[ExI] Fan of Sci-Fi? Psychologists Have You in Their Sights

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2020 at 1:40 PM John Clark via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 11:20 PM John Grigg via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> "Psychology has often supported a dismissal of the genre. The most recent
>> psychological accusation against science fiction is the “great fantasy migration hypothesis.”
>
>
> This is nothing new, all non-fiction is some form of escapism, except for stuff like James
> Joyces's Finnegans Wake that nobody reads unless they're teaching a course on it or
> are a student in such a course and have to. So if you're going to condemn Star Wars
> and Harry Potter then to be consistent you should also condemn the Bible, the Quran
> and all religions.

I believe you meant 'fiction' -- not non-fiction.

I believe comes down to, as I mentioned in another post, what's
acceptable entertainment by some person or established taste. What's
not is considered escapism.

By the way, I wouldn't make a hard line between stuff like _Finnegan's
Wake_ (okay, I haven't read that, but I did start to read _Ulysses_
and found it's actually easy to read; the Wake will have to wait:) and
'genre' or commercial fiction. There's no hard line and nothing to
stop a genre author from crossing it or blending it in a given work.
Think of the literary Westerns of Cormac McCarthy, Peter S. Beagle's
fantasy (which owes more to Lord Dunsany than Tolkien and his hordes
of imitators), or the SF of LeGuin* or a host of others writer today.
Blending established genres -- and genres do have a history too;
they're malleable rather than ideal types -- is done often enough,
time and again.

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://author.to/DanUst

* I hate to use her because she's the 'go to' literary SF writer, but
it's not like she invented that or that all literary SF must follow in
her wake and adopt her approach. Certainly, much of the SF being
written today, even the New Space Opera of authors like Becky Chambers
and Ian McDonald write to a different, more literary (IMO) standard
than most popular Golden Age SF authors.