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Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

Theorists and apologists for science fiction (sf) are persistently defending it from accusations of fantasy and of mediocrity. Take the opening sentence of a recent edited collection on the genre:

For most of the eighty years since science fiction (SF) was identified and named as a distinct genre, it has typically been dismissed as the infantile excrescence of a stultifying mass culture, a literature doubly debased by its fantastic elements and mediocre prose (Bould 1).

Whether sf remains marginalized by high literary culture remains a matter for debate. Yet Bould's claim for the genre's denigration is a typical strategy by which critical work on sf positions itself. The most influential theorist of sf, Darko Suvin, wants to elevate sf from its status both as marginal and as popular by considering it to be cognitively engaging and distinct from fantasy fiction. This doubled strategy of discovering sf's thoughtful, reflexive qualities and of elevating it from other, more degraded popular genres has largely held sway in the tiny discipline of sf studies. Here, I want to reverse this trend to argue that sf can be mediocre and can lack those cognitive, reflexive ideas that define literature. To do this I turn to one of the most popular writers of sf in the twentieth century, Arthur C. Clarke. This essay illustrates the mediocrity of sf with five examples of Clarke's fiction, as well as with the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) that he co-wrote with filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. First published in the pulp magazine Astounding in 1946, Clarke went on to become not only a bestselling sf writer, but a leading propagandist for space exploration. His fictions can be considered as something of an extension of this public role, as they demonstrate the feasibility of near-future technologies. Yet, while illustrating the possibilities for the human race off the planet, they also subsume human relations to this greater goal. As Merritt Abrash points out, "cooperation serves no necessary function" for Clarke, instead being a means to the ends of human expansion into space (377). This contradiction between the grandiose and the banal, the contrast between the infinite and the finitude of Clarke's fiction, is understood here to be its distinctive quality. Clarke's mediocrity is a way of understanding the way in which the genre functions aesthetically.

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