le Guin's discussion of academic treatments (and the scorning) of Tolkien, Norbert Schürer has published an article in the Los Angeles Times Review of Books titled Tolkien Criticism Today.

As Schürer sees it, scholarship on Tolkien has struggled to find a path between recognizing the difficulty of the literature:

ON THE FACE OF IT, J.R.R. Tolkien’s works are not exactly easy reading. The Hobbit veers between childish asides and grandiose battles; The Lord of the Rings trilogy presents 1,000 pages of unrelenting heroism; The Silmarillion makes the Bible look like easy reading — and this doesn’t even begin to consider The History of Middle-Earth, the 12 volumes of manuscript variants compiled posthumously by Tolkien’s son Christopher. Furthermore, much of Tolkien’s work is written in an indigestible faux-medieval style; there are long descriptions of imagined countrysides, and he sprinkles in countless obscure references to invented fantastic histories.

and the popularity of the works:

Tolkien is nonetheless one of the most popular authors of the 20th century. In poll after poll, readers declare him their favorite writer; his main books remain bestsellers 60 years after their publication, and the recent movies based on his works are box office hits. On a superficial level, Tolkien’s success is easy to explain: He offers timeless stories about hard moral choices, and he creates a marvelous world of magic, including talking eagles, walking trees, and hobbits — invented figures with whom many contemporary readers can easily identify.

As he says it, scholars face a difficult trade-off:

On one hand, critics do not want to be seen as fawning fans, so their writing adopts a scholarly tone. On the other hand, they want to appeal to fans, so they have to cater to popular sentiment. They need to address controversial topics, but they cannot attack the author if they want to find readers among fans, and while they often try to address the entirety of Tolkien’s published imaginary writings (known as the legendarium) they can only rely on readers being familiar with The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and often only in cinematic form.

As a result, he concludes that Tolkien scholarship is in a sad state. He then goes on to review seven recent works of Tolkien scholarship, and comes away unimpressed for the most part.

The best of the seven, he argues, is A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Stuart Lee, and published by Wiley Blackwell. The next best, the essay collection Tolkien: The Forest and the City:

these books show the two requirements for good Tolkien criticism. For one, he should be treated like any other author in being discussed in seriously peer-reviewed journals and established academic presses rather than in essay collections and niche publications. Just as importantly, Tolkien should not be treated with kid gloves because he is a fan favorite with legions to be placated, but as the serious and major author he is.

David Mitchell on Literary vs Genre Fiction

David Mitchell is an unusual author. He has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 3 times, shortlisted twice, and was also the author of Bone Clocks, which recently won the World Fantasy Award. His recent novel, The Slade House, is a haunted house story. As such, he is uniquely qualified to speak on the separation of literary fiction from genre fiction, a topic that has been of substantial interest to me on this blog (see my posts on the views of  C.S. Lewis, Terry Pratchett and Ursula Le Guin).

In a recent article in The Guardian, based on a Wired podcast and entitled David Mitchell: separating literary and genre fiction is act of 'self-mutilation', he spoke at some length on this topic. The title pretty much sums up his views, but I think the arguments are worth repeating.

He starts by listing some of his childhood influences, listing Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin (I recently reported on David Mitchell's stirring tribute to Ursual Le Guin's Earthsea books), Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, British SF comic 2000AD and EE “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series. These were all books I read as a child, too.

He then goes on to talk about the “ghettoisation” in bookshops:

“It’s convenient to have a science fiction and fantasy section, it’s convenient to have a mainstream literary fiction section, but these should only be guides, they shouldn’t be demarcated territories where one type of reader belongs and another type of reader does not,” said Mitchell. “It’s a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that ‘I don’t get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore I’m never going to read any’. What a shame. All those great books that you’re cutting yourself off from.”

He also pointed out that many books accepted as literature, such as Dickens, are “shot through with fantasy” and argued that works that “become sanctified in the canon of English literature, people then forget – conveniently – are what we now called genre”. He listed George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the works of HG Wells and Margaret Atwood. I would add Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, much of magical realism, and many, many others.

He also had a lot to say about Kazuo Ishiguro’s distancing of his novel The Buried Giant from the fantasy label (for which he was criticized by Ursula Le Guin):

Mitchell said he admired both writers. On Ishiguro – and those readers and critics who also sought to downplay the fantasy elements in his novel – Mitchell said: “There was just this big, big, big brouhaha in the press. In the admittedly tiny corner of the press that the book world occupies, there was this, ‘How dare he? Has he lost his marbles? What does he think he’s doing?’ A lot of people just didn’t get it. But this is what the book wants to be. You’re personally entitled to not like the book because you don’t think it works, you’re allowed to not like the book because you don’t get on with his style of writing, you don’t like the book because of its absurdity or strangeness – but don’t not like it because it’s got a dragon in it!”

Le Guin remains a personal favourite: “I visit Earthsea about once a decade, and I read myself when I’m there – my earlier selves, reading them as a boy of nine, as a teenager of 15, as a young man of 26 or so, as a writer of 35, and as a person who re-read them to write an introduction to the Folio Society’s recent hardback reprint of A Wizard of Earthsea. So it’s kind of come full circle.”

 I've not read any of Mitchell's works, but will seek some out in the near future.

Le Guin on Where Ideas Come From

In my last post on transcript of a talk by Ursula Le Guin from 2000 that was published recently online (“Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”; see my discussion here and here), I review what Le Guin has a lot to say directly about the topic of the title of the talk.

“Where do you get your ideas from?” is the question people in my line of work—fiction writers—get asked most often. We never know how to answer. In self-defense, most of us develop a sound-bite answer. Harlan Ellison’s is the best; he says he gets his ideas from a mail-order house in Schenectady.

When people ask, “Where do you get your ideas from?” what some of them really want to know is the address of that mail-order company.

That is, they want to write, or more likely what they want is to be a writer, because they know writers are rich and famous; and they know that there are secrets that writers know, like that address in Schenectady; and they know that if they can just learn those secrets, those mystical post-office box numbers, they will be Stephen King.

Alas. Writers don’t have secrets. Except maybe the well-kept secret that about 99 percent of writers are neither rich nor famous. Writers talk. Writers are wordy people. They talk, blab, whine all the time to each other about what they’re writing; they teach writing workshops and write writing books and yadder on talk shows. Writers tell all. If they could tell beginning writers where to get ideas, they would. In fact they do, all the time. Some of them actually get rich and famous by doing it.

What do the how-to-write writers say about getting ideas? They say stuff like: “Listen to conversations, note down interesting things you hear or read about, keep a journal, describe a character, imagine a dresser drawer and describe what’s in it”—yeah, yeah, but that’s all work. Anybody can do work. I wanna be a writer. What’s the PO box number?

