ext_12592 ([identity profile] papersky.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] truepenny 2005-06-24 12:00 pm (UTC)

Did I ever tell you my pacing theory of genre?

Genres have their own style of pacing. What you're calling "sensibilities" can be seen as pacing. Reader expectation of pacing is adhusted for genre. This is one of the things mainstream writers who write SF often (Piercy, Lessing, James) get wrong, and what leads the mainstream work of SF writers (Simmons' Phases of Gravity) its peculiarity.

The text that made me come up with this was Byatt's "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye", a charming novella in which a female academic discovers a genie in a bottle, on page 100.

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