a little fervor for your Monday morning

[truepenny]

I'm signing on to ursulav's new crusade. (Not, you know, that it's the bad sort of crusade where you sack Constantinople and die horribly and that sort of thing. It's more an interior crusade of trying to remember what fantasy can do instead of what we're accustomed to it doing. Like when they tell you to sack Constantinople, saying, "Well, actually, I think I'd rather go hang out on Crete and learn to talk to the minotaurs.") Because, dammit, she's right.

Comments

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, of course not. I'm not talking about obligation, and there's nothing wrong with writing solidly within the genre tradition if that's what you want to do. I figure, as sf/f/h writers, we're obligated to tell the best stories we can to the best of our ability, and defining "stories" and "ability" has to be done on a case by case basis.

What Ursula said just happens to resonate extremely strongly for me, because:

1. when wearing my literary scholar hat, I'm a genre theorist more than anything else

2. The books I've been working on are secondary-world fantasy generically in the same camp as Tolkien and all his fanboyz.

3. I personally want to push the boundaries of the fantasy genre, to find out what it can do if I just lean on it a little harder.

There are lots of different ways to lean on it, mind you. One of them is character development. Another is treating a secondary world's history seriously, instead of just throwing in a Cataclysm to be sure nobody asks any awkward questions. And a third is trying to think outside the D&D box and trying to redefine "fantastical." None of these ways is necessarily more valuable than any other.

And, you know, nobody's keeping score.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

And, you know, nobody's keeping score.

Imho, there is some scorekeeping involved, mostly on the critical side of things. The work of Mieville and others like him definitely are considered more acclaim-worthy than the more MOR work that's out there. It can be irritating, speaking as someone who learned that when it came to one particular publication, her books were lumped with the "junk fantasy" and relegated to a certain reviewer forevermore. But it may be just the way it is if I decide to continue to write within certain boundaries, and explore areas that those on the critical side don't consider important. I need to hope that my readers don't feel the same way, and appreciate what I do try to do when I try to do it.

So, depending on the reaction you wish to elicit or the audience you wish to reach, there may be some obligation to push boundaries.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

And after rereading this, I realize that I really shouldn't try to post on the fly at the day job. Subject-verb agreement tends to suffer, among other things.