Most sci-fi writing—even the greats—doesn't reach the minimal level of writing quality to get much attention from Lit Fic people. Flat, cliche-filled, inefficient, lacking the insight and turn of phrase needed to make simple stuff like scene-setting truly good. All of the above, often enough. One level up from bare quality of craft, you have obvious themes and motifs handled poorly being a common problem. At worst they blend into bad allegory or morality tales.
The set that manages to overcome those hurdles and achieve the sublime—feelings of awe, of sudden revelation, of such beauty in the use of language that you have to stop reading and just absorb it for a minute—with fair frequency is much smaller still.
But hey, it manages to produce good (in a literary sense) stuff at a better rate than some genres (ahem, fantasy) at least. In fact I can't think of any other "genre" fic that beats it.
I don't mean, of course, that deliberately "literary" work, especially of the last few decades, doesn't have its own problems. Lit journals often read like self-parody, certainly.
It is true that if your fiction has more to do with sociology or political philosophy than individual psychology you're already fighting an uphill battle if you want recognition from academics. It's been decided, rightly or wrongly, that the proper place for those topics is in works of history—plenty of which end up as honorary entries in the canon of "literature", even! The strongest reason I can think of for this (in the whopping few minutes I've been thinking about it, just now) is that the personal perspective on which fiction thrives isn't nearly as useful for revealing insights about objects of that perspective—especially the more distant and abstract they become—as it is the subject in relation to those objects.
The set that manages to overcome those hurdles and achieve the sublime—feelings of awe, of sudden revelation, of such beauty in the use of language that you have to stop reading and just absorb it for a minute—with fair frequency is much smaller still.
But hey, it manages to produce good (in a literary sense) stuff at a better rate than some genres (ahem, fantasy) at least. In fact I can't think of any other "genre" fic that beats it.
I don't mean, of course, that deliberately "literary" work, especially of the last few decades, doesn't have its own problems. Lit journals often read like self-parody, certainly.
It is true that if your fiction has more to do with sociology or political philosophy than individual psychology you're already fighting an uphill battle if you want recognition from academics. It's been decided, rightly or wrongly, that the proper place for those topics is in works of history—plenty of which end up as honorary entries in the canon of "literature", even! The strongest reason I can think of for this (in the whopping few minutes I've been thinking about it, just now) is that the personal perspective on which fiction thrives isn't nearly as useful for revealing insights about objects of that perspective—especially the more distant and abstract they become—as it is the subject in relation to those objects.