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truepennyNamely, admitting that I do not have the energy to keep two blogs at once.
I've liked having a quasi-Sekrit Identity as Truepenny (and wouldn't change my LJ user name for anything), but the fact of the matter is, a writer's blog is partly a marketing tool, and it can't very well work as one if I don't tell people that's what it is. And![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala's example has shown me that I don't need a Sekrit Identity to be myself.
So Notes from the Labyrinth is, I think, going to merge into this journal (which is currently called Mole-dug Mazes, but will probably take NftL as a name, because, heck, it's nifty).
And as a preliminary step in that direction, I'm using this post to save all the interesting entries from Nftl. So this is long, and some of you have probably read all of these before, and it's mostly for me so I know where to find 'em.
February 1, 2004
How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?
I sold my tenth short story recently, and it occurred to me that the outward manifestation, the bibliography, is rather like the curtain in the throne room of the Great and Terrible Oz. It's concealing the work by which the trick is done.
So I did some math.
This is February 1, 2004. I started submitting short stories as a serious part of my professional career on October 5, 2000. (First rule of any professional endeavor: keep good records.) In those three years and three months, I've sold ten stories and garnered one hundred rejections.
The numbers are so tidy even I am tempted to believe I planned this.
One in ten. That's a batting average of .100, worthy only of a pitcher. But for my game, it's a pretty good success rate.
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? the tourist asks the beatnik.
Practice, man. Practice.
February 6, 2004
This past week, I've been writing short stories.
Novels and short stories are not the same species. At least for me, there's a dramatic difference in the way they feel as I'm writing them, which corresponds to the difference in the way they feel when I read them. A novel isn't just a short story grown really really big. It's a different approach to narrative, and it requires a different kind of story.
I wish I could explain myself more clearly, but one of the big problems with trying to talk about creativity is that there's no unified vocabulary. When we talk about it, we're trying to describe a process that is, by its nature, not merely a matter of profound interiority, but also a matter of profound subjectivity. No two creative people (artists, dancers, writers, what have you) talk about the creative process in quite the same way. We all have different metaphors, and our metaphors are what we live or die by. We can't change them just to make communication easier.
So I can say that short stories feel like a Celtic knotwork brooch, whereas novels are more like the Bayeux Tapestry, and perhaps that means something to you. But odds are very good that it doesn't mean to you exactly what it means to me, and trying to extrapolate from that to any principle of writing is an exercise doomed to futility. And I'm not sure that it really conveys my meaning in any event. But it captures something of how the two forms feel in my head.
On the subject of metaphors and creativity (as we watch the brain think about itself thinking about its own thought processes), there's always the question of how we understand the process of creativity itself. My own personal metaphor is the Great Grimpen Mire, that desolate brain-child of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There are paths, and they're even marked with flags, but if you stray, you will sink into the bog never to be seen again. There are hounds in the mire, monstrous hounds with glaring red eyes, and if you get too cocky, you're likely to have your throat torn out.
It's not a very cheerful metaphor--you can remember the rare butterflies if you like--and there's a great deal it does not capture. But it describes how it feels. For me. And that's the best any of us can do.
February 17, 2004
The Obscure and Secretive Life of Plants
I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, have a green thumb.
I just want to be clear about that.
For many years, I didn't even try to keep houseplants. They're a pain, my husband wasn't interested, and they were just going to die anyway, right?
Right.
Then a friend presented me with a philodendron, presented to her by a neighbor who was moving and could not take all her plants. My friend did not want the philodendron, and since my husband and I had just moved into our current residence, she palmed it off on me as a housewarming present.
I was not deceived, but I figured, as mehitabel would say, wotthehell. It could die in our apartment just as easily as anywhere else.
But the damn thing didn't die.
Philodendrons are, of course, notoriously hard to kill, and this one, rather than recognizing its plant-hostile environment, went mad and decided it was the reincarnation of the Emperor Napoleon. It wants to take over the world.
We've become fond of it, actually. We've let it grow long and leggy, bought it a plant holder it can twine itself about and indulge its fantasies of imperial domination without actually endangering the lamp. It's really very gratifying for all concerned.
Giddy with success, I bought an aloe vera (first-aid, you know; good for burns). It hasn't died either.
And then, in October, I was seduced by a Venus flytrap.
