Hate SF? What are you, a Commie?

[elfs]

Dave Wolverton has as essay, On Writing as a Fantasist, in which he takes to task the various odd schools of writing that describe the genre known as Literature, and he reveals something I did not know. In 1866, William Dean Howells became an editor, and eventually the editor, of Atlantic Monthly, which at the time was by far the magazine with the greatest distribution and widest readership for short fiction. When he became editor, he set out new rules for the kind of fiction he wanted, describing it as Realism. Howell's rules forbade the supernatural, the weird, or the overly dramatic.

What Wolverton claims is that Howells was a socialist: he came up with a way of restricting his writers to dealing only with economic issues that affected "real" people. He took away all of the trappings of escaping: no witches, warlocks, vampires, ghosts, mob bosses and molls, ray guns, trips to the moon, adventures underground, or time travel. That left writers who wanted to get into the Atlantic Monthly with two constrictions: that all fiction must have a conflict, and that all conflict must be real, personal, and intimate.

Since at the time "intimate" was not allowed to have the same meaning it quite has now, his writers were pared down to writing around these issues, and they did what Howell hoped they would: they wrote all of their stories about economic hardships suffered by ordinary human beings. Howell hoped that enough stories describing the "plight of the common people" would encourage America toward a more socialist and collective direction.

If true, it would explain a lot about the state of Literature today.