Well, I would say that much of LITERATURE is unoriginal and poorly written
Uh-oh. Now you're hitting one of MY buttons.....*
Seriously, "mainstream" literature -- the contemporary variety, anyway -- often IS as hidebound and poorly written as the worst of the pulps. Literature (capital "L"), on the other hand, seldom suffers from such defects save in isolated spots; it is, after all, what sets the bar for what quality writing is.... And let's not forget that, at least until the early part of the twentieth century, literature as a whole didn't make that much of a distinction between the fantastic and mundane realms of fiction, either. As Lovecraft has put it, "sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of even the very hardest head", and when you have someone who already has honed their literary abilities to a high degree let loose on this aspect of things, the result is seldom disappointing....
I must say that, in contrast to the sort of attitudes I ran into growing up, and even well into my adult years, what I see as "superior" attitudes concerning sf are almost negligible. It has become too popular (though still not as much so as fantasy) with the general reading public, and as for the film- and television-viewing audience....
My suggestion: introduce them to some of the less conventional aspects of sf. Give them an anthology with the original short story "Flowers for Algernon", by Daniel Keyes, for instance.
That one was not only highly popular with the sf crowd, but was reprinted in numerous general literature anthologies as well. Lem, obviously, is another great example. There are far too many examples to mention more than a handful, even if one goes for earlier sf of the 1940s to the 1970s... let alone what has come out since that time, no few of which were on the best-selling lists at different points.
Or you could point to all the academic attention which is being paid to sf these days. Look up a listing of Masters' or Ph.D. theses focusing on the genre
in a favorable fashion. Or the fact that a number of critics have pointed out that sf is
the mythology for the modern age, for it is able to tackle uniquely modern aspects of the human condition in ways that no other type of literature truly can, in symbolic language that can hit as deeply as does classical mythology at its best.
Or point to the high aspect of its lineage, and mention that such things as Mary Shelley's
The Last Man (not to mention such things as Kafka's
Metamorphosis, or Čapek's
R.U.R.) are often considered among the classics of the field.
These are just a few of the arguments in favor of sf. For myself, I've long come to the conclusion that people who close their mind to any field of literature as a whole are blinkered and (in this facet at least) willfully, stupidly, ignorant. ANY field of literature is largely mediocre to bad (
Sturgeon's Law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), but one doesn't judge by the worst, or even the run-of-the-mill, but by its best, what a branch of literature can be... and on that front, science fiction certainly has no reason to hang its head.....
*Never a thing you want to do. Get me started, and a tactical nuclear missile wouldn't shut me up; ask anyone around here......
