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Could a sci-fi writer win the Nobel Prize for Literature?
Why does the jury that awards the Nobel Prize for Literature hate us?
By "us," I mean, of course, hardcore writers and partisans of fantastika, people unafraid and unashamed to boldly identify themselves primarily with the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror, rather than with mainstream, mimetic literature.
I think I can safely say, without being privy to their secret deliberations, that the jury has never once seriously considered confering a Nobel Prize on any writer whose overall body of work has been in science fiction, and who has forthrightly labeled himself or herself an SF geek.
Death has sadly removed from the running most of the SFWA Grand Masters who should have gotten a Nobel: famous, worthy names such as Asimov, Heinlein and Williamson, whose work has surely contributed more to the shaping of 21st-century culture than that of, say, the obscure and occult Elfriede Jelinek, the controversial Nobel winner in 2004, or the only slightly less hermetic Herta Müller (below), who won this year's award. Other deserving names not accorded a Grand Master Award, such as H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Jorge Luis Borges and J.G. Ballard have been slighted by both death and the jury.
Of course, this stiff-necked, stiff-armed, haughty and blinder-wearing refusal by the Nobel committee to recognize and honor the value of science fiction and its allied genres is only the most extreme example of the way all the Big-Name Awards ignore us. Kim Stanley Robinson recently nailed the phenomenon in his New Scientist article about the Booker Prize.
Now, it's true that quite a few Nobelists have dabbled in fantastika to a greater or lesser degree. Here's a partial list, in chronological order of their award: Rudyard Kipling, Maurice Maeterlinck, Anatole France, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Sinclair Lewis, Herman Hesse, Bertrand Russell, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Harry Martinson, Isaac Bashevis Singer, William Golding, Nadine Gordimer, José Saramago, Gunter Grass and Doris Lessing.
That's an honorable lineage of fantastical writers, many of whom you would find in the library of any broad-minded fan. But not one of them is a truly satisfying representative of the beating, sense-of-wonder heart of modern science fiction, those unabashed proponents of ray guns and aliens, space operas and cyberpunk, dystopias and steampunk, time travel and miraculous technology.
This blatant, painful injustice is why we feel compelled to nominate eight writers whom we feel truly deserve a Nobel Prize. Eight names of artists who have enriched our literary culture at least as much as, say, Frans Eemil Sillanpää (1939); Eyvind Johnson (1974); or Wisława Szymborska (1996).
Now, while there are scads of living writers in our field who have produced monumental works of value, we've acknowledged in our choices the fact that the Nobel judges exhibit certain prejudices: They like to pick older writers with a certain extra-literary gravitas and political-cultural credentials. So that eliminates for the moment such figures as Ian MacLeod, Ken MacLeod and Gwyneth Jones, whom we at first considered.
Here are our candidates, ranked in order from least likely to get the nod to a possible shoo-in.
Geoff Ryman
Our youngest writer, Ryman is the creator of a body of work not quite as sizable as that belonging to the other folks on our list. But he has a knack for making each book a unique masterpiece. His postmodern take on the Wizard of Oz, Was..., gets him credit from the academics, while his transgressive sex novel Lust earns radical appeal. And his multiculturalism in such books as Air is a plus.
Christopher Priest
With the high profile gained by the film version of his novel The Prestige and his award-winning followup The Separation, Priest suddenly leaps more into public focus as an idiosyncratic, ingenious, non-repeating perfectionist, much like a father-figure predecessor to Ryman. His political awareness in such books as Fugue for a Darkening Island is a potent factor as well.
Michael Moorcock
The polymath genius behind the New Wave has a substantial mainstream body of work—notably the Pyat series—which would impress the judges. Of course, they'd have to wrap their minds around the Multiverse and Elric as well, not to mention Jerry Cornelius. Moorcock's editorial record has to count for a lot. But the judges might discount for his Hawkwind lyrics.
Brian Aldiss
Like Moorcock, Aldiss, the last of our Fab Four from the U.K., also has plenty of judge-impressing mimetic novels to his credit, such as the Horatio Stubbs saga and the Squire Quartet. But such true SF masterpieces as Greybeard and the Helliconia Trilogy can't help but impress even literal-minded judges. Aldiss' nonfiction books, his anthology-building and his critical track record have to count for a lot as well.
