Sir, At the Cheltenham Festival Margaret Atwood said that writers “are likely to be compulsive wordsmiths” — presumably a way of saying that writing is for some of us an expression of the life force.

Her life would have been more difficult had she not cleverly denied that her early science fiction novels, such as A Handmaid’s Tale, were science fiction. Had she neglected this strategy, there would have been for her no more literary festivals, no more reviews, no more appearances on BBC breakfast programmes.

It is a truth widely acknowledged that SF is not worth consideration by sane minds. Kurt Vonnegut and J. G. Ballard have adopted Atwood’s gambit. When Vonnegut grew tired of being a guru, he returned to SF and wrote such brilliant novels as Galápagos. No reviewer spoke its name. When — possibly because of my age — I was invited on Desert Island Discs this year, I was told that SF readers were nerds who were poor and could not “get a woman”.

One of the most popular novels of the postwar period was John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. Our hero, in the face of worldwide catastrophe, gets to stay free at the Ritz, choses which car he fancies most, and goes with his girl to live on the halcyon Isle of Wight. At that time, a better writer, John Christopher, wrote Death of Grass. Same scenario: London stricken. So two well-characterised brothers head north to practise survival agriculture, growing potatoes. But this grim novel, together with Christopher himself, seems to be forgotten.

Is this the crux of it? That the popular novels are in general self- indulgent. Harshness, disaster — “Hubris clobbered by Nemesis”, as one of our writers puts it — will always be out of favour. Yet, like Tolstoy’s brilliant Resurrection, literature is not there to make us feel cosy, but rather to help us to confront the errors and terrors of our lives.

Brian Aldiss
Oxford

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