Armchair quarterbacks gotta love em. Where is your Pulitzer homie?
But authors aren't just writing books for other authors to enjoy. Authors are writing a consumer product. It's meant for readers, not other authors (unless they're functioning in a readerly capacity). There's no prerequisite that states that in order to enjoy or not enjoy a book one must be an author of at least a certain caliber, which is what this statement seems to imply. If you're going to take this stance on things, how can you possibly have anything bad to say about any author, Chabon and friends included? In saying these things you do come across as having a chip on your shoulder about what is and isn't recognized as literature. You say you're against the things that are recognized as literary, but you do it in such a way that feels like you resent the fact that other things aren't. Your statements and your tone seem to be at odds.
You take offense at Owlcroft calls some authors commercial hacks. But he admits (elsewhere) to liking some commercial hackery. There are authors I think of that way -- but I really enjoy their books. I understand that "commercial hacks" can and usually does have a negative connotation, but I don't think some of us (at least speaking for myself) mean it in any kind of damning way.
As to "High-brow": There aren't a lot of people embracing that term in this thread. In fact, there aren't a lot of people even using it. Again, almost everyone who has posted has expressed interest in secondary-world fantasy to some degree or another. It feels a bit like you're tilting at windmills. No one is condemning fantasy or swords-and-fireballs fantasy as a lost cause or something to be scorned