Why is Science fiction held is such low esteem by literary critics?
It has to be admitted that most SF is quite poorly written and that a substantial percentage is little more than power fantasies designed to appeal to male teenagers or TV spinoff merchandising – for example, Star Trek novels. This kind of stuff generally has little or no literary merit. However, to appreciate the best SF requires a reasonable knowledge of scientific concepts which literary critics, who have generally been educated in the arts rather than sciences, are unfamiliar with. This means they generally don’t see beyond the fact that they are reading what is in essence a genre novel, rather than a literary one, and tend to downplay whatever merit the book might actually have. From my own extensive reading there is very little SF which is anywhere near the level of artistic merit as the best literary novels, although a few come quite close. Isaac Asimov, for example, is highly regarded in SF but compared to ‘real’ fiction his writing and characterisation are generally pretty awf
