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Margaret Atwood and the Hierarchy of
Contempt1
Peter Watts


Start with a metaphor for literary respectability: a spectrum,
ranging from sullen infrared up to high-strung ultraviolet.
Literature with a capital L (all characters, no plot) sits enthroned at
the top. Genre fiction, including science fiction (all plot, no
characters) is relegated to the basement. Certain types of fantasy
hover in between, depending on subspecies: the Magic Realists get
loads of respect, for example. Tolkein gets respect. (His myriad
imitators, thank God, do not.) Down in the red-light district,
science fiction's own subspectrum runs from "soft" to "hard", and
it's generally acknowledged that the soft stuff at least leaves the
door open for something approaching ArtтАФLessing, Le Guin, the
New Wave stylists of the late sixtiesтАФwhile the hardcore types are
too caught up in chrome and circuitry to bother with character
development or actual literary technique.

I call it The Hierarchy of Contempt, and although you might
point to exceptions at any wavelength, it seems a reasonable
approximation of the literary "credscape"тАФaccording to the current
regime at least, who hold the realist novel to be the benchmark
against which all else is judged.

Given that realist benchmark, you might expect respectability to
correlate with real-world plausibility in the narrative itself. You
would be wrong. The same critics who roll their eyes at aliens and
warp drive don't seem to have any problems with a woman
ascending into heaven while hanging laundry in One Hundred
Years of Solitude, just so long as Gabriel Garcia Marquez doesn't
get published by Tor or Del Ray. In this sense the Hierarchy is
neither consistent nor rational; it is therefore unsurprising that
those who live by its tenets tend to develop psychological
problems.

First published summer 2003 in On Spec 15(2): 3-5.
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Peter Watts 2 Hierarchy of Contempt


Margaret Atwood, for example.

Here is a woman so terrified of sf-cooties that she'll happily
redefine the entire genre for no other reason than to exclude herself
from it. Of her latest novelтАФa near-future dystopia detailing
baseline-Humanity's replacement by a genetically-engineered
daughter speciesтАФshe has said: "Oryx and Crake is not science
fiction. Science fiction is when you have chemicals and rockets."