The blogger Mark Wallace reckons so:
It’s time to abolish a whole literary genre – science fiction must be destroyed. The signs should be taken down from Waterstones, the specialist shops should pull down the shutters and the conventions should be disbanded.
I say this as a fan, rather than an enemy. Science fiction as a genre should be abolished – so it can take its rightful place in the genre where it belongs: literature.
He then goes on to list some works usually classified as science fiction that he thinks are good enough to be go toe-to-toe with general fiction. His Top Five are:
The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller.
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman.
I have a couple of reservations here. First, if he is forced to nominate two works by Philip K Dick, doesn't this rather undermine his contention that the sci-fi genre contains a wealth of writing as good as anything in mainstream fiction. By name-checking Dick twice, he's really saying either Dick (and a few others) are great writers who opted to write in a genre that is otherwise pretty weak; or his own knowledge of sci-fi is rather limited, in which case who is he to be pontificating on it's value?
Further, if you're going to cite an example of Banks's fiction, why plump for the inferior Player of Games and overlook the monumentally great Use of Weapons?
Use of Weapons IS the most obvious example of Banks's sci-fi that could be described as something more than 'just' science fiction, with its forwards-backwards structure, it's unreliable narrator and its still-impressive-even-after-you-know-about it double whammy twist ending. It's every bit as challenging and inventive as mainstream fiction, whereas Player of Games is just a bit of a space opera romp.
(As an aside, I used to think Banks - in either form - was brilliant, but now I can't be bothered. Most of his straight fiction seems pretty facile. The Bridge is so far up its own arse it might as well be renamed The Bert. Espedair Street is a rather silly bit of wishful fulfillment (Banks kinda wanted to be a rock star, he even wrote the songs referred to in the book), Crow Road and Whit are just a bit rubbish, Dead Air should have been great but wasn't (I suspect it was another bit of wishfulfillment, the wannabe rockstar re-casting himself as a DJ). The only one I still entertain any fondness for is complicity, largely because it was so deliberately nasty, and so very, very angry. And the description of the main character trying to wedge his bobbing erection under his computer desk while he plays a God game on his computer is amusing.
That said, I'm tempted by some of his recent efforts, because he seems to have become stridently political again, and that always gave his writing a bit more of an edge.)
However, Wallace, may have some sort of point. We need to get over the weird snobbishness that seems to exclude a novel like Use Of Weapons from consideration. I think the Whitbread put Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone on the short list, but that was probably more about making the prize seem relevant to general book readers, rather than a heroic blow against book-snoots. Otherwise, novels like Use Of Weapons would surely also feature - technically ingenious, imaginatively superb, character driven, full of ideas ... but since Use of Weapons was categorised as sci-fi, and generally ignored by readers (who for some reason didn't think there was anything odd about reading a kids book about a boy wizard at boarding school) it was also safe for prize panels to ignore it.
