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While past Nobel laureates like Doris Lessing certainly approve of and are connected with the Fantasy and Science Fiction genre in at least a peripheral way, no unabashed genre writer has ever won the prize.

Our question for this week's fearless panelists:

Q: What F/SF authors should be considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Here's what they said…

Will Shetterly

Will Shetterly is the author of 10 fantasy novels and numerous short stories.

I'm a firm believer that it's a greater honor to be nominated than to win, because there are usually better reasons to quibble about the winner than the nominees. Therefore, my first thoughts on nominees, in no special order: Jane Yolen, Ursula LeGuin, Samuel R. Delany, John Crowley, and Gene Wolfe. If she was still alive, I would include Diana Wynne Jones.

John Ginsberg-Stevens

John Ginsberg-Stevens is a writer, anthropologist, and bookseller whose has loved all forms of SF and Fantastika since he was a wee lad. He is married to a red-headed fiddler and father of an infant geek-in-training who is slowly perfecting her Jedi mind tricks. He is working on a novel and several short stories, is a biweekly columnist for Forces of Geek and a monthly blogger for Apex Book Company. He has taught anthropology and writing at Cornell University, Ithaca College, and several other fine institutions. At parties he participates in improv poetry competitions as Iron Poet Scandinavian Saga, whose lengthy eddaic paeans to the dust-bunnies beneath Odin's throne often extend the celebrations until dawn.

As I started thinking about this question, my first reaction was rather ambivalent: the idea of a writer of fantastika winning the Nobel Prize for Literature was not far-fetched, but seemed at once improbable and, more importantly, unnecessary. What would it do for the allied genres if a "real" writer of SF or fantasy or horror took the honor (and doesn't 1987 Worldcon GoH Doris Lessing count for something)? Would there be a sudden renewal of interest in fantastic literature? What does the Prize do for the field of literature anyway?. The Prize is an odd creation, funded rather ambiguously by the estate of the man who patented dynamite and who was prematurely excoriated as a "merchant of death" when his brother's death was confused with him dying. The Prize was to be awarded "to the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction," an instruction that has its own peculiar history of interpretation. It is a strange honor, one created by privilege and granted by a tiny elite, to acknowledge something that is, as the award's history itself demonstrates, rather subjective, leading one to wonder just what is being lauded in its giving.

For these reasons, I think that the question is interesting not as one of speculation, but as one of rumination about what strengths we find in the works of genre authors that exemplify fantastika's broader artistic and contemplative values. Looking for such nominees is like looking for our Jose Saramago or our Nadine Gordimer, but it's also like looking for our Sully Prudhomme or Roger Martin du Gard; what was resonant fifty years ago may not be today. As Gene Wolfe once noted about the Nobel, winning it is no guarantee of enduring importance or admiration, especially as its standards have shifted over time. A given writer's legacy is rarely influenced by winning the Award, nor is it predictive of enduring eminence. But the question of which authors in fantastika come to mind as contenders can start a conversation about what we think fantastic literature has to offer authors as well as readers.

Wolfe would, perhaps not surprisingly, be my first nominee. As our gracious host noted himself on Twitter a few weeks ago: "It's my contention that Gene Wolfe is one of the few core genre writers who could plausibly get a Nobel Prize in Literature." A quick search on Goggle turned up many conversations about this possibility, touting Wolfe's gifts as world-class and deeply literary. He fits many of the preconceptions we have about what makes an author worthy of the Prize: his work is written with precision and profundity, his novels are often capacious and labyrinthine, with subtexts, depths of interpretation, and philosophical intricacies. They have aesthetic flourishes and meticulous structures, and they often have a lot to say about human nature. Wolfe reflects, for a number of readers, all of the qualities that we think a Nobel Laureate should possess.

And yet, I wonder if he is the best name to put forth. Wolfe is one of my favorite writers, and hugely influential, but I can't