Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

The minor genres such as science fiction, jazz, the Western and the detective story can (I think)
only be deeply appreciated and properly understood by the addict, the bulk consumer who was
drawn to the stuff in late childhood for reasons he could not have explained then and would
have a lot of trouble explaining now.
Amis himself was just such an addict as other essays in this and other books make abundantly clear.
Consequently it comes as no real surprise to find that among his published works are detective stories,
spy stories and SF stories. (I don't recall any Westerns or any jazz records, but I am willing to be
corrected on this).
If this was peculiar to Kingsley Amis then I suppose we could simply dismiss him as a minor eccentric
and move on to something else. But it turns out to be a surprisingly common phenomenon. It
transcends artistic boundaries (not only the literati go slumming) and it seems to be almost exclusively a
British trait. There are examples from other countries, but they are far fewer and far less significant.
Let's take a closer look...
I think that at some point in our lives we have all been faced with trying to justify and explain our strange
hobby to some doubting person or other.
("Why do you read this rubbish?"
"It isn't rubbish!
"Prove it.")
One defence that springs to mind is to try and list all the science fiction books that have been accepted
by the mainstream. We point to Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and 1984 by George Orwell. We
probably mention H. G. Wells and perhaps Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange and various
others) and William Golding (The Lord of the Flies and several other SF related works). Depending on
our audience we might go further back in time and discuss Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift and
Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne. Actually, I'm not sure if Tristram Shandy is science fiction, but
whatever it is, it is undeniably odd and it has as good a claim to being science fiction, or at least fantasy,
as it does to being anything else. How else would you describe a book where the narrator hasn't been
born yet?
The interesting thing about all these examples is that in every case the writer was not writing SF for the
love of it, he was writing SF for the sake of the story, the message and the theme (or the sub-text if that
is your literary bent). Indeed, several of our favourite mainstream colleagues couldn't have even known
that they were writing science fiction since the term and the genre did not exist when they were putting
their words on to dead trees. Anyway, it's irrelevant. None of these writers (and half a dozen more that I
could name) felt that they were doing anything out of the ordinary when they wrote their books. They
merely wrote what the story required. (I once heard Gene Wolfe comment that what he wrote was just
stuff. What happened to it after it went to the publisher was their business and had nothing to do with
him). In other words the literary boundaries that you and I may force on to our reading are often
meaningless to the writers who produce it. Sometimes I suspect that the tail is wagging the dog.
I doubt if Wells saw any real distinction between the scientific romances of The Time Machine and The
War of the Worlds and the sociological commentary of Kipps and The History of Mr Polly. Amis
and Wells represent perhaps the two extremes in their approaches. Wells probably didn't even
recognise that different categories of fiction existed at all, at least not to the extent that we do today.
Literary categories were much more fluid in his time. Amis recognised their existence but felt little
interest in such artificial distinctions. Both approaches lead to the same end result, of course. The writer
simply writes the book that he writes without any feeling of slumming at all. Under this rubric, the only
thing that separates the genre writer from the mainstream is that the mainstream writer has a far
greater spread and the genre specialist can thus be considered to be far too narrow-minded for his own
good. Now there's a thought to play with -- the SF writer as a conservative literary reactionary! (Do I
hear you cry "Anathema!"?)
You can see the phenomenon much more clearly when you examine that peculiarly British genre, the