Well, the secret to writing is writing. Writing is how you be a writer. It’s only a secret to people who really don’t want to hear it.

So why do I want to try to answer this foolish question, “Where do you get your ideas from?” Because underneath the foolish aspect of it, the question is a real one that people really want to know the answer to, even though it is ultimately unanswerable; and unanswerable questions are just what fiction writers like to answer.

It’s a big question—where do writers get their ideas, where do artists get their visions, where do musicians get their music? It’s bound to have a big answer. Or a whole lot of them.

One of my favorite answers is this: Somebody asked Willie Nelson how he thought up his tunes, and he said, “The air is full of tunes, I just reach up and pick one.”

Now that is not a secret. But it is a sweet mystery.

And a true one. For a fiction writer—a storyteller—the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it’s there; you just reach up and pick it.

Then you have to be able to let it tell itself.

First you have to be able to wait. To wait in silence. Wait in silence and listen. Listen for the tune, the vision, the story. Not grabbing, not pushing, just waiting, listening, being ready for it when it comes. This is an act of trust. Trust in yourself, trust in the world. The artist says, “The world will give me what I need and I will be able to use it rightly.”

Readiness—not grabbiness, not greed—readiness: willingness to hear, to listen carefully, to see clearly and accurately—to let the words be right. Not almost right. Right. To know how to make something out of the vision; that’s what practice is for. Because being ready doesn’t mean just sitting around, even if it looks like that’s what writers mostly do; artists practice their art continually, and writing happens to involve a lot of sitting. Scales and finger exercises, pencil sketches, endless unfinished and rejected stories. The artist who practices knows the difference between practice and performance, and the essential connection between them. The gift of those seemingly wasted hours and years is patience and readiness; a good ear, a keen eye, and a skilled hand, a rich vocabulary and grammar. The gift of practice to the artist is mastery, or a word I like better, “craft.”

With those tools, those instruments, with that hard-earned mastery, that craftiness, you do your best to let the “idea”—the tune, the vision, the story—come through clear and undistorted. Clear of ineptitude, awkwardness, amateurishness; undistorted by convention, fashion, opinion.

This is a very radical job, dealing with the ideas you get if you are an artist and take your job seriously, this shaping a vision into the medium of words. It’s what I like best to do in the world, and what I like to talk about when I talk about writing. I could happily go on and on about it. But I’m trying to talk about where the vision, the stuff you work on, the “idea,” comes from. So:

The air is full of tunes.

A piece of rock is full of statues.

The earth is full of visions.

The world is full of stories.

As an artist, you trust that. You trust that that is so. You know it is so. You know that whatever your experience, it will give you the material, the “ideas,” for your work. (From here on I’ll leave out music and fine arts and stick to storytelling, which is the only thing I truly know anything about, though I do think all the arts are one at the root.)

“Idea”—what does that word mean? “Idea” is shorthand for the material, the subject, subjects, the matter of a story. What the story is about. What the story is. “Idea” is a strange word for an imagined matter, not abstract but intensely concrete, not intellectual but embodied. However, “idea” is the word we’re stuck with. And it’s not wholly off center, because the imagination is a rational faculty.

“I got the idea for that story from a dream I had.”

“I haven’t had a good story idea all year.”

“Here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm.”

That last sentence was written in 1926 by Virginia Woolf, in a letter to a writer friend. I will come back to it in the end, because what she says about rhythm goes deeper than anything I have ever thought or read about where art comes from. But before I can talk about rhythm I have to talk about experience and imagination.

Where do writers get their ideas from? From experience. That’s obvious.

And from imagination. That’s less obvious.

Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We shape experience in our minds so that it makes sense. We force the world to be coherent, to tell us a story.

Not only fiction writers do this; we all do it; we do it constantly, in order to survive. People who can’t make the world into a story, go mad. Or, like infants or (perhaps) animals, they live in a world that has no history, no time but now.

This excerpt led to the discussion of distrust of imaginative fiction that Le Guin claims to find most obviously in American academics.

Le Guin also talks about using other writers as inspiration and as a guide to writing material she was unfamiliar about. She illustrates this with her own work.

I want to use some of my own fiction as examples of Where Ideas Come From. I have written fantastic stories closely based on actual experience, and realistic stories totally made up out of whole cloth. Some of my science fiction is full of accurate and carefully researched fact, while my stories about ordinary people doing ordinary things on the Oregon coast in 1990 contain large wetlands and quicksands of pure invention. I hope to show you that fictional “ideas” arise from a combination of experience and imagination that is both indissoluble and utterly unpredictable.

In my Earthsea books, particularly the first one, people sail around on the sea in small boats all the time. They do it quite convincingly, and many people understandably assume that I spent years sailing around on the sea in small boats.

My entire experience with sailboats was during my junior semester at Berkeley High School, when they let us take sailing for gym credit. On a windy day in the Berkeley Marina, my friend Jean and I managed to overturn and sink a nine-foot catboat in three feet of water. We sang “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as she went down, and then waded a half mile back to the boathouse. The boatman was incredulous. “You sank it?” he said. “How?”

That will remain one of the secrets of the writer.

All right, so practically all the sailing in Earthsea, certainly all the deep-sea sailing, does not reflect experience. Not my experience. Only my imagination, using that catboat, other people’s experience, novels I’d read, and some research (I do know why Lookfar is clinker-built), asking friends questions, and some trips on ocean liners. But basically, it’s a fake. So is all the snow and ice in The Left Hand of Darkness. I never even saw snow till I was seventeen, and I certainly never pulled a sledge across a glacier. Except with Captain Scott, and Shackleton, and those guys. In books. Where do you get your ideas? From books, of course, from other people’s books. If I didn’t read, how could I write?

We all stand on each other’s shoulders; we all use each other’s ideas and skills and plots and secrets. Literature is a communal enterprise. That “anxiety of influence” stuff is just testosterone talking. Understand me: I don’t mean plagiarism; I’m not talking about imitation, or copying, or theft. The stuff from other people’s books gets into us just as our own experience does, is composted and transmuted and transformed by the imagination, just as actual experiences are, and comes forth entirely changed. If that were not so, if I thought I had really stolen and used any other writer’s writing, I certainly wouldn’t stand here congratulating myself. I’d go hide my head in shame and wait for the lawsuit. But as it is, I acknowledge with delight my endless debt to every storyteller I have ever read, my colleagues, my collaborators—I praise them and honor them, the endless givers of gifts.

