Comments on "On Genre, Part II: the future of genre" - Faerye Net

2011-07-24T12:03:54+00:00

I wish I’d gotten to see Molly’s talk too, but I got to chat with her about the topic beforehand, so there is that!

Yes, the tendency of people to dismiss or categorize spec-fic without reading it is definitely a pet peeve of mine. Also, people starting to try to write it without reading any!

2011-07-23T08:54:10+00:00

“. . . it may be, as a very smart friend of mine (an academic and spec fic fan) has predicted, that the Hemingway/Carver era of literature is at an end, and only the speculative can ask the questions literature wants to ask next.”

I’ve been hearing this a lot lately from people who are grown weary of books that only whine about angst and seem to have nothing to say. I wish you’d heard Molly Gloss at the most recent residency. She had a lot to say about what SF can do and where it can go.

And while I am ranting, I am so weary of people who never read SF or fantasy making judgments about what it’s like. And when Atwood (how can Handmaid’s Tale be anything but SF?) was in Portland with Le Guin and Leguin asked her what she thought SF was, Atwood starting citing films and Le Guin just sighed, “Oh, media.”

working at a bookstore

2010-03-08T04:28:48+00:00

In working at a bookstore we had a game when we were sorting books where we’d give a title and see how many “genres” it could possibly work under. Sounds utterly dull when typed, but was actually quite entertaining

my comment

2010-03-04T22:04:27+00:00

Good. I hate Hemingway. You write so well, btw, I come close to being distracted from your point. Could also be because I am much less knowledgeable in this area, of course.

This makes me think...

2010-03-01T08:47:26+00:00

of AS Byatt’s Possession: A Romance, in which Byatt plays with the ideas of genre: romance, literary mystery, Victorian novel, even poetry. It’s definitely a book that pushes boundaries, even jokes around with them a little, which is why I like it (and her speculative short stories, like the one about the mermaid and the sea monster) more than anything else she’s written.

Poetry, too, is a genre that most people think of as “realism,” but there is a lot of good speculative poetry out there, more all the time.

I think I’ve said this before, but writers like Kelly Link and Haruki Murakami represent, to me, the future of literary writing – hybrids of the real and the imagined, folklore and pop culture.

Brick & Mortar Labels

2010-02-28T18:06:11+00:00

Interesting exploration, Felicity. There’s a lot in here I hadn’t really thought about.

On a forum elsewhere, I was discussing the slow, bleeding death of Brick & Mortar™ stores for published works. It occurs to me reading this in close proximity that there is an important relation between that topic and this one.

You say:

“Sure, let’s label books, but let’s not put them in exclusive parts of the bookstore, segregated by shelf.”

and Lo!, look at labels in Gmail, and hashtags in Twitter, and so on. The internet is shifting like an avalanche from categorization to tagging. And freed from the one-to-one correspondence between a physical object and its location in category space, a book can have many labels.

But within the walls of a B&M bookstore out there today, a specific copy of a book can be in only one shelf at a time. It can have only one label.

And so we have yet another reason why the process of printing books, THEN distributing them, THEN selling them must necessarily die. We will instead see stores, quite possibly with physical B&M locations, that have no shelves full of books, but rather displays full of covers, and synthesize books through on-demand-print and digital transfer so that until I have finished buying the book, it doesn’t have material existence. And freed from material existence, it can be in many places at once. It can keep all of its labels.