I want good suggestions of action-driven galactic space operas preferably with someone called Linda in it'?
I usually go with camels in it, but the Linda bit is good.
It's sad, true, and perfectly understandable but people want to be safe.
And Amaunette thinks people may be anti-intellectual, etc. (More people read fiction today than did in the Modernists time when there was a lot more disparity on literacy, education, etc.) Both of you are sort of proposing that, again, people may have a uniform view, motive -- you're trying to build a neat little box. But, as we know, some people don't read fiction. Some people read fiction but have very narrow preferences. Some people graze along a wider scale. And many people -- the core book buyers -- buy tons of books of all different kinds and have shelves like Gaiman's. Let's embrace the spectrum.
There is a movement happening, for decades really but more rapidly in the past 15 years. It's not about writing or style but about perception. It's not organized or cohesive or uniform. It's just that a lot of people are dumping the scripts or partly dumping the scripts of tribes as movements, culture wars, genres as philosophies of writing, literary versus commercial/genre, and other such stuff. This is happening for a variety of factors, from generational, to changes in media, to changes in how books are sold, fiction publishers putting out everything from Pulitzer Prize winners to merchandising tie-in novels, academia, the Internet, marketing techniques, etc.
Grossman is an excellent example of what's going on. He's an established critic with Time for fiction. He reviews SFF and loves it. He wrote a fantasy novel and went to WorldCon. That's why he's an effective advocate because he challenges and thus can change perceptions. What's effective is challenging the script, and in particular the notion of trying to paint things and authors that don't fit the script as abnormal exceptions. When someone says: "That doesn't count," others say: "Yes, it does."
When Michael Chabon gets asked by an interviewer: these works of yours aren't the way genre writing is supposed to be or transcend genre, so they don't really count as genre, right? he answered, "Yes, they do," and went to SFF conventions.
When Margaret Atwood says that her speculative novels aren't science fiction because the stuff in them could theoretically happen today and therefore they don't count as SF as they don't fit the SF style/needs, Ursula LeGuin says yes they do, but I'll try not to upset you.
When someone says that Novel X doesn't have this or does have that, and that's not what literary fiction does, so Novel X doesn't count as literary, you say, yes it does.
This works because it says that the script isn't fact and isn't accurate and the exception to the script cannot be dismissed as an abnormality loophole. By challenging the script as not fact, you get discussion about the fiction as fiction, as opposed to dogma labelling.
If you don't counter, but allow or even suggest the loophole, it doesn't work as well because it allows the script to stand as fact and books to be dismissed. So if someone says genre is trash, and you agree that most of genre is trash, except for this book you like -- which is an abnormality -- you just confirm the script of genre=trash, and the book you like, which you made an exception, doesn't count as genre. Or, the person, having had the script confirmed by you about genre fiction, dismisses your assessment of the book you like as erroneous, and perceives it as genre trash despite your belief that it's not. Either way, genre=trash is allowed to stand as the way the world works, even though it's an imaginary idea.
Grossman, again, tried to do both -- challenge the script and and agree with it as the definition of terms about writing. Which for a lot of the SFF community meant that he was reinforcing the script against genre SFF, not challenging it, and they perceived him as being condescending, or unintentionally condescending. But again, his piece may have done some good with non-fans since it was in the Wall Street Journal and because of who he is and that he is now also a fantasy writer. That requires they see him as odd -- an abnormality to the script -- or as normal -- a perception change. The likelihood because of his standing as a critic is that some of them will start to see it as normal.
It's an interesting thing watching the shifts happen. (Ready to give up your script about tie-in novels, Junk Monkey?)
