Evaporating Genres by Wolfe Gary K.;

Author:Wolfe, Gary K.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2011-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

PART II

writers

As the preceding essays have argued, genres do not always behave as expected, and this may be particularly true of the fantastic genres. And, as I hope my various examples have made clear, the reason for this is that writers do not always behave as expected, and are not always comfortable within the perceived strictures of the genres to which, by circumstance or marketing, they have found themselves assigned. As I mentioned in “Malebolge, or the Ordnance of Genre,” writers often have used the term “ghetto” to describe the sense of entrapment they may feel as a result of being categorized as a horror writer, science fiction writer, or fantasy writer, and some writers bristle at such labels altogether. Given the tendency of publishers and booksellers to market by category, the tendency of readers to organize themselves into affinity groups, and even the tendency of librarians to shelve fiction according the special interests of patrons, this complaint is hard to dismiss. An experienced science fiction writer turning to mainstream realistic fiction may find herself very nearly in the position of a first-time novelist, and may even be warned by her agent against making such a risky move in the first place.

While a great many successful and talented writers are comfortable continuing to work within their market niches, they are by and large not the ones I’ve been focusing on in this book. Of the authors I have been discussing, however, I plead guilty to the charge of contributing in some small measure to that ongoing ghettoization by treating these writers as exemplars of the very arguments that I have been making about the instability of the fantastic genres. On the one hand, I’m claiming that such authors seek to stretch or escape the strictures of genre altogether; on the other I’m saying, isn’t this interesting in what it tells us about these genres? I would not blame any of these authors for shaking their heads and muttering, “You can’t win.” The three essays that follow represent something of an effort to redress that imbalance by focusing first on the authors, and only secondarily on the genres they generally are thought to inhabit. While genre considerations are hardly absent from these essays, the focus here is more on technique and angle of vision—even on the lives of the authors themselves—than on the manipulation of specific conventions. These are authors for whom genre is not a space to inhabit, but a collection of tools and resources to be drawn upon along with the myriad other tools and resources available to the makers of contemporary fiction.

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