C. S. Lewis on Science Fiction

[jsburbidge]

"Science-fiction is a literary province I used to visit fairly often;  if I now visit it seldom, that is not because my taste has improved but because the province has changed, being now covered with new building estates, in a style I don't care for. But in the good old days I noticed that whenever critics said anything about it they betrayed great ignorance. They talked as though it were a homogeneous genre. But it is not, in the literary sense, a genre at all. There is nothing common to all who write it except the use of a particular 'machine'. Some of the writers are of the family of Jules Verne and are primarily interested in technology. Some use the machine simply for literary fantasy and produce what is essentially Märchen or myth. A great many use it for satire...And finally, there is the great mass of hacks who have merely 'cashed in' on the boom in science-fiction and used remote planets or even galaxies as the backcloth for spy-stories or love-stories which might as well have been located in Whitechapel or the Bronx. And as the stories differ in kind, so too do their readers.  You can, if you wish, class all science-fiction together; but it is about as perceptive as classing the works of Ballantyne, Conrad, and W. W. Jacobs together as "the sea-story" and then criticising that."

- An Experiment in Criticism