I'd never considered the possibility of owning a Venus flytrap, but I walked into the grocery store one day, and there it was: small plant, small, notably DIY terrarium, six bucks. I assumed I'd kill it (because, hey, me and exotic plant, surely a recipe for disaster), but I brought it home, did some research online (Google is a miraculous thing), and discovered that the best thing to do for Venus flytraps is to leave them alone.
I can do that.
I named it Audrey, of course, as anyone fond of Little Shop of Horrors would, and it sat on the windowsill in its terrarium, and caught and ate the little teeny bugs that seemed to have come along for the ride in its potting soil, and behaved the way my research said it ought. I gave it filtered water (VFTs are cranky about chemicals and such, and really who can blame them?) and stared at it in awe and was generally hopelessly smitten.
This winter, as it has gotten excessively cold, I moved the VFT from the windowsill (where the condensation on the terrarium was in fact freezing to the wood) to the bookcase. I was afraid I'd acted too late, but today I looked at it and discovered that it has put up two new green shoots.
Audrey thinks it's spring.
It's terribly terribly wrong, of course, but I find its faith touching.
And for some reason it makes me ridiculously happy.
(Anyone interested in Venus flytraps or other carnivorous plants should check out The Carnivorous Plant FAQ, where you will learn many amazing things.)
August 15, 2004
In and around the chaos associated with buying, repairing, repainting, and moving into a 98-year-old house, I've been thinking. About a lot of things, including epistolary novels (which I'll probably post about sooner or later) and (thanks to a conversation with Elizabeth Bear) the nature of a literary movement.
Currently, it seems to me, the field of SF (using the term in its broadest sense to include fantasy, science fiction, and horror) is experiencing a great deal of anxiety about literary movements. From the New Weird to interstitiality, everyone seems to want to found a new movement, identify a new movement ... prove perhaps that SF has movements. This in its turn (at least as I see it, and goodness knows my speculating should be taken with ample quantities of salt) is part of a much older anxiety--one older than I am--about SF as "genre fiction," and what that means, and whether it should be taken seriously.
I think SF should be taken seriously; I admire the people who are thinking and working seriously within the genre, and I recognize that part of that thinking and working is exactly this endless quest to form movements, to prove that SF can be artistically coherent as well as all the other things we already know it can do.
What occurred to me, and what I want to try to explain here, is that there's a difference between a "literary movement" and what I'm going to call a "literary paradigm." "Literary movements" like Dadaism or the Bloomsbury school or the Inklings are small matters, encompassing a circle of people who all know each other and read each other's work and comment on it. Most of what's being triumphantly identified as the Next Major Movement in SF are phenomena like that. And, yes, those literary movements are incredibly important and influential, and we need them. But they're not what people are trying to make them be. They're built on the body of work produced by the circle, and (IMHO) can't be assessed or understood until there is a body of work, which none of the current "movements" in SF is old enough to have produced.
A "literary paradigm," under my definition, is something like modernism. Which encompasses the Dadaists and the Bloomsburyites, the Joyceans and the surrealists and a hundred and one other little movements. A literary paradigm is a revolution, as impressionism was in art. It's also an idea--a meme, if you will--with a much larger range and influence, not confined to one small circle of artists, but showing up in the strangest places in the strangest ways. Literary paradigms can be seen, but they can't be announced.
I think SF itself is a literary paradigm, that we are inside a great and exciting revolution--a rebellion which has lasted 50 years and is going strong, which has invaded popular culture and consciousness, which keeps insisting and proving that serious works of the imagination do not need to be veristic. And I think there are a number of literary movements within our literary paradigm and they are important precisely because they are serious, because they ask questions and try to answer them, because they are developing the critical tools we're going to need to explain our literary paradigm to ourselves.
The work is what matters.
August 26, 2004
Grand Unified Theory of Everything
Okay, maybe not everything. But.
I've chosen an unusual and difficult profession, one that frequently feels like doing a trapeze act without a net, and thus I spend, not a lot of time, but a certain amount, thinking about why I chose it.
The simple answer is that I can't imagine being happy doing anything else.
But that's a little glib, a little facile. The better answer is that it's the only thing I've ever found about which I am entirely self-motivating.
I have the talent to do a number of different things. I was up to advanced calculus classes in high school. I sang with the high school chorus (which won awards) and made it to All-State one year. I took art classes, both in high school and in college, and I'm about as competent an artist as I am a pianist, which is to say that I've got decent technical proficiency and no creativity to speak of. I was a Classics major, which involved learning two dead languages in three years, and won prizes for both Greek and Latin translation. My other major was a weird hybrid of English and Comparative Literature, which involved doing college-level work in French. I've also taken Old English and Middle English (which isn't exactly a foreign language, but also isn't exactly anything else).
