THE GENRE

What you will find in this link here is, overall, a good thing.  I don’t like that fantasy isn’t taken very seriously.  I don’t find a lot of peoples’ reasons for not taking it seriously to be all that solid.  I think it’s good to call out behavior that appears vaguely douchebaggish…douchey?  Douchesque?

You’ll note I haven’t signed said petition yet.  This is, of course, partially due to the fact that the last petition I signed ended with me absently joining a cause called Marvin’s Law, which suggested that those who disagreed with the obscure political opinions of the late Marvin Gaye should be made into eunuchs.  But there are other reasons.

For one, it’s never occurred to me to get upset at the BBC and those who don’t take fantasy seriously for the same reason it’s never occurred to me to take it seriously when narwhal biologists write to me and say: “You know, there’s just not enough narwhals in this book.”  I’m not talking to narwhal biologists and the needs of narwhal biologists don’t really factor into what I do.  This is, of course, hyperbole, since the people behind mainstream literature recognition and I presumably share similar interests, but when our agendas are set differently, I don’t really mind that they don’t match up.

But beyond that, I don’t know that the idea sits that well with me.  Today, while browsing twitter, I found this quote in Adam Whitehead’s feed from this link here:

‘It’s almost like they’ve given us older writers licence to use it. Before, it was ghettoised and stigmatised. For years there has been a prejudice towards sci-fi writing, which I think has been to the loss of the literary world, and not vice versa. But with things like graphic novels now, people are taking it seriously.’ Still, he has misgivings: ‘In truth, the sci-fi label is misleading. I’m just wary like everybody else that it’ll bring in the wrong audience with the wrong expectations.’

This was from Kazuo Ishiguro on science fiction acceptance into mainstream.

And it’s those last few words that make me hesitate before fully committing myself to the cause of the anti-BBC sentiment.

“The wrong audience.”

In the context, it’s clear that Mr. Ishiguro is suggesting that people looking for narwhals won’t find them in science fiction, so to speak, which is a point worth noting in itself.  But more than that, there are implications regarding the phrase “the wrong audience” that sort of haunt me.

It’s only been fairly recently that “nerd” has stopped being a dirty word.  Nerds are not overweight and smelly people with thick, horn-rimmed glasses squatting in basements.  D&D is something you play, not a lifestyle you live.  Liking fantasy means you like fantasy, not that you live in perpetual denial of the world around you.

It wasn’t always this way.  Nerds used to be the kind of people that dwelled in clandestine organizations.  If you were a nerd, your interests were restricted mostly to imaginary people and paper.  It was an unfair stereotype then and it’s unfair now, and a lot of people in mainstream literature still cling to it.  Sadly, in some instances, so do we.

I’m going to preface what I say next with a few things:

-I can’t really cite specific sources

-It might come off as a bit whiny and self-indulgent (it’s not intended to, though)

-I don’t blame you at all if you decide to stop reading because of these

But we, as genre writers and readers, are not innocent.

R.A. Salvatore.  China Mieville.  One sells a ton, another wins awards.  Fight scenes, weird races.  Sells-a-lot, genius.  Not-touched-by-Locus, critically-acclaimed-everywhere.  We seem pretty content to let this lie and safely file the two authors away under their own little labels, but we’re not happy when fantasy, as a whole, is filed away under “drek.”  We draw hard lines between hard sci-fi and soft sci-fi, epic fantasy and heroic fantasy, us and them.  If you’re on one side, you’re not on the other and you don’t get to be in that camp.

Now, this is not at all to suggest that Salvatore is the same as Mieville, even by a little.  Mieville earns his awards.  Salvatore earns his paychecks.

But they aren’t really judged in the same way, are they?  I’m not you, so I can’t say what you thought when you heard Salvatore’s name, but I imagine “not real fantasy” in one way or another, be it those actual words or just a brief, fleeting pang of resentful nostalgia like you feel for when you think of when you used to think Pogs were cool, cropped up.  Either way, you wouldn’t think to judge them the same way.

But should they even be?

We can argue that they write different things, different styles, different content entirely and that it’s impossible to judge them by the same standard.  If we do judge them the same, we live with the suggestion that we’re wrong to look at Salvatore book and sneer.  If we don’t judge them the same, we send the message that it’s fine for us to judge people differently, but not for you, mainstream literature.

We might say that the issue is that Mieville deserves to win a mainstream prize because his work is just that good.  But in that case, are we acknowledging that the awards he gets are not good enough for him?

Of course, it’s also perfectly fine to say that Salvatore/Mieville just doesn’t do it for us and we prefer Mieville/Salvatore.  Nothing wrong with preference, in the slightest.  What Mieville’s saying doesn’t really interest us, what Salvatore’s doing doesn’t really jive with us, what we’re really interested in is Sam motherfucking Sykes, right?

But then, if it’s all about preference, why does the acceptance of someone who doesn’t share our preference matter?

So, I guess that’s why I haven’t committed to anything yet.  It seems we lack a pretty solid stand.  Are we different or are we the same?  Do we need to be recognized for what we’ve done for narwhal biology or is it okay that they don’t like us?

But maybe I’m missing something important.  I’m not claiming to be making any sweeping declarations of what is and what is not here.  There could be another issue that I’ve totally missed and there’s no reason for this post to exist.

If there is, though, I’d love it if you’d tell me.