Samuel R. Delany
Delany's status as a youthful prodigy culminated in the genius of Nova, while his mature novel Dhalgren remains a postmodern milestone of what SF can do. And his Nevèrÿon tales manage the unlikely trick of mixing semiotics with sword & sorcery. Delany's academic credentials and essay writing work in his favor as well.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Le Guin already has the backing of the literary establishment, as witnessed by her appearances in The New Yorker and other high-toned venues. Her canonical YA books are another arrow in her quiver, as is a certain liberal slant to her implicit politics. But of course her pure-quill SF, such as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, is the real meat of her candidacy, as is her continuing strong work in the short SF forms.
Ray Bradbury
Lionized for decades, Bradbury presents an almost water-tight case for a Nobel, with works such as Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles well known to even casual readers. His reputation as one of the finest short-story writers of the 20th century continues unsullied, despite a certain slackening in his recent work. His advocacy of libraries, writers, literature, pop culture, the power and autocracy of the imagination and a lifelong autodidacticism rounds out his appeal.
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon! Author of such postmodernist bugcrushers as Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon! Surely this name doesn't belong on a list of genre writers! He's a canonical mainstream figure.
Far from it. Pynchon is our genre's secret agent. Consider these qualifications.
a) Every single one of his books is fantastical, not just one or two of them.
b) Although he has never specifically labeled himself an SF writer, he's never repudiated such a designation.
c) John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly nominate him as the central figure in an alternate history of our genre in their recent book, The Secret History of Science Fiction.
d) Pynchon namechecks SF all the time, such as his frequent references to Asimov in Against the Day.
e) Pynchon has appeared twice on The Simpsons.
If all this does not make the man "one of us," in a way that, say, Margaret Atwood defiantly is not, then we are throwing away our best chance to finally say, "Yes, science fiction now has the Nobel Prize it has always deserved!"
By Simon Baylor at 7:54 PM ON 10/08/09
And all of them are worthy candidates indeed. It would be huge boon to Science fiction it it came to pass.
By Severian :) at 9:27 PM ON 10/08/09
Gene Wolfe should be on this list. The most under-rated author of our times. A lot of his work is SciFi and all of it falls squarely in the realm of hardcore literature.
From wikipedia...
Award-winning science fiction author Michael Swanwick has said: "Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning."[6]
Among others, writers Neil Gaiman and Patrick O'Leary have credited Wolfe for inspiration. O'Leary has said: "Forget 'Speculative Fiction'. Gene Wolfe is the best writer alive. Period. And as Wolfe once said (in reference to Gaiman), 'All novels are fantasies. Some are more honest about it.' No comparison. Nobody – I mean nobody – comes close to what this artist does."
By mitchell at 11:12 PM ON 10/08/09
I really enjoyed this article. Just out of curiosity I looked up some of the past nobel winners, and to be completly honest I barely recognized any of them (and there were hardly any from the USA).
I believe these people just live in a completly different world than we do. Science Fiction tends to heavily stress its subject matter, which is it's nature. The nobel academy seemed to be more interested in prose. I think if anybody had an honest chance at one, it would be Bradbury.
If it makes you feel any better, Micharl Chabon won a pulitzer, that shoud count for something.
By divephotog at 5:15 AM ON 10/09/09
Have to agree with you mitchell... When this years winner announcement came in my e-mail, I went huh?? Romanian writer Herta Mueller wins Nobel Literature Prize, and having had at least a little idea of who the people were that had received other awards (Physics, Chem, Medicine) or at least able to easily reasearch the names I did not know, tried to find the works of Herta, and was able to find two obscure titles (Land of the Green Plums, & The Passport) which were not recognizable to me, and probably not very amazing either.
One thing to be remembered is that the Prize board is very European-centric, and even this list of nominees-for-SF is very US-centric.
I though would love to see UrsulaK LeGuin or Ray Bradbury especially from this list go forward.
I know many have no knowledge of Ursulla's one movie from her book, 'The Lathe of Heaven' which I enjoy watching from time to time still, but her 'EarthSea' trilogy adaptation is more well known (neither of which have been on SyFy in a while) and Rays are numerous, but I can remember as a kid resding the short story 'A Sound of Thunder' back in 1962 in 'R is for Rocket', and was very pleased at the Syfy adaptation movie on it, but his major pieces are especially poignant, and I would thing 'Farenheit 451' is due for an adaptation to modern day situations, what with the e-book and internet reducing the market for published materials(and the unfortunate loss of them to society).
