genre avoidance
Sep. 18th, 2007 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
[The editor of Atlantic Monthly in the late 1800s] claimed that authors had gone astray by being imitators of one another rather than of nature. He proscribed writing about "interesting" characters--such as famous historical figures or creatures of myth. He decried exotic settings—places such as Rome or Pompeii, and he denounced tales that told of uncommon events. He praised stories that dealt with the everyday, where "nobody murders or debauches anybody else; there is no arson or pillage of any sort; there is no ghost, or a ravening beast, or a hair-breadth escape, or a shipwreck, or a monster of self-sacrifice, or a lady five thousand years old in the course of the whole story." He denounced tales with sexual innuendo. He said that instead he wanted to publish stories about the plight of the "common man," just living an ordinary existence. Because Howells was the editor of the largest and most powerful magazine of the time (and because of its fabulous payment rates, a short story sale to that magazine could support a writer for a year or two), his views had a tremendous influence on American writers.
Well. Now I know why 'mainstream' fiction is so hostile to the fantastic.
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Date: 2007-09-18 10:42 pm (UTC)I think if I'd stayed in college, I would have continued with a goal towards an engineering degree. 'Cause it certainly sounds like taking literature or writing as your main is a waste of time.
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Date: 2007-09-18 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-18 11:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-18 11:53 pm (UTC)Anyhow, what're you left with when you excise aliens and FTL drives and robots from sci-fi? Well, cyberpunk, I suppose, and if that hasn't become a gloriously tangled mess of clichés then I don't know what has. Somehow, people keep coming up with new ideas within all of these....
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Date: 2007-09-18 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-18 11:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 03:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 06:03 pm (UTC)First off, because both Howell and the Mundane Science Fiction thing sound too much like people just slamming shit because it makes them feel big. You know the sort of person - oooh, the perfect way to prove they're all cool and rational and intellectual is to slam furries, or otherkin, or religious types, or childish wish-fulfillment in science fiction, or whatever.
Also, I'm pretty interested in social science fiction. I'm interested in how people work, and how people react to each other. So having FTL drives or aliens or whatever poses a what if question; what are people like, when their lives include all this stuff? Going the opposite direction, with fantasy, what are the people like when their lives are influenced by having dragons, magic, or soul-corrupting rings of power around? And you have these neat fantastic elements which are pretty cool in themselves and add to the story.
You get rid of all that stuff, and you've got the question of "what are people like if their lives include all the stuff you've got right here, right now?" Uh... I already get to observe that 24/7, what's the draw in reading fiction about that? At that rate I may as well read an actual psychology book and learn something.
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Date: 2007-09-19 06:18 pm (UTC)And y'know, looking at it like that, an insistence on only writing stories about the common man set in the here and now could be thought of as a form of laziness. Don't like far-future settings or fantasy settings because the dialog and props come off as cheesy? Simple, just get rid of them! Don't bother trying to figure out how to write good uncheesy far-future or fantasy settings; just proclaim them worthless as literary territory!
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Date: 2007-09-19 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 01:59 am (UTC)In 2002, a Dragonlance novel debuted on both the top ten of the Publisher's Weekly and the New York Times' best-seller lists.
Harry Potter is a world-wide phenomenon.
I simply can't agree that mainstream fiction is hostile to fantasy.
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Date: 2007-09-19 03:42 am (UTC)Having said, that though, it seems to me that Dave Wolverton, author of the linked article, is trying to place an awful lot of baggage at the estimable Mr. Howells' doorstep. Science fiction was barely even a proto-genre when the man was at the Atlantic (1866-1876); Jules Verne's most popular books were being published during that very period -- but not translated into English yet -- and H.G. Wells wouldn't start publishing until 1900. Wolverton glosses over a lot of change in the mainstream literary world in what's considered "acceptable," and ignores entirely the question of how much of the ghettoization of F/SF may just be its own damn fault. An honest analysis of how this came to pass would focus a little less on William Howells and a little more on Hugo Gernsback.
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Date: 2007-09-19 08:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 03:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 06:41 pm (UTC)If he was pining for a "real life", maybe he should have moved out west. Yeah, that was the thing to do back then, wasn't it? That's all they had, horses and guns and cows. Going to the moon? That'll never happen!