cheech

This is something I read by Michael Chabon in The New York Review of Books, about how he was deciding how to write his fiction, as a college student. I thought he especially made sense in the end part about what bugs him about science-fiction.
Growing up, I read some science-fiction that was trad hero/ bad-guy stuff but I generally shied away from that for stuff like Moorcock and the short stories of Larry Niven and Harlan Ellison (if he can be considered in the genre; of course, in my later years, I've preferred his non-fiction), stuff that went beyond the sorta superhero stuff (my entire life, I've never read superhero comics, always comics about regular people [or, uh, animals that act like regular people?]. The closest I came is probably the war comics of England in the late-'70s.). I also loved sci-fi that spoofed sci-fi, of course, and had a greater agenda than goodguy/ badguy (Douglas Adams, Buckaroo Banzai, National Lampoon's Doon):

I wanted to tell stories, the kind with set pieces and long descriptive passages, and "round" characters, and beginnings and middles and ends. And I wanted to instill- or rather I didn't want to lose- that quality, inherent in the best science fiction, which was sometimes called "the sense of wonder." If my subject matter couldn't do it- if I wasn't writing about people who sailed through neutron stars or harnessed suns together- then it was going to fall to my sentences themselves to open up the heads of my readers and decant into them enough crackling plasma to light up the eye sockets for a week.
But I didn't want to write science fiction, or a version of science fiction, some kind of pierced-and-tattooed, doctorate-holding, ironical stepchild of science fiction. I wanted to write something with reach. Welty and Faulkner started and ended in small towns in Mississippi but somehow managed to plant flags at the end of time and in the minds of readers around the world. A good science fiction novel appeared to have an infinite reach- it could take you to the place where the universe bent back on itself- but somehow, in the end, it ended up being the shared passion of just you and that guy at the Record Graveyard on Forbes Avenue who was really into Hawkwind.
I wasn't considering any actual, numerical readership here- I wasn't so bold. Rather I was thinking about the set of axioms that speculative fiction assumed, and how it was a set that seemed to narrow and refine and program its audience, like a protein that coded for a certain suite of traits. Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world. (Twenty-one, I was twenty-one!)