Fiction And Literature

Value judgements can be individual or collective. An example of an individual value judgement would be if someone said something like, "I think that the literary qualities of Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Night's Tempest are so outstanding that this novel counts as 'literature.'" However, a collective value judgement is shown by which works of poetry, prose fiction or drama are permanently in print. For present purposes, I refer to the permanently in print as "literature." All science fiction is fiction but how much of it is "literature"? Frankenstein and The Time Machine definitely are. They are also pre-genre science fiction. The Frankenstein theme is continued in Poul Anderson's Genesis and time travel in several of Anderson's works that we do not need to list yet again.

The Time Machine owes its status, I think, to:

its discussion of the nature of Time (I disagree with everything that is said but the point is that there is a discussion);

its vivid descriptions both of time travelling and of several future periods;

its vision of the future and sunset of mankind;

its characterization;

its hints at curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter confusion;

its final mystery about when the Time Traveller went and whether he will return;

its poetic descriptions of the past ages when he might have gone.

Enthusiasts for time travel fiction rightly value Poul Anderson's several contributions to this sub-genre although these works have not become "literature."