I graduated summa cum laude, did extremely well in all my graduate courses, took a Pass with Distinction on my prelims exam, had an article published in SEL, and, of course, now have a doctorate in English Literature.
But what is it that I do?
I write stories.
All of those other things (and I listed them not to brag about them but to make this point) are things that I don't do without outside motivation.* Even the ones I genuinely enjoy. I don't care enough about them to put the hours and hours and hours of work into them that I put into my writing, and that you have to put into anything if you're going to do it well.
Writing, on the other hand, I don't even count the hours. In an odd way, time ceases to be the point. I write because I want to; I write because I need to. I don't care how long it takes, because the journey is as important as the destination, and you don't clock-watch when you're doing what you love.
Writing makes me self-motivated. I don't need anyone leaning over me telling me to get to work. I've internalized the drive. I have friends who aren't writers who are the same way about their jobs, and I think that's how we know that we're doing the thing we're built to do.
I'm sure it's not the only way, but it's how I made my career choice, and it's how I keep making it, day after day, instead of giving up and going to work at the local convenience store.
And now, having said all that, I suppose I should go write something.
---
* With a partial exception for the piano, because I would play one if I had one. But I'm really only good enough to please myself, and I have deathly performance anxiety, so in the broader sense I don't think it counts.
October 5, 2004
Warning: this is going to be tendentious and possibly a little theory-heavy. V. argumentative, but not intended to sound as if I think I have all the answers. 'Cause I don't.
---
So the other day I got to talking with my husband on the subject of genre (as we are wont to do), and made a point which I've made before, namely that fantasy and science fiction, as genres, are not marked in the same way that genres like mystery and romance and Jacobean tragedy are. Only this time, my brain followed that up with a more useful point:
Genre is the wrong word.
Let me explain myself. Genre, in literary theory as opposed to marketing, is a difficult and slippery concept, subject to a great deal of self-bootstrapping. You have a group of texts that have a number of things in common; you call them a genre; and then you use the things they have in common as a checklist to decide whether or not other texts belong in that group. A gross oversimplification, of course, but it is pretty much what happens. So murder mysteries have a particular kind of plot (the whodunit), certain characters who must be present (the detective, the perpetrator, the victim, etc.), narrative moves like the red herring ... a collection of characteristics which make it possible to look at books as diverse as, say, The Three Coffins and The Silence of the Lambs and identify them both as mysteries. There are a number of other things you need to go on to say after that, of course, but they are recognizably the same genre.
Genre conventions, then, are what define a genre. (I said it was bootstrappy.) And by and large these conventions are narratological in nature; they talk about what can happen in a particular genre and how it can happen. Who has the agency to act? Who can say what to whom? Books like Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose may turn these conventions on their heads, but in doing so they are engaging with the very conventions they up-end.
A genre convention isn't a rule. It's a question. And the author may answer that question yes, no, or giraffe, but to engage with the genre, they must engage with the question.
Which leads me to fantasy and science fiction, which have between them exactly one generic marker: they present the subjunctive as indicative. Or, to put that in terms that will make more sense, they take the contrary-to-fact and treat it as factual. Science fiction novels can range from 1984 to The Warrior's Apprentice to Ringworld to Red Mars. Fantasy contains The Lord of the Rings, Swordspoint, The Last Unicorn, The War for the Oaks, Alice in Wonderland, Spindle's End, Paladin of Souls ...
You see my point, I hope. Fantasy books belong together, in that they share a particular way of presenting their contrary-to-fact happenings as fact, but Alice in Wonderland and Swordspoint are not the same genre. They have no genre conventions in common. And ditto for science fiction. It's ridiculous to try to cram this kaleidoscope of books into a single genre as defined above.
I wouldn't dream of arguing that "fantasy" and "science fiction" aren't useful categories. They are. Incredibly useful, and valid, and necessary. But they aren't narrow enough to be genres in the modern sense. (Elizabethan authors had three genres: prose, poetry, and drama ... but, then, the novel hadn't been invented yet.) And trying to talk about fantasy and science fiction as genres causes a great deal of frustration and obscurity, because we're trying to match concepts that do not fit together.
We need a new word.
