"Performing the Atwood" Sounds Kinda Dirty,
Given My Memories of The Handmaid's Tale

China Mieville weighs in on the battle between the literary elite and science fiction/fantasy writers for Believer readers:

"As a kid, you grow up reading SF, fantasy, and horror and you do have that slight sense of literary embattlement. We exaggerate it for the purposes of radical chic, but nonetheless you do get a lot of shit for it. And so many writers perform the [Neal] Stephenson maneuver in reverse--they perform the Atwood--they write things that are clearly weird or in the fantastic tradition and then bend over backwards to try to distance themselves from genre. Or you have writers like Vonnegut who write science fiction in their early years and then continue to write it but make a big public pronouncement about how they no longer write science fiction. Of course it is their right to do, but it always at least disappoints me and at worst enrages me. I have so much enormous respect for Neal. He’s saying essentially, 'Whether or not you think you can see aliens or spaceships in this book and therefore you don’t think it’s science fiction, the sensibility I bring to it is born out of my relationship with genre. Essentially, this is a geek historical novel, and more than that, it’s a science-fiction geek historical novel.' I could kiss him."