So, in a science fiction novel set on a planet populated by people whose gender arrangements are highly imaginative, the part about two people hauling a sledge across a glacier is as factually accurate as I could make it, down to the details of their gear and harness, how much weight they haul, how far they can get in a day, what different snow surfaces are like, and so on. None of this is from my direct experience; all of it is from the books I’ve read about the Antarctic, ever since I was in my twenties. It is factual material woven into a pure fantasy. As a matter of fact, so is all the stuff about their gender arrangements; but that’s a little too complicated to go into here.

and

My book The Telling started this way: I learned that Taoist religion, an ancient popular religion of vast complexity and a major element of Chinese culture, had been suppressed, wiped out, by Mao Tse-tung. Taoism as a practice now exists chiefly in Taiwan, possibly underground on the mainland, possibly not. In one generation, one psychopathic tyrant destroyed a tradition two thousand years old. In one lifetime. My lifetime. And I knew nothing about it. The enormity of the event, and the enormity of my ignorance, left me stunned. I had to think about it. Since the way I think is fiction, eventually I had to write a story about it. But how could I write a novel about China? My poverty of experience would be fatal. A novel set on an imagined world, then, about the extinction of a religion as a deliberate political act in counterpoint to the suppression of political freedom by a theocracy? All right, there’s my theme, my idea if you will.

I’m impatient to get started, impassioned by the theme. So I look for the people who will tell me the story, the people who are going to live this story. And I find this uppity kid, this smart girl who goes from Earth to that world. I don’t remember what her original name was; she had five different names. I started the book five times, and it got nowhere. I had to stop.

I had to sit, patiently, and say nothing, at the same time every day, while the fox looked at me out of the corner of its eye and slowly let me get a little bit closer. And finally the woman whose story it was spoke to me. “I’m Sutty,” she said. “Follow me.” So I followed her; and she led me up into the high mountains; she gave me the book.

I had a good idea; but I did not have a story. The story had to make itself, find its center, find its voice—Sutty’s voice. Then, because I was waiting for it, it could give itself to me. Or put it this way: I had a lot of stuff in my head, but I couldn’t pull it together, I couldn’t dance that dance because I hadn’t waited to catch the beat. I didn’t have the rhythm.

She also talks about the difficulty of translating ideas from brain to paper:

Earlier, I used a sentence from a letter from Virginia Woolf to her friend Vita Sackville-West. Sackville-West had been pontificating about finding the right word, Flaubert’s mot juste, and agonizing very Frenchly about style; and Woolf wrote back, very Englishly:

As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it: But no doubt I shall think differently next year.

Woolf wrote that seventy-five years ago; if she did think differently next year, she didn’t tell anybody. She says it lightly, but she means it: this is very profound. I have not found anything more profound, or more useful, about the source of story—where the ideas come from.

Beneath memory and experience, beneath imagination and invention—beneath words, as she says—there are rhythms to which memory and imagination and words all move. The writer’s job is to go down deep enough to begin to feel that rhythm, find it, move to it, be moved by it, and let it move memory and imagination to find words.

She’s full of ideas but she can’t dislodge them, she says, because she can’t find their rhythm—can’t find the beat that will unlock them, set them moving forward into a story, get them telling themselves. A “wave in the mind,” she calls it; and says that a sight or an emotion may create it, like a stone dropped into still water, and the circles go out from the center in silence, in perfect rhythm, and the mind follows those circles outward and outward till they turn to words. But her image is greater: her wave is a sea wave, traveling smooth and silent a thousand miles across the ocean till it strikes the shore and crashes, breaks, and flies up in a foam of words. But the wave, the rhythmic impulse, is before words and “has nothing to do with words.” So the writer’s job is to recognize the wave, the silent swell way out at sea, way out in the ocean of the mind, and follow it to shore, where it can turn or be turned into words, unload its story, throw out its imagery, pour out its secrets. And ebb back into the ocean of story.

What is it that prevents the ideas and visions from finding their necessary underlying rhythm, why couldn’t Woolf “dislodge” them that morning? It could be a thousand things, distractions, worries; but very often I think what keeps a writer from finding the words is that she grasps at them too soon, hurries, grabs. She doesn’t wait for the wave to come in and break. She wants to write because she’s a writer; she wants to say this, and tell people that, and show people something else—things she knows, her ideas, her opinions, her beliefs, important things—but she doesn’t wait for the wave to come and carry her beyond all the ideas and opinions, to where you cannot use the wrong word. None of us is Virginia Woolf, but I hope every writer has had at least a moment when they rode the wave, and all the words were right.

Ursula Le Guin is one of my favorite writers. This is for many reasons. One of them is that, as this talk shows (and there is more at the link that I have not excerpted), she is an astute observer and a deep thinker about the process of writing.

Le Guin on Reading vs Viewing Stories

In the same transcript of a talk by Ursula Le Guin that I talked about yesterday (“Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?”; see my discussion here), Le Guin also has a lot to say about the differences between reading fiction, and the experience of watching TV or movie adaptations of that same material.

In it, she says, following on from her discussion of fantasy existing in a literary ghetto:

Another way we show our distrust of the imagination, our puritanical lust to control it, is in the way we tell stories on TV and in video or online games.

Reading is active. To read a story is to participate actively in the story; to read is to tell the story to yourself by reliving it and rewriting it with the author, word by word, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. If you want proof, just watch an eight-year-old reading a story she likes. She is concentratedly, tensely, fiercely alive. She is as intense as a hunting cat.

Reading is a mysterious act. It absolutely has not and cannot be replaced by any kind of viewing, because viewing is an entirely different undertaking, with different stakes and rewards. Viewing is passive. A reader reading makes the book, brings it into meaning, by translating the arbitrary symbols, printed letters, into an inward, private reality. A viewer watching a film does not make the film. To watch a film is to be taken into it—to participate in it—be made part of it. Absorbed by it. Readers eat books, but film eats viewers. This is fine. It’s wonderful to be eaten by a good movie, to let your eyes and ears take your mind into a reality you could never otherwise know. However, passivity means vulnerability, and that’s what a great deal of media storytelling exploits.

Reading is an active transaction between the text and the reader. The text is under the control of the reader—she can skip, linger, interpret, misinterpret, return, ponder, go along with the story or refuse to go along with it, make judgments, revise her judgments— she has time and room to genuinely interact with it. A novel is an active, ongoing collaboration between the writer and the reader.

Viewing is not a transaction. It isn’t collaborative. The viewer, consenting to participate, hands over control to the filmmaker or programmer. Psychically there is no time or room outside an audiovisual narrative for anything but the program. For the viewer, the monitor screen temporarily becomes the universe. There’s very little leeway, and no way to control the constant stream of information and imagery unless one refuses to accept it and detaches oneself emotionally and intellectually, in which case it appears essentially meaningless. Or one can turn the program off.