Yes, we can each all suggect other writers that are our favorites, but these are the quintiscential best to pass a Nobel Selection committee for their Science Fiction work, and surely better known world wide than Herta Mueller. :) - kh
By Paranatural at 10:18 AM ON 10/09/09
Pratchett belongs on that list as well.
By Leroy at 10:28 AM ON 10/09/09
When I saw the headline as I was scrolling down I immediately thought of Delaney. I was pleased to see his picture a moment later. I agree that Dhalgren and the Neveryon series (among other works) are Nobel worthy, but I wonder if the committee could ever get past his semi-autobiographical, pornographic, and urine-obsessed non-science-fiction novel, Mad Man.
By Alverant at 11:28 AM ON 10/09/09
Sci-fi doesn't get much respect period. SF movies and TV shows are lucky if they get anything more than special effects awards. For actors it's almost like a black hole, once you go in you don't get out. How many SF actors went on to do things other than SF? Very few.
That isn't going to change until the public accepts that SF is a valid form of storytelling.
By Fred Kiesche at 11:35 AM ON 10/09/09
Well, I can think of one writer who won the prize who wrote science fiction as well as "adventure stories" and poetry and the like. Of course, the fact that he won the prize often makes the literati explode their heads, but that is a good thing.
By Mark CN at 11:38 AM ON 10/09/09
Well, Doris Lessing wrote science fiction...
By divephotog at 1:09 PM ON 10/09/09
Alverant: "Sci-fi doesn't get much respect period." HOW TRUE!
Otherwise we would not be subjected to Wrestling, pseudo-sciences (Scares, Ghosts and Myths - still say those shows need a dog, and a goateed guy named Shgaggy to round their staff out!) and the predominance of horror (which is now more at home on NBC-Uni's Chiller channel!) over-running our beloved Science Fiction channel... -kh
By Flux Cheese at 2:35 PM ON 10/09/09
What about DUNE.. that is nobel worthy for sure
By ecgordon at 3:24 PM ON 10/09/09
@Severian: "Gene Wolfe should be on this list. The most under-rated author of our times. A lot of his work is SciFi and all of it falls squarely in the realm of hardcore literature."
You beat me to it. Wolfe is the best I have ever read, period.
By Seanbtwo at 4:04 PM ON 10/09/09
This being the syfy channel, perhaps a movie of the month set in an alternate universe where scifi writers win awards and respect would be in order? Then again, flying lizards from mars are more likely to attack the earth than scifi is to get it's due.
By Blacksnake at 4:29 PM ON 10/09/09
I ignore all critics and awards because they mean nothing to me.In fact anything that wins an award i go out of my way to avoid watching.
By manysisters at 6:39 PM ON 10/09/09
Clarke. Come on.
By Simon Baylor at 7:58 PM ON 10/09/09
What about Harlan Ellison ? One of the greatest writer of all. He has had such huge impact on the genre.
By Spaceman Spiff at 10:19 PM ON 10/09/09
THE SIMPSONS!? exCUSe me. I'm sorry but being on the Simple-sons does NOT qualify one to be labeled an SF personality
By Weirdside at 10:54 PM ON 10/09/09
Pynchon will for sure win one, but I bet you the first SF writer to win one is Octavia Butler. She's already one of only two SF writers who've won the MacArthur Fellowship.
By gleg at 3:54 AM ON 10/10/09
Michael Chabon, has won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hugo Award for Best Novel, so he comes the closest, so far.
By Gabriel Mckee at 10:16 PM ON 10/10/09
If there's ever a Nobel for Having a Truly Epic Beard, Delany should get it.
By SMD at 11:01 AM ON 10/11/09
A couple points you've forgotten:
--Anyone who is an American on this list will never win the award, including Pynchon (who I think should win it and should have won it this year). Why? Because one of the judges on the committee has already publicly stated his bias against American literature. So long as that person is on the committee, no American will win the award unless he or she is a strange sleeper agent pretending to be a European. This is also why the Nobel Prize has lost all credibility and relevance to the U.S. Clearly that fellow has yet to read any American literature, or he's just reading partisan texts or whatever.
