Let's All Get Real

Back in May, Arthur Krystal published a piece in The New Yorker attempting to put some clear blue water between genre and literary fiction.  Lev Grossman presented a slew of exceptions to Krystal's arguments, and suggested that Krystal's so-called clear-cut division was falsified by writers working from the edge of genres outward, and the many recent literary novels that found their own uses for genre tropes and narrative vitality.  If there is a border, it's porous in both directions.  And now Krystal had revisited his argument in another New Yorker piece, asserting that genre is basically commercial fiction, while literature is art, baby, with a capital A, its carapace glimmering with ambiguity, its heart pumping the rich blood of 'felt life'.

I was planning to write something about Krystal's circular logic and claims of exceptionalism re literary fiction, but by the time I started to think about getting around to it, several people smarter than me had already cut him down.  We've been here before, far too many times.  It's like man-made climate change: there are the facts on the ground, and there are the arguments that those who want to deny those facts or claim they aren't important trot out time and again, no matter how many times they're proven to be based on partial data or to be just plain wrong.  It's necessary to engage with splitters like Krystal, I guess, and maybe it's even useful . . . but it's getting old.

Still, a short passage in Krystal's piece does have the sting of (partial) truth:

...perhaps the better word for novels that taxonomically register as genre is simply “commercial.” Born to sell, these novels stick to the trite-and-true, relying on stock characters whose thoughts spool out in Lifetime platitudes. There will be exceptions, as there are in every field, but, for the most part, the standard genre or commercial novel isn’t going to break the sea frozen inside us.

I was trying to figure out how to link this to a new essay by Paul Kincaid, in which he returns to his argument about a growing sense of exhaustion in the science-fiction field, and suggests that the problem lies in the heartland of science fiction.  Which I think is more or less congruous with what we might call 'commercial' science fiction - those novels which make up the bulk of publishers' lists, and which tend to be self-contained polders which either have little connection with the present, or simplify its complex ambiguities to stirring tales of right and wrong, light and dark, heroes and villains.  And which tend to consist of rearrangements of genre furniture that are sometimes elegant, but don't contain any new tropes, and usually don't examine in any radical way the premises on which they are founded.

Krystal's piece pulls that old trick of judging literary fiction by its best examples, and genre fiction by its worst.  And too much criticism within the science-fiction field doesn't distinguish between commercial sf, which is trying to construct new and engaging stories within a defined framework, and the edgier stuff, which is trying to do something else.  One of the things Paul Kincaid is trying to do, I think, is attempting to work out what that distinction means. It's good, useful stuff.  I don't agree with all of it.  I certainly think, like Kincaid, that too much science fiction looks 'inward', but I wouldn't make a strong distinction between science fiction that attempts to revitalise genre tropes and science fiction that attempts to inject new ideas for 'outside'; some of those tropes have escaped into the real world, and by engaging with them and using them to discover new meanings science fiction is in dialogue with both its own ideas and with the real.  But it's laying the groundwork for all kinds of debates that stimulate writers and readers, and refresh the field and widen its possibilities, and crack open the limitations and boundaries (too often self-imposed) that, according to critics like Krystal, consign genre fiction to the outer dark of the second-rate.

Found Poetry

Found while trawling the internets, a brief article on manipulating photons, which might have implications in creating nanoscale circuitry. I'm not really interested in the workings of 'entirely new class of devices that use light instead of electricity' that could be used in 'applications ranging from accelerators and microscopes to speedier on-chip communications'.  Too mundane.  But wouldn't it be lovely to write a story, or even a sentence, that sings with the found poetry of synthetic magnetism, photonic crystals, breaking time-reversal symmetry, photon control?

Edna Sharrow

 

Edna Sharrow was born in Glastonbury on All Souls Day, 1876. Claiming to be the last true black witch, she became a supporter of the Nazis in the 1930s and fled her homeland after a failed attempt to turn the gold reserves of the Bank of England into iron pyrites.

She survived the last days of Hitler's bunker and kidnap attempts by the KGB, the CIA, and Mossad, returned to London in the 1960s, and drew a circle of protection around herself in a ground floor flat in Essex Road, Islington.

She's been there ever since, living on spiders, woodlice, and pallid tendrils of ivy that curl through the rotten courses of mortar of the kitchen wall. A few weeks ago, a young crack addict broke into the flat, hoping to find something he could sell for his next fix. Edna patched the broken pane in the front door with cardboard charged with a sly charm. An open invitation to another desperate chancer.

She'd forgotten how good fresh meat tasted. After another meal, she'll be ready to go back into the world.

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