Although there’s a lot of talk about transactional viewing and “interactive” is a favorite word of programmers, electronic media are a paradise of control for programmers and a paradise of passivity for viewers. There is nothing in so-called interactive programs except what the programmer put in them; the so-called choices lead only to subprograms chosen by the programmer, no more a choice than a footnote is—do you read it or don’t you. The roles in role-playing games are fixed and conventional; there are no characters, only personae. (That’s why teenagers love them; teenagers need personae. But they have to shed those personae eventually, if they’re going to become persons.) Hypertext offers the storyteller a wonderful complexity, but so far hypertext fiction seems to be like Borges’s garden of forking paths that lead only to other forking paths—fascinating, like fractals, and ultimately nightmarish. Interactivity in the sense of the viewer controlling the text is also nightmarish, when interpreted to mean that the viewer can rewrite the novel. If you don’t like the end of Moby-Dick you can change it. You can make it happy. Ahab kills the whale. Ooowee.

Readers can’t kill the whale. They can only reread until they understand why Ahab made it kill him. Readers don’t control the text: they genuinely interact with it. Viewers are either controlled by the program or try to control it. Different ballgames. Different universes.

A 3-D animated version of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, narrated by Kenneth Branagh, appeared this year and was presented as offering “more than just the story of the Little Prince. You can, for example, catch an orbiting planet in the Little Prince’s universe and learn all about the planet’s secrets and its inhabitants.” But in the book, doesn’t the prince visit several planets, with extremely interesting inhabitants, and doesn’t his own tiny planet have an immense secret—a rose—the rose he loves? Do the makers of this version feel that Saint-Exupéry was stingy with his planets? Or are they convinced that stuffing irrelevant information into a work of art enriches it? Maybe they’ll give us a version of The Tempest, and when Miranda says, “O brave new world, that has such creatures in it!” the viewer can press a button and on the screen there will be information about a genuine virtual new world with all kinds of weird creatures in it.

We are told that the viewer can interact with the animated version of The Little Prince. You can “enter the Fox Training Game and after you’ve ‘tamed’ the fox that the Little Prince meets, he will give you a gift.”

Do you remember the fox in The Little Prince? He insists that the little prince tame him. Why? the prince asks, and the fox says that if he is tamed he will always love the wheat fields, because they’re the color of the little prince’s hair. The little prince asks how to tame him, and the fox says by being very patient, sitting down “at a little distance from me . . . in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day . . .” And it should be at the same time every day, so that the fox will “know at what hour my heart is to be ready to greet you . . . One must observe the proper rites.” And so the fox is tamed, and when the little prince is about to leave, “‘Ah,’ said the fox, ‘I shall cry.’” So the little prince laments that being tamed “has done you no good at all!” but the fox says, “It has done me good . . . because of the color of the wheat fields.” And when they part, the fox says, “I will make you a present of a secret . . . It is the time you wasted for your rose that makes your rose important. . . . You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

So, then, the child viewing the program “tames” the fox by pressing buttons until the food pellet drops into the food dish—no, no, sorry, that’s how we train rats. We train children by teaching them to select the “right” choice from the choices offered until the program tells them that the fox is “tamed.” Somehow this doesn’t seem the same as imagining doing what the book describes: coming back every day at the same time and sitting silently while a fox looks at you out of the corner of its eye. Something essential has been short-circuited, falsified. What do you think the fox’s “gift” to the child viewer will be? I don’t know, but I don’t really see how it can top the fox’s gift in the book: just the words “you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

The “gift” The Little Prince gives its readers is itself. It offers them absolutely nothing but a charming story with a few charming pictures, and the chance to face fear, grief, tenderness, and loss.

Which is why that story, written in the middle of a war by a man about to die in that war, is honored by children, adults, and even literary critics. Maybe the animated version isn’t as ghastly as it sounds; but it’s hard not to see it as an effort to exploit, to tame something that, like a real fox, must be left wild: the imagination of an artist.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry did crash-land in the desert once, in the thirties, and nearly died; that is a fact. He did not meet a little prince from another planet there. He met terror, thirst, despair, and salvation. He wrote a splendid factual account of that experience in Wind, Sand and Stars. But later it got composted, transmuted, transfigured into a story of a little prince. Imagination working on experience. Invention springing like a flower, a rose, out of the desert sands of fact.

I thought these were interesting views, and her references to The Little Prince were spot on. However, it is interesting to note that some of the more popular video games available today (like Minecraft) are popular because they allow for the player to express their individuality. Even those games based on movies tend to allow the player to depart from the script of the movie, and so express their own imagination (albeit within the limits of the game).

Le Guin On Fantasy as a Literary Ghetto

The website tinhouse.com recently published the transcript of a talk by Ursula Le Guin from 2000 entitled “Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?” in which she discussed a number of things about writing fantasy. I'll come back to some of them later, but for now I want to focus on her thoughts on fantasy (and genre fiction more generally) as being placed in a literary"ghetto".

This is a theme that arises repeatedly when talking to both fans and authors of genre writing. In earlier posts, I have discussed reactions to this phenomenon by C.S. Lewis and Terry Pratchett, and so it is interesting to see how Le Guin compares.

The relevant (lengthy) except from her talk:

I wrote a piece years ago called “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” In it I talked about how so many Americans distrust and despise not only the obviously imaginative kind of fiction we call fantasy, but also all fiction, often rationalizing their fear and contempt with financial or religious arguments: reading novels is a waste of valuable time, the only true book is the Bible, etc. I said that many Americans have been taught “to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful. . . . They have learned to fear [the imagination]. But they have never learned to discipline it at all.”

I wrote that in 1974. The millennium has come and we still fear dragons. Our fear has taken some forms I’d like to talk about.

One is the tactic of infantilizing fantasy. Fantasy is for children. It’s kiddilit. It’s cute. But fantasy also has shown that it can make money. Gotta take that seriously. So the Harry Potter books—amiable, conventional children’s fantasies—were praised for their originality by reviewers utterly ignorant of the tradition they derive from: a tradition that descends from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the One Thousand and One Nights and Beowulf and the Tale of Monkey and medieval romance and Renaissance epic, through Kipling and Borges and Calvino and Rushdie: a form of literature that is not well described as cute, not to be dismissed as “entertainment,” “great fun for the kiddies,” or “well, at least they’re reading something.” The Potter phenomenon was a godsend to those who want fantasy to be childish, not to be taken seriously.

American critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction, The Lord of the Rings. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it, because they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid of dragons. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they’ll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they’ll have to redefine what literature is.