--Doris Lessing was an unapologetic science fiction writer. Yes, her full body of work was not science fiction, but she did write a rather substantial series of science fiction novels. If we're going to consider Pynchon on this list, then we have to acknowledge that Lessing has already shoved science fiction into the Nobel world. Nobody can deny it. I suppose the only reason you wouldn't acknowledge Lessing is because all her work is not fantastic in some way...
That's all I have to say.
By MarkH at 4:02 PM ON 10/11/09
If anybody actually wants to read an excerpt of Herta Müller's most recent novel to form an own opinion you can find an English translation here:
By zsingerb at 2:51 PM ON 10/12/09
Samuel R. Delany is also the author of such kiddie porn as Equinox which will get the Nobel committee in hot water. Better to add Clarke, Asimov, and Roger Zelazny.
By MarkH at 4:04 PM ON 10/12/09
Except that they are all dead.
By rowanws at 2:32 AM ON 10/16/09
As most of you have said, a number of laureates have written science fiction and/or fantasy. Not one of the winners, though, was known primarily as a genre writer. So you're right, combine an anti-American lit bias with an anti-genre bias and the hope is dead in the water.
I'd nominate John Crowley as one who should be high on the list. Small output, but each one remarkable in many ways. Pynchon, no. He has wide name recognition, but how many of you,honestly have finished one of his books cover to cover (Crying of Lot 49 doesn't count)? Also, of course, he isn't generally known as a genre writer. Ballard would have been a great pick as not only did he straddle the divide so well, but wrote as if the divide didn't exist.
Wolfe, LeGuin, Bradbury, Moorcock - they'd all be cause for celebration.
Thanks for a fun article and discussion.
By Cora at 11:57 PM ON 10/19/09
I get very weary of people, mainly but not exclusively Americans, complaining about supposedly obscure Nobel Prize for Literature winners.
The Nobel Prize for Literature is intended to award the best in world literature (and I agree that the list of winners is too eurocentric, more Asian, African and Latin American writers would be great), not the best in American or English language literature. Because believe it or not, there is life beyond the English speaking world and it includes some very fine writers.
I am German and neither Elfriede Jelinek (who for whatever reasons is always singled out as a supposedly unworthy winner) nor Hertha Müller are obscure writers to me, though I must admit that both choices surprised me (pleasantly), Müller's more so than Jelinek's. And while their works do not appeal to me personally, both are talented writers and IMO deserving winners.
Of course, there is the occasional Nobel Prize for Literature winner whose name I have never heard of. In recent times, last year's winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, 2000 winner Gao Xingjian and 1996 winner Wislawa Szymborska were unknown to me at the time they won the award. However, I attributed that to my own lack of knowledge of French, Chinese and Polish literature respectively rather than to a bad choice of the Nobel committee.
As for obscure past winners, literary fashions change and sometimes juries make decisions that do not stand the test of times. Neither did all Hugo or Nebula winners. For example, the first three German winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Theodor Mommsen (1902), Rudolf Eucken (1908) and Paul Heyse (1910) are these days only known to specialists even in their native country. Yet someone thought they were worthy and important at the time.
As for an SF writer winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, it already happened with Doris Lessing who not just wrote SF but admitted it. Günther Grass also wrote SF (a postapocalyptic novel) as well as fantasy, but doesn't admit it. In the future, Margaret Atwood (yes, she doesn't want to admit it, but some of her works are SF) and Thomas Pynchon both are good possibilities. Cormac McCarthy, too, and maybe in twenty years or so Michael Chabon or Jonathan Lethem. I would applaud all of these choices. From the non-English speaking world, Michel Houellebecq might be a candidate in a few years' time.
As for "pure" genre writers, I don't see much of a chance in the foreseeable future, because the Nobel Prize committee is not very genre friendly, because genre writers are obscure to many people beyond the genre community and frankly, because while there are many fantastic SF writers, most of them are not Nobel Prize material. Personally, I believe that Ursula K. LeGuin, Ray Bradbury and Samuel Delany would all be worthy winners and should either of them ever win, I would cheer. However, I don't see much of a chance for it.
By gonzo supreme at 10:23 PM ON 10/25/09
How could you omit Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science-fiction writer who was one of the most widely-read figures around the world? His literary brilliance was almost unparallelled.
By MarkH at 3:01 AM ON 10/26/09
Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously.
By CC?? at 5:08 AM ON 12/20/09
Since when is Cormac McCarthy a SF author??? Also, who's the genius who left Gene Wolfe off the list.
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