This has been always one of my very favorite stories ever. Its how I convince people that sci-fi isn't just for geeks.
Challenging, funny, deeply thought-provoking. Its just the one of the best things ever. I never tire of reading it and people I tell about it come back and invariably rave about how great it is. I've had quite a few converts to the whole panoply of "speculative fiction" from their exposure to this wonderful little gem.
Sci-fi is only for geeks because when something gets accepted into the canon of good literature, we stop calling it sci-fi. The stuff that's left, that only geeks like, is "sci-fi".
Brave New World, 1984, Slaughterhouse Five, Gravity's Rainbow, etc. aren't usually what the label conjures up.
Salman Rushdie started as a Sci-fi author. Then he moved into "Magic realism", which is Fantasy without the barbarians and buxom wenches (or more eloquently written barbarians and buxom wenches).
"Literature" is the label for works that are good enough that everyone should read them, not just genre fans. "Romance", "Sci fi", "Travel", "Crime", "Comedy", "Detective", "Drama" and so on are works that aren't good enough for everyone to read.
Of course, there's writers who hack their way into the "Literature" section by imitating the quirks of a genuine pieces of literature, or just avoiding all the other categories.
No, "Literature" is the label for works of middle-class introspection, whereas "Genre" fictions are books that are about any other subject matter.
If you move from actually having a subject to making your subject a metaphor for middle-class internal conflicts, you have made the move from Genre to Lit.
Yes, that's why I refer to the kind of works you mention with the label "speculative fiction". They are really sci-fi but they have reached a level of social import and acceptance -- upon which they get labelled as "speculative fiction" rather than "sci-fi".
"Speculative" is just used to bring fantasy and alternative history and other "what if the world worked under different rules? " material under the same umbrella as lasers and robots and starships. It is not a marker of quality level.
Challenging, funny, deeply thought-provoking. Its just the one of the best things ever. I never tire of reading it and people I tell about it come back and invariably rave about how great it is. I've had quite a few converts to the whole panoply of "speculative fiction" from their exposure to this wonderful little gem.