/book/ - Recommendations

Name: Anonymous 2009-03-27 8:28

>Do you even know what genre fiction is? Get a brain, moran.

Sigh. Yes, I know what genre fiction is. It seems you don't. So let me give you a little primer. Genre is a word which is used to envelope broad classifications of types of stories. Nothing more, nothing less. Every story ever written can be said to belong to a genre. In our era, mainstream literary fiction is a genre. Science fiction is a genre. Horror is a genre. Both science fiction and horror can be said to fit within the broader realm of the speculative fiction genre. You're using the word in a derisive way -- as if any 'genre' story is automatically inferior. By this I take it that when _you_ use the word genre, you have shunned the actual meaning of the word, and instead are using it as a catch-all for types of fiction you don't like. I assume, from the context of this conversation, that means anything other than mainstream literary fiction.

But (I presume) you haven't read the stuff, and so you don't know what you're talking about. You probably also don't realize that many of what we now consider to be literary classics are in fact genre (your definition of the word) fiction. Consider the strange case of George Orwell's 1984. 1984 is -- by any measurement -- a science fiction novel; and it uses all the tricks and tropes of science fiction. (The only reason you don't know this is because you don't know what the tricks and tropes of science fiction are.) Consider Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote, to the great exclusion of most other topics, science fiction novels. What happens, over and over again, is that great works of speculative fiction get co-opted by the literary mainstream. As if once Penguin Classics puts out an edition of a genre novel, it ceases to be a genre novel. Well, that doesn't quite work.

In the meantime, so-called genre fiction continues to be derided.... Usually by people who have made no effort to read it or understand it.

"But 1984 was about contemporary people," I can hear you protesting. "It was about the social order and the role of individuals in societies and in a time where the reaches of governments were ever-increasing. It was about big ideas and important things."

Bingo. Yeah it was. And that's what science fiction can do that other fiction can't (or at least, often doesn't). Science fiction can show the world what it should not become. By extension -- that's what genre fiction can do. There are literary depths within the pages of many horror novels, and many science fiction novels, and many crime novels -- if we want to get into that as well. These writers understand literature. They know the same things that mainstream writers know. Probably they have the same goals. Many of them spend their _lives_ studying literature of all kinds.

Many of them are real writers.

Now, I'll grant you Sturgeon's Law on this. 90% of everything sucks. I agree that most science fiction is crap. Most horror is crap. But the flipside of that is, most mainstream literary fiction is crap.

The innate quality of speculative stories is no better or worse than that of mainstream stories. Genre means nothing. The name of the author on the manuscript means nothing. The only thing that means anything is the work. And all stories are about the same thing: People. In the end, the only difference between genre fiction and mainstream fiction is the toolset available to the writers -- all of whom are writing about. Guess what? People.

Now I've spent way too much time on this, and I'm going to bed. I almost included a suggested reading list for you. But somehow I think you might be entrenched.

Recommendations

1 Name: Anonymous 2009-03-24 17:06

21 Name: Anonymous 2009-03-27 8:28

Name: Anonymous 2009-03-24 17:06

Name: Anonymous 2009-03-27 8:28