Genres of Fiction, and Why They Aren’t Discrete Entities →

Rachel Swirsky, guestblogging for Jeff VanderMeer, explains a common problem for SF fans and writers: any SF that is also good literature gets reassigned away from the category of SF — leaving only the “bad stuff” as true SF. (On the other hand, this goes both ways: many SF fans won’t touch literary fiction. It’s too “boring.”)

The comments are very instructive as well. (A rarity!) VanderMeer, Swirsky, and author Nick Mamatas all have good things to say.

"Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction. "

Ray Bradbury (via booklover)

"Hon­estly, I think the bar­ri­ers are imag­i­nary, the walls have already been breached and the key to lit­er­a­ture in the early 21st cen­tury is one of con­flu­ence. There’s not much high and low cul­ture any more: there’s just min­gling streams of art and what mat­ters is whether it’s good art or bad art. But then, I come from comics, and miss the days when it was a gut­ter art-form in which nobody was expected to make art; and think that SF was much more vibrant and rel­e­vant before they taught it in uni­ver­si­ties."

Neil Gaiman in The New Yorker’s Ask the Author. As Robin Sloan says, the most interesting part is the “confluence” of art in the 21st century: the breaking down of barriers between high and low.

"To this I say, find me anything at all dumbed down about Ursula K. LeGuin. Show me oafishness in Phil K. Dick. Show me how E. Annie Proulx understands human nature better than Ray Bradbury does."

Jason Henninger, writing a rant about literary vs. speculative fiction on Tor.com.

Henninger’s post rehashes an old argument: “genre” fiction isn’t good literature, and any time a literary critic likes a piece of genre fiction it’s often explained as not really being genre fiction at all. (See, for example, The Road, Slaughterhouse Five, etc.)