I've liked having a quasi-Sekrit Identity as Truepenny (and wouldn't change my LJ user name for anything), but the fact of the matter is, a writer's blog is partly a marketing tool, and it can't very well work as one if I don't tell people that's what it is. And
matociquala's example has shown me that I don't need a Sekrit Identity to be myself.So Notes from the Labyrinth is, I think, going to merge into this journal (which is currently called Mole-dug Mazes, but will probably take NftL as a name, because, heck, it's nifty).
And as a preliminary step in that direction, I'm using this post to save all the interesting entries from Nftl. So this is long, and some of you have probably read all of these before, and it's mostly for me so I know where to find 'em.
February 1, 2004
How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?
I sold my tenth short story recently, and it occurred to me that the outward manifestation, the bibliography, is rather like the curtain in the throne room of the Great and Terrible Oz. It's concealing the work by which the trick is done.
So I did some math.
This is February 1, 2004. I started submitting short stories as a serious part of my professional career on October 5, 2000. (First rule of any professional endeavor: keep good records.) In those three years and three months, I've sold ten stories and garnered one hundred rejections.
The numbers are so tidy even I am tempted to believe I planned this.
One in ten. That's a batting average of .100, worthy only of a pitcher. But for my game, it's a pretty good success rate.
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? the tourist asks the beatnik.
Practice, man. Practice.
February 6, 2004
This past week, I've been writing short stories.
Novels and short stories are not the same species. At least for me, there's a dramatic difference in the way they feel as I'm writing them, which corresponds to the difference in the way they feel when I read them. A novel isn't just a short story grown really really big. It's a different approach to narrative, and it requires a different kind of story.
I wish I could explain myself more clearly, but one of the big problems with trying to talk about creativity is that there's no unified vocabulary. When we talk about it, we're trying to describe a process that is, by its nature, not merely a matter of profound interiority, but also a matter of profound subjectivity. No two creative people (artists, dancers, writers, what have you) talk about the creative process in quite the same way. We all have different metaphors, and our metaphors are what we live or die by. We can't change them just to make communication easier.
So I can say that short stories feel like a Celtic knotwork brooch, whereas novels are more like the Bayeux Tapestry, and perhaps that means something to you. But odds are very good that it doesn't mean to you exactly what it means to me, and trying to extrapolate from that to any principle of writing is an exercise doomed to futility. And I'm not sure that it really conveys my meaning in any event. But it captures something of how the two forms feel in my head.
On the subject of metaphors and creativity (as we watch the brain think about itself thinking about its own thought processes), there's always the question of how we understand the process of creativity itself. My own personal metaphor is the Great Grimpen Mire, that desolate brain-child of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There are paths, and they're even marked with flags, but if you stray, you will sink into the bog never to be seen again. There are hounds in the mire, monstrous hounds with glaring red eyes, and if you get too cocky, you're likely to have your throat torn out.
It's not a very cheerful metaphor--you can remember the rare butterflies if you like--and there's a great deal it does not capture. But it describes how it feels. For me. And that's the best any of us can do.
February 17, 2004
The Obscure and Secretive Life of Plants
I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, have a green thumb.
I just want to be clear about that.
For many years, I didn't even try to keep houseplants. They're a pain, my husband wasn't interested, and they were just going to die anyway, right?
Right.
Then a friend presented me with a philodendron, presented to her by a neighbor who was moving and could not take all her plants. My friend did not want the philodendron, and since my husband and I had just moved into our current residence, she palmed it off on me as a housewarming present.
I was not deceived, but I figured, as mehitabel would say, wotthehell. It could die in our apartment just as easily as anywhere else.
But the damn thing didn't die.
Philodendrons are, of course, notoriously hard to kill, and this one, rather than recognizing its plant-hostile environment, went mad and decided it was the reincarnation of the Emperor Napoleon. It wants to take over the world.
We've become fond of it, actually. We've let it grow long and leggy, bought it a plant holder it can twine itself about and indulge its fantasies of imperial domination without actually endangering the lamp. It's really very gratifying for all concerned.
Giddy with success, I bought an aloe vera (first-aid, you know; good for burns). It hasn't died either.
And then, in October, I was seduced by a Venus flytrap.
I'd never considered the possibility of owning a Venus flytrap, but I walked into the grocery store one day, and there it was: small plant, small, notably DIY terrarium, six bucks. I assumed I'd kill it (because, hey, me and exotic plant, surely a recipe for disaster), but I brought it home, did some research online (Google is a miraculous thing), and discovered that the best thing to do for Venus flytraps is to leave them alone.
I can do that.
