Greg Frost takes the words right out of my mouth, with his insightful and pointed critique on the Sunday NY Times' somewhat condescending article on Philip K. Dick, and also on the unfortunate coining of the term "mundane" SF.
My sentiments, exactly, as oft griped about here, tho' perhaps not quite as eloquently as Sieur Frost.
The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror
The Birthday Girl, or Tiny Doom is Thirteen
Comestible Commissaries, or The Importance of Eating Earnest
Metal More Attractive, or A Young Man's Dilemma
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1 comment:
Surely there's no art more fraught with angst than the literary! It just seems to get worse, too, as the reading audience shrinks. It's horrifying how many actual humans there are out there who actually read only one book per year! If that! And of course these are the books EVERYONE buys, like DaVinci Code, Jurassic Park, or Left Behind which (I feel) are miserable excuses for novels but wind up bestsellers due to that "If you only read one book this year, make sure it's this one!" phenomenon. As far as the prejudice against genre, it seems to me we have the trade-off of being more popular with just about everyone except literary critics, and whadda they know? There's something to be said for that, although I agree it's horribly unfair and painful to be dismissed by anyone, especially litcritters, based on a label rather than the merit of the work. Plenty of SF, even by midlist writers, is every bit as beautifully written as the most cerebral litfic in my opinion. The YA SF novel "Darkchild" by Sydney Joyce Van Scyoc comes to mind. But alas, we probably have to face the fact that prejudice in the literary world will never be completely overcome. I suspect many of the people who are agitating for FSF to be given equal footing with lit harbor secret snobberies about the romance genre. There has been some wonderful writing stigmatized by being labeled "Romance." Also, the same thing has happened in Romance as in the other genres, when a work somehow transcends the genre to become "literary" or "a classic." P&P? Wuthering Heights? Prime examples of Regency and Gothic, respectively, if you ask me.
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