What American critics and teachers call “literature” is still almost wholly restricted to realism. All other forms of fiction—westerns, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, romance, historical, regional, you name it—are dismissed as “genre.” Sent to the ghetto. That the ghetto is about twelve times larger than the city, and currently a great deal livelier, doesn’t bother those who live in ivory towers. Magic realism, though—that does bother them; they hear Gabriel García Márquez gnawing quietly at the foundations of the ivory tower, they hear all these crazy Indians dancing up in the attic, and they think maybe they should do something about it. Perhaps they should give that fellow who teaches the science fiction course tenure? Oh, surely not.

To say that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to imply that imitation is superior to invention. I have wondered if this unstated but widely accepted (and, incidentally, very puritanical) proposition is related to the recent popularity of the memoir and the personal essay. This has been a genuine popularity, not a matter of academic canonizing. People really do want to read memoir and personal essay, and writers want to write it. I’ve felt rather out of step. I like history and biography fine, but when family and personal memoir seems to be the most popular—the dominant narrative form—well, I have searched my soul for prejudice and found it. I prefer invention to imitation. I love novels. I love made-up stuff.

To put a high value on story drawn directly from personal experience is a logical extension of our high value for realism in fiction. If fiction is expected to cling to actual experience, if faithful imitation of reality is its great virtue, then memoir is far more virtuous than fiction. The memoir writer’s imagination is subordinated to the hard facts. It may connect them aesthetically and draw from them a moral or intellectual lesson but is understood to be forbidden to invent. If there’s nothing in the story outside familiar experience, emotion may certainly be roused but imagination may scarcely be called upon. Recognition, rather than discovery, is the reward.

True recognition is a true reward. The personal essay is a noble and difficult discipline. I’m not knocking it. I admire it with considerable awe. But I’m not at home in it.

I keep looking for dragons in this country, and not finding any. Or only finding them in disguise.

Some of the most praised recent memoirs have been about growing up in hopeless poverty, cruel fathers, incompetent mothers, abused children, misery, fear, and loneliness. But is all this the property of nonfiction? Poverty, cruelty, incompetence, dysfunctional families, injustice, degradation—that is the very stuff of the fireside tale, the folk tale, stories of ghosts and vengeance beyond the grave—and of Jane Eyre, and David Copperfield, Huckleberry Finn, and Cien años de soledad. The ground of our experience is dark, and all our inventions start in that darkness. From it, some of them leap forth in fire.

The imagination can transfigure the dark matter of life. And in too many personal essays and autobiographies, that’s what I begin to miss, to crave: transfiguration. To recognize our shared, familiar misery is not enough. I want to recognize something I never saw before. I want something terrible and blazing to leap out at me. I want the fire of the transfiguring imagination. I want the true dragons.

Experience is where ideas come from. But a story isn’t a mirror of what happened. Fiction is experience translated by, transformed by, transfigured by the imagination. Truth includes but is not coextensive with fact. Truth in art is not imitation, but reincarnation.

To be valuable in a factual history, the raw material of experience has to be selected, arranged, and shaped. In a novel, the process is even more radical: the raw materials are not only selected and shaped but also fused, composted, recombined, reworked, reconfigured, reborn, and at the same time allowed to find their own forms and shapes, which may be only indirectly related to rational thinking—so that the whole thing may seem to be pure invention. A girl chained to a rock as a sacrifice to a monster. A mad captain and a white whale. A ring that confers absolute power. A dragon.

But there’s no such thing as pure invention. Invention is recombination. We can work only with what we have. It all starts with experience. There are monsters and leviathans and chimeras in the human mind; they are psychic facts. Dragons are one of the truths about us. The only way we may be able to express that particular truth is by writing about dragons—admitting their existence. People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The idea that fantasy and science fiction are harder to write than literature because the require greater feats of imagination has come up before. Le Guin gives a very eloquent take on it.

Le Guin also has some interesting things to say about imagination and the stakes in fantasy novels:

But many fantasies, works of so-called imaginative fiction, suffer from the same thing: imaginative poverty. The writers haven’t actually used their imaginations, they don’t make up anything—they just move archetypes around in a game of wish fulfillment..

In fantasy, since the fictionality of the fiction—the inventions, the dragons—are all right out in front, it’s easy to assume that the story has no relation at all to experience, that everything in a fantasy can be just the way the writer wants. No rules, all cards wild. All the ideas in fantasy are just wishful thinking—right? Well, no. Wrong. It may be that the further a story gets away from common experience and accepted reality, the less wishful thinking it can do, and the more firmly its essential ideas must be grounded in common experience and accepted reality..

Serious fantasy goes into regions of the psyche that may be very strange territory to the reader, dangerous ground; and for that reason, serious fantasy is usually both conservative and realistic about human nature. Its mode is usually comic, not tragic; that is, it has a more-or-less happy ending but, just as the tragic hero brings his tragedy on himself, the happy outcome in fantasy is earned by the behavior of the protagonist. Serious fantasy invites the reader on a wild journey of invention, through wonders and marvels, through mortal risks and dangers—all the time hanging on to a common, everyday, realistic morality. Generosity, reliability, compassion, and courage: in fantasy these moral qualities are seldom questioned. They are accepted, and they are tested—often to the limit, and beyond..

The people who write the stuff on the book covers obsessively describe fantasy as “a battle between good and evil,” but in commercial fantasy the battle is all it is; the white wizards and the black magicians are both mindlessly violent. It’s not a moral struggle, just a power struggle. This is about as far from Tolkien as you can get..

But why should moral seriousness matter, why do probability and consistency matter, when it’s “all just made up”? Well, moral seriousness is exactly what makes a fantasy matter. The made-up story is inevitably trivial if nothing real is at stake. That’s my problem with Harry Potter; the powerful people are divided into good ones and bad ones, all of whom use their power for mere infighting and have nothing to do with people without power. Such easy wish fulfillment has a great appeal to children, who are genuinely powerless, but it worries me when adults fall for it. In the same way, the purer the invention, the more important is its credibility, consistency, and coherence. The rules of the invented realm must be followed to the letter. All wizards, including writers, are extremely careful about their spells. Every word must be the right word. A sloppy wizard is a dead wizard. Serious fantasists delight in invention, in the freedom to invent, but they know that careless invention kills magic. Fantasy happily flouts fact, but it is just as concerned with truth as the direst realism.

