There are very real differences between science fiction and realistic fiction, between horror and fantasy, between romance and mystery. Differences in writing them, in reading them, in criticizing them. Vive les différences! They’re what gives each genre its singular flavor and savor, its particular interest for the reader—and the writer.
But when the characteristics of a genre are controlled, systematized, and insisted upon by publishers, or editors, or critics, they become limitations rather than possibilities. Salability, repeatability, expectability replace quality. A literary form degenerates into a formula.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 2014
Permit us to begin with a brief summary of a short story. A hardware salesman driving from Providence to his home in New Haven notices that a clock in a roadside diner is a few minutes ahead of his watch but thinks nothing of it; he’ll still be home by 7:30. Later, after being momentarily disoriented by a “feeling of blank unbelongingness” and noting yet another inexplicable time discrepancy, he arrives home more than an hour late. Unable to account for his lost hour, he has a vague memory of seeing a group of white houses at an intersection and momentarily wonders if he’s the same person he was when he left Providence. Several times over the next few weeks he looks for the white houses, feeling a “strange sense of loss” until one day, departing from his usual route to check out a new hardware store, he finds himself on strange but oddly familiar roads. He not only sees the houses, but a middle-aged woman tending to her flowers at a nearby summer cottage seems to recognize him as does a bartender at a roadside bar. But when he leaves the bar and drives past the woman’s cottage, it looks empty and closed up for the winter as do all the other seaside cottages.
Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