I named it Audrey, of course, as anyone fond of Little Shop of Horrors would, and it sat on the windowsill in its terrarium, and caught and ate the little teeny bugs that seemed to have come along for the ride in its potting soil, and behaved the way my research said it ought. I gave it filtered water (VFTs are cranky about chemicals and such, and really who can blame them?) and stared at it in awe and was generally hopelessly smitten.
This winter, as it has gotten excessively cold, I moved the VFT from the windowsill (where the condensation on the terrarium was in fact freezing to the wood) to the bookcase. I was afraid I'd acted too late, but today I looked at it and discovered that it has put up two new green shoots.
Audrey thinks it's spring.
It's terribly terribly wrong, of course, but I find its faith touching.
And for some reason it makes me ridiculously happy.
(Anyone interested in Venus flytraps or other carnivorous plants should check out The Carnivorous Plant FAQ, where you will learn many amazing things.)
August 15, 2004
In and around the chaos associated with buying, repairing, repainting, and moving into a 98-year-old house, I've been thinking. About a lot of things, including epistolary novels (which I'll probably post about sooner or later) and (thanks to a conversation with Elizabeth Bear) the nature of a literary movement.
Currently, it seems to me, the field of SF (using the term in its broadest sense to include fantasy, science fiction, and horror) is experiencing a great deal of anxiety about literary movements. From the New Weird to interstitiality, everyone seems to want to found a new movement, identify a new movement ... prove perhaps that SF has movements. This in its turn (at least as I see it, and goodness knows my speculating should be taken with ample quantities of salt) is part of a much older anxiety--one older than I am--about SF as "genre fiction," and what that means, and whether it should be taken seriously.
I think SF should be taken seriously; I admire the people who are thinking and working seriously within the genre, and I recognize that part of that thinking and working is exactly this endless quest to form movements, to prove that SF can be artistically coherent as well as all the other things we already know it can do.
What occurred to me, and what I want to try to explain here, is that there's a difference between a "literary movement" and what I'm going to call a "literary paradigm." "Literary movements" like Dadaism or the Bloomsbury school or the Inklings are small matters, encompassing a circle of people who all know each other and read each other's work and comment on it. Most of what's being triumphantly identified as the Next Major Movement in SF are phenomena like that. And, yes, those literary movements are incredibly important and influential, and we need them. But they're not what people are trying to make them be. They're built on the body of work produced by the circle, and (IMHO) can't be assessed or understood until there is a body of work, which none of the current "movements" in SF is old enough to have produced.
A "literary paradigm," under my definition, is something like modernism. Which encompasses the Dadaists and the Bloomsburyites, the Joyceans and the surrealists and a hundred and one other little movements. A literary paradigm is a revolution, as impressionism was in art. It's also an idea--a meme, if you will--with a much larger range and influence, not confined to one small circle of artists, but showing up in the strangest places in the strangest ways. Literary paradigms can be seen, but they can't be announced.
I think SF itself is a literary paradigm, that we are inside a great and exciting revolution--a rebellion which has lasted 50 years and is going strong, which has invaded popular culture and consciousness, which keeps insisting and proving that serious works of the imagination do not need to be veristic. And I think there are a number of literary movements within our literary paradigm and they are important precisely because they are serious, because they ask questions and try to answer them, because they are developing the critical tools we're going to need to explain our literary paradigm to ourselves.
The work is what matters.
August 26, 2004
Grand Unified Theory of Everything
Okay, maybe not everything. But.
I've chosen an unusual and difficult profession, one that frequently feels like doing a trapeze act without a net, and thus I spend, not a lot of time, but a certain amount, thinking about why I chose it.
The simple answer is that I can't imagine being happy doing anything else.
But that's a little glib, a little facile. The better answer is that it's the only thing I've ever found about which I am entirely self-motivating.
I have the talent to do a number of different things. I was up to advanced calculus classes in high school. I sang with the high school chorus (which won awards) and made it to All-State one year. I took art classes, both in high school and in college, and I'm about as competent an artist as I am a pianist, which is to say that I've got decent technical proficiency and no creativity to speak of. I was a Classics major, which involved learning two dead languages in three years, and won prizes for both Greek and Latin translation. My other major was a weird hybrid of English and Comparative Literature, which involved doing college-level work in French. I've also taken Old English and Middle English (which isn't exactly a foreign language, but also isn't exactly anything else).
I graduated summa cum laude, did extremely well in all my graduate courses, took a Pass with Distinction on my prelims exam, had an article published in SEL, and, of course, now have a doctorate in English Literature.