I think the whole talk is fascinating and I will have more to say on it tomorrow. Nevertheless, the article got under the skin of some people, particularly its depiction of academic study of Tolkien. Robin Anne Reid over at file770.com write a stirring response Praising or Burying Tolkien. In essence, she argues:

Le Guin isn’t wrong that a lot of critics and academics want to dismiss Tolkien: what leaves me frustrated by her comments is that she completely glosses over and ignores the forty or more years during which *some* academics and critics have been resisting that tendency.

and is frustrated by

Le Guin’s ongoing dismissal of “academics and critics”

Reid then goes on to illustrate both the paucity of academic study of Tolkien in the period after its publication until 1975, and how it has grown since. Compiling data from the Modern Languages International Bibliography, she find that

If I limit the search for publications on Tolkien’s work to only those publications appearing during the years 1950-1975 (the final date being chosen because it was 40 years ago) on Tolkien, I get:.

177 publications during those in 25 years.

I’ve read quite a few of them, and there are some interesting patterns to discuss, including the fact that the earliest academic anthologies on Tolkien’s work tended to try to “dismiss the fans,” and explain how Tolkien’s work was really GOOD despite its popularity, and to hope that the popularity diminished so “real” scholarship could be done..

So clearly those early academics’ hopes that popularity would diminish have failed miserably!.

A subject search on Tolkien criticism and scholarship from 1976-2015:.

2,242 results (these include periodical articles, peer-reviewed articles, anthology chapters, books by single authors, and dissertations in the United States at least)..

I’d say the last forty years shows a spirited attempt by scholars and critics in multiple disciplinary areas to *bring Tolkien into the canon of literary works.*.

By canon, I mean those works that are discussed by academics and critics, in a variety of cultural spaces, including peer-reviewed journals, and those works that are taught in schools.

I am not sure how much to make of these numbers. Yes, there have been many more works about Tolkien since 1975, but there has been an explosion of scholarship of all sorts, and a proliferation of publication outlets. Nonetheless, I am quite confident that Reid is correct that there has been growth in Tolkien scholarship above what we might have otherwise expected.

In sum, I don't think Reid really disagrees with Le Guin on anything of importance. Fantasy and genre fiction are still in a ghetto, but perhaps the walls of the ghetto are starting to crumble a little bit.

David Mitchell on Le Guin's Earthsea

I've written briefly several times about my love for Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea books (see here and here). They were my Harry Potter and played a prominent role in developing my interest in SFF.

Recently, David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks wrote a lovely tribute to these books for The Guardian: David Mitchell on Earthsea – a rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin.

For Mitchell, Earthsea was instrumental in making him want to become a writer:

Growing up, I adored A Wizard of Earthsea, Le Guin’s slim but muscular 1968 novel, which I read and reread until my ratty old paperback copy required emergency surgery, and I still have a precious memory of getting to the last page for the umpteenth time, staring at the final line – “and Yarrow ran to meet them, crying with joy” – and realising with a giddy clarity that being a goalkeeper or inventor or forester was yesterday’s news, and that I had to be a writer and nothing else would do. I yearned to do to other people what A Wizard of Earthsea had just done to me – even if I couldn’t articulate exactly what that was.

Mitchell does a great job articulating what it was about Earthsea that resonated for so many of us. Unlike many earlier magical fantasies, where the wizard was some version of Merlin, "a Caucasian scholarly aristocrat amongst sorcerers, who appears fully formed and with little room for character development," the protagonist of Earthsea is Ged, who starts as a young lad from a tiny island, transforms into a brash student, and grows to become a powerful wizard. This makes him understandable to anyone who has gone through adolescence.

The world of Earthsea is also rich and, thankfully, free of many of the worst Tolkien clichés:

Earthsea is a fantasy world, and proud of it, mapped by its creator in 1966–7 on a large sheet of butcher’s paper with crayons in a house full of young children. Earthsea has magic, dragons, its own myths and prehistory; but its magic is weighted with metaphysics, its dragons are psychodragons of air and mind, more akin to dangerous Chinese sages than Tolkien’s Smaug; and Earthsea is so human a world – with trade-routes, local politics, class hierarchies, infant mortality, abuse, addiction and slavery – that its fantastical elements feel almost quotidian. Even Earthsea’s islands, with names such as Atnini, Komokome, Selidor and the Isle of the Ear, have a habit of morphing into islands in each reader’s memory: the Hebrides, the Cyclades, the islands of the Seto Inland Sea, or Hawaii.

 It is also free of the worst of Tolkien's racial styereotypes:

In contrast to Tolkien’s Middle-earth, where what is western and white is good, Earthsea’s Arians, the Kargad raiders, are “a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce, liking the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns”. Ged’s skin is copper-brown, “like most Gontishmen”; his friend Vetch would pass as a sub-Saharan African; and in the third book of Earthsea, The Farthest Shore, Ged will owe his life to a “floating tribe” of raft people in the Southern Reach whose Polynesian-inflected folkways match their complexions.

The books are also more cerebral than many epic fantasies.

Chief among its concerns are morality, identity and power. In The Farthest Shore the Master Patterner on Roke will ask Ged, “What is evil?” and be answered, “A web we men weave,” but the seed of this theme is germinating in A Wizard of Earthsea. From Beowulf to Tolkien, to countless formulaic fantasy movies at a multiplex near you, the genre generates two-dimensional Manichaean struggles between Good and Evil, in which morality’s shades of grey are reduced to one black and one white. The real world, as most of us know (if not all presidents and prime ministers), is rarely so monochromatic, and neither is Earthsea. Ged’s quest is not to take down a Lord of Darkness but to learn the nature of the shadow that his vanity, anger and hatred set loose – to master it, by learning its nature and its name. “All my acts have their echo in it,” says Ged of his shadow; “it is my creature.” The climax of A Wizard of Earthsea is not the magical shootout that lesser novels would have ended with, but the high-risk enactment of a process Jung called “individuation”, in which the warring parts of the psyche integrate into a wiser, stronger whole. To quote Le Guin again: “In serious fantasy, the real battle is moral or internal … To do good, heroes must know or learn that the ‘axis of evil’ is within them.”

Lastly, Mitchell also points out the difficulty of writing fantasy fiction well:

Style and voice are the Scylla and Charybdis of fantasy novels, where many authors of duller literary gifts than Le Guin’s come undone. Quality writing within genre is harder, not easier, because the ground is so mined with cliche. A cod-historic narratorial voice in a fantasy novel feels like being locked inside a medieval theme park; neologisms will jar – one use of “totally awesome” will puncture a fantasy world; but a studied neutrality of style tastes like clingfilm. What is needed is a high-wire balancing act, which Le Guin pulls off with deceptive effortlessness. Ged’s story is told with the calm authority of an age-old Icelandic saga, yet stitched here and there with passages of pure beauty for its own sake.