But what is it that I do?
I write stories.
All of those other things (and I listed them not to brag about them but to make this point) are things that I don't do without outside motivation.* Even the ones I genuinely enjoy. I don't care enough about them to put the hours and hours and hours of work into them that I put into my writing, and that you have to put into anything if you're going to do it well.
Writing, on the other hand, I don't even count the hours. In an odd way, time ceases to be the point. I write because I want to; I write because I need to. I don't care how long it takes, because the journey is as important as the destination, and you don't clock-watch when you're doing what you love.
Writing makes me self-motivated. I don't need anyone leaning over me telling me to get to work. I've internalized the drive. I have friends who aren't writers who are the same way about their jobs, and I think that's how we know that we're doing the thing we're built to do.
I'm sure it's not the only way, but it's how I made my career choice, and it's how I keep making it, day after day, instead of giving up and going to work at the local convenience store.
And now, having said all that, I suppose I should go write something.
---
* With a partial exception for the piano, because I would play one if I had one. But I'm really only good enough to please myself, and I have deathly performance anxiety, so in the broader sense I don't think it counts.
October 5, 2004
Warning: this is going to be tendentious and possibly a little theory-heavy. V. argumentative, but not intended to sound as if I think I have all the answers. 'Cause I don't.
---
So the other day I got to talking with my husband on the subject of genre (as we are wont to do), and made a point which I've made before, namely that fantasy and science fiction, as genres, are not marked in the same way that genres like mystery and romance and Jacobean tragedy are. Only this time, my brain followed that up with a more useful point:
Genre is the wrong word.
Let me explain myself. Genre, in literary theory as opposed to marketing, is a difficult and slippery concept, subject to a great deal of self-bootstrapping. You have a group of texts that have a number of things in common; you call them a genre; and then you use the things they have in common as a checklist to decide whether or not other texts belong in that group. A gross oversimplification, of course, but it is pretty much what happens. So murder mysteries have a particular kind of plot (the whodunit), certain characters who must be present (the detective, the perpetrator, the victim, etc.), narrative moves like the red herring ... a collection of characteristics which make it possible to look at books as diverse as, say, The Three Coffins and The Silence of the Lambs and identify them both as mysteries. There are a number of other things you need to go on to say after that, of course, but they are recognizably the same genre.
Genre conventions, then, are what define a genre. (I said it was bootstrappy.) And by and large these conventions are narratological in nature; they talk about what can happen in a particular genre and how it can happen. Who has the agency to act? Who can say what to whom? Books like Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose may turn these conventions on their heads, but in doing so they are engaging with the very conventions they up-end.
A genre convention isn't a rule. It's a question. And the author may answer that question yes, no, or giraffe, but to engage with the genre, they must engage with the question.
Which leads me to fantasy and science fiction, which have between them exactly one generic marker: they present the subjunctive as indicative. Or, to put that in terms that will make more sense, they take the contrary-to-fact and treat it as factual. Science fiction novels can range from 1984 to The Warrior's Apprentice to Ringworld to Red Mars. Fantasy contains The Lord of the Rings, Swordspoint, The Last Unicorn, The War for the Oaks, Alice in Wonderland, Spindle's End, Paladin of Souls ...
You see my point, I hope. Fantasy books belong together, in that they share a particular way of presenting their contrary-to-fact happenings as fact, but Alice in Wonderland and Swordspoint are not the same genre. They have no genre conventions in common. And ditto for science fiction. It's ridiculous to try to cram this kaleidoscope of books into a single genre as defined above.
I wouldn't dream of arguing that "fantasy" and "science fiction" aren't useful categories. They are. Incredibly useful, and valid, and necessary. But they aren't narrow enough to be genres in the modern sense. (Elizabethan authors had three genres: prose, poetry, and drama ... but, then, the novel hadn't been invented yet.) And trying to talk about fantasy and science fiction as genres causes a great deal of frustration and obscurity, because we're trying to match concepts that do not fit together.
We need a new word.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-12-10 11:40 am (UTC)Could you make that easier and tell me what the other name is, or is this going to be the blog that survives?
Thank you
no subject
Date: 2004-12-10 11:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-10 11:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-10 01:09 pm (UTC)I like this one better, too.
By the way, a flamewar in your comments thread is worth approximately two sales on amazon.com, judging by my sales rank. *g*
no subject
Date: 2004-12-10 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-12-10 12:57 pm (UTC)---L.