I think Mitchell does a masterful job explaining what it is that we love about these books; far better than I could have done myself. All in all, this is a fitting tribute to Le Guin just days after her 86th birthday.

Economics in SFF

Somebody with extremely good tastes once said that "the best science fiction is social science fiction". I agree. And as an economist, I am always especially interested in the way in which economics is portrayed in science fiction and fantasy.  This interest usually turns to horror when it emerges that the author has not understood their first lesson in economics about the importance of comparative advantage.  But it does not stop me getting excited about the next attempt.

I feel much the same way about blog posts that aim to identify the "best uses" of economics in SFF. Often (although with a notable exception or two) these blog posts are written by non-economists who really are thinking of business when they talk about economics, or are narrowly focused on macroeconomics, as opposed to discussions of economics per se. I was reminded of this by a recent post in the Barnes and Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy blog entitled 6 Fantasy Novels that Explore the Economics of Imagined Worlds which focused almost entirely on monetary systems.

There have been a number of relatively recent posts pointing to SFF books that treat economic issues. These include:

1. Science Fiction Novels for Economists by Noah Smith on his blog.
2. More Science Fiction for Economists (Seriously Time-Wasting) by Paul Krugman in The New York Times.
3. Science Fiction and Fantasy To Learn Economics From by Tim Worstall on Forbes.
4. Essential Science Fiction Novels for Understanding the Economy by Charlie Jane Anders on io9.
5. Great Science Fiction Stories That Can Help You Make Sense Of Economics by Diana Biller on io9.
6. Hard Social Science Fiction: Neptune’s Brood by Alex Tabarrok on the Marginal Revolution blog. (This is a review of a single book, and not a list).

Most of the above were inspired by Noah Smith's blog post. In introducing his list, he wrote:

Really, most science fiction is about economics. What makes most future visions interesting is not just the technical particulars of the cool new Stuff, but the social ramifications. Here are some of the sci-fi books that I thought dealt with important economic issues in the most insightful and interesting ways. I also chose only books that I think are well-written, with well-conceived characters, engaging plots, and skillful writing.

I haven't read more than a small subsample of the books on the lists people have come up with, and I will endeavor to read more in my abundant (ha!) free time. For now, I will simply collect here a large subset of the books on these lists, along with some comments of my own about them and a few additional books I have either read or mean to get around to reading. I exclude a few books from the lists, such as Dune and McCaffery's Dragonrider books, because I have read them and do not think the economics stands out as being of interest.

In rough alphabetical order by author's last name:

1. Daniel Abraham
1. The Dagger and the Coin Series. I started the first book in this series and could not finish it.  I also read one of his The Long Price Quartet series and one of his short stories. He has a reputation for using a lot of economics in his stories, but I am not convinced he always gets it right.
2. Isaac Asimov
1. Foundation. Entire Trilogy. I loved these books, and like Krugman, the futuristic vision of mathematical social science probably influenced my love of economics. But I recall nothing special about the economics in the books. I would not go as far as Noah Smith in removing them from the list because of this. And I disagree with a lot of Smith's reasoning: "I love the Foundation series, and it's really fun, but the economics are crappy (agglomeration economies encourage the collapse of empires?). And more importantly, the whole conceit of psychohistory is very dangerous for economists; our models will never forecast that well, the Universe is stochastic rather than deterministic, and we should avoid the temptation for intellectual hubris. Foundation is social science's "physics envy" writ large. We are not, and will never be, Hari Seldon, so Foundation, classic as it is, doesn't go on my list!" I think Smith is wrong. IIRC, Asimov explicitly makes reference to the notion of a universe as stochastic, although with civilization so vast a form of the law of large numbers kicks in so that prediction works well. That is, it works well until a rare draw from a very fat tailed distribution occurs.
3. Margaret Atwood
1. The Year of the Flood. Noah Smith's reasoning here sounds very compelling: "This book is, basically, about a market dystopia. Everything is for sale in this future, and yet negative externalities, asymmetric information, and weak institutions make the world a nightmare."
4. Paolo Bacigalupi
1. The Windup Girl. I loved this book, although I don't recall the economics as being particularly insightful. Noah Smith: "about peak oil, global civilizational decline, and the (temporary) end of positive-sum economies. In a suddenly overpopulated world, humans are forced into a constant Hobbesian zero-sum game, and most moral norms go right out the window. ... it serves as an important reminder of the Malthusian menace that forever lurks just outside the circle of light provided by the flickering candle-flame of modern technology."
5. Kage Baker
1. The Company. Recommended by Anders without comment.
6. Iain Banks.
1. Use of Weapons.
2. Consider Phlebas. Post material scarcity world.  I frankly doubt that such a world will ever exist.
7. Elizabeth Bear
1. Range of Ghosts. About trade routes and financing war.
8. John Brunner.
1. Stand on Zanzibar. Noah Smith: "picks up on a lot of economic trends that were just starting in the 60s (e.g. the pricing of previously plentiful commodities such as water). The economics are all about the effects of overpopulation, which seems less menacing in the 2010s, but is still a major problem in parts of the world."
9. Seth Dickinson
1. The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Not released yet. Supposed to about an accountant who brings down an empire. I am pretty excited about this book although the potential for the economics to go wrong seems very high.
10. Cory Doctorow.
1. Makers. Noah Smith: "The book is all about economics, the death of corporations, the rise of freelance and temp economies, the death of old media and the rise of blogs, and the disruptive impact of technology on people's jobs. It envisions the rise of 3D printing, the startup craze (and the startup glut), and the use of intellectual property as corporations' weapon of choice to fight back against progress."
2. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Noah Smith: "examines what a true post-scarcity society would look like. ... I think that's probably what the future will look like, at least if we're lucky. Anyway, this book is notable for the concept of "whuffie", an online currency based on peer approval, which arguably inspired Facebook's "like" button."
11. George Alec Effinger.
1. When Gravity Fails. Noah Smith: "a novel about underground economies and organized crime."
12. Greg Egan
1. Permutation City. Noah Smith: "about the ultimate nature and purpose of human consciousness and experience, and yet it has implications for technologies that are being developed right now, as we speak."
13. Robert A. Heinlein
1. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Noah Smith: "contains some very interesting thoughts on colonialism and the Resource Curse. Unsurprisingly, terrorism is used as a way to make resource colonialism too expensive for the occupying power. Unfortunately, we don't get to see the political struggles and despotic regimes that probably arose in the aftermath of lunar independence. But Heinlein also does use the book to play with some interesting libertarian ideas, like a privatized court system."
14. Nancy Kress.
1. Beggars in Spain. Not on any of the above lists, but a book I have been meaning to read for a while. It considers a world in which, among other things, genetic modifications have given some people the ability to survive without sleep.  I am a bit afraid that it confuses absolute and comparative advantage.
15. Ursula Le Guin
1. The Dispossessed. Noah Smith: "It's incredibly hard to imagine a world without private property, but LeGuin pulls it off."
16. Ken MacLeod
1. The Restoration Game.
17. L.E. Modesitt, Jr. I am told he writes a lot about economics, but I do not recall much of this in the few books of his I read many years ago.
18. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
1. Lucifer's Hammer. Noah Smith: "a story about a comet hitting Earth, and the aftermath. It's notable for its quaint Reaganite conservative politics (it came out in 1977), and does make a couple of glaring economic mistakes (for example, a guy trying to build a nuclear power plant is an independent wildcatting entrepreneur instead of a giant government-backed corporation). But it makes up for that with its excellent portrayal of what the economy would be like in the immediate aftermath of an abrupt civilizational collapse. Hint: Farming, containment of contagious diseases, de-specialization of labor, and collective security become very very important."
19. Terry Pratchett
1. Making Money. I haven't read it, sadly. Supposedly about monetary policy, and including a hydraulic model of the macroeconomy reminiscent of The Philips hydraulic model of the macroeconomy known as MONIAC (Monetary National Income Analogue Computer). I have given a talk in the same room as the MONIAC at Cambridge.
2. The Truth. I haven't read it, sadly. About newspapers?
20. Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
1. The Long Earth. Economics in a world where land is no longer scarce.
21. Kim Stanley Robinson
1. 2312.
2. Pacific Edge.
3. Mars Trilogy.
22. Karina Sumner Smith
1. The Towers Trilogy. The description makes me concerned that this book also confuses absolute and comparative advantage.
23. Sherwood Smith
1. King's Shield. Apparently considers public finance.
24. Neal Stephenson
1. The Diamond Age. Corporate competition and intellectual property.
2. Anathem.
3. Reamde. Noah Smith: "The hero is an aging tech entrepreneur who owns a game that's a combination of World of Warcraft and Bitcoin (yes, this book predicts Bitcoin). It also deals with the economic incentives of the Russian mob, the challenges facing smart young tech workers in China and Hungary, and lots of other cool features of today's global economy."
25. Bruce Sterling
1. Schismatrix. Noah Smith must have been smoking crack if he recommended it based on this observation: "None of the economics here makes any sense - or, more accurately, it all takes place in such a funky, crazy future world that it's impossible to know if it makes any sense."
26. Charles Stross (Recommended to me for his economics, I have only just begun to read Stross and started with Saturn's Children.)
1. Neptune's Brood. Opening with a quote from David Graeber's Debts is not an auspicious beginning.
2. Accelerando. Noah Smith: "mainly plays with the idea of the Singularity, but he also plays with a bunch of far-out funky future economics. In one part, the main character, impresario and wandering entrepreneur Manfred Macx, uses advanced computer algorithms to successfully implement an optimal centrally planned economy, by predicting what humans will want before they even know they want it. Macx's various disruptive innovations inevitably draw the ire of the law, and he creates a protective cloud of AI lawyers to wage constant "lawfare" against governments and corporations alike. In another part of the book, the entire solar system is taken over by sentient High-Frequency Trading algorithms."
3. Merchant Princes series. Krugman describes them as "arguably parallel-universe fantasies that are also essays in development economics."
27. Vernor Vinge
1. The Peace War. Noah Smith: "[along with] its sequel short story "The Ungoverned", ... like a Real Business Cycle model come to life, with lone-wolf genius engineers teaming up with private police forces to bring down a fascist technocratic government made up of...university administrators."
2. A Fire Upon the Deep. Noah Smith: "private security forces failing miserably when faced with a powerful external threat (in fact, that book made me think of the "Tamerlane Principle"). Security, Vinge realizes, is a public good."
3. Rainbows End. I loved this book. Noah Smith: "a sad, thoughtful novel about old age and obsolescence (notice that there is no apostrophe in the title). But it's also one of the most visionary novels about future labor markets. In an interconnected world in which skills never stay fresh for long and most value is created through entertainment, old engineers have to go back to high school, and new corporations are started by teenagers collaborating online with strangers halfway around the world. Rainbows End is also famous for envisioning the technology of Augmented Reality; this novel probably inspired Google Glass."
4. A Deepness in the Sky. Noah Smith: "In addition to being quite possibly the best science fiction novel I've ever read, Deepness is also a great meditation on public economics. ... In Deepness, Vinge adds another public good: Research. The narrative of Deepness is split between a race of spider-people with roughly 20th-century technology, and a spacefaring guild of human merchants called the Qeng Ho. On the spider world, the protagonist is a brilliant scientist named Sherkaner Underhill, who is basically a Von Neumann or Feynman type. Sherkaner is the ultimate lone genius, but he ends up needing the government to fund his research. In space, meanwhile, the heroic merchant entrepreneur Pham Nuwen (who is a recurring protagonist in Vinge novels) struggles to decide whether he should turn his merchant fleet into an interstellar government. Governments, he finds, are good at producing really new scientific breakthroughs, but eventually they become unwieldy and stifle the economy and society, then collapse under their own institutional weight. The very very end of the book is - or at least, seemed to me to be - a metaphor for the Great Stagnation and the death (and future rebirth) of Big Science."

The Biller article also includes a long quote from an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson:

I am coming to understand that economics is many things, sometimes a social science, but often mostly a name for explication and analysis of a legal system, often pseudo-mathematical or quantitative, which never challenges our current system’s basic rules and assumptions. So “economics” is by definition an explication of capitalism, and as such it can be clarifying or obfuscatory, but it is never speculative or projective, in that it does not often propose really new systems. There are almost no worked-out alternative economic systems, although I’ve seen some good preliminary work in Albert and Hahn and elsewhere; but still, the best current critiques of economics are coming out of sociology or anthropology or political science or law, not out of the field of economics itself. So I am looking around in all these fields and finding lots of interesting things, and I hope it will turn into something I can use. Seems to me science fiction ought to have a substantial dose of post-capitalist futures included in it, just to keep sf’s edge, and keep people thinking in new ways about the future. Capitalism as currently practiced will wreck the Earth; people don’t want to wreck the Earth; therefore a better economic system is called for. So, this is the kind of call that science fiction is supposed to answer.

I could not disagree more with this assessment of economics, but it will take a full blog post to offer a satisfying rebuttal. But, I do *not* disagree with the idea that SFF should explore post-capitalistic futures. I just doubt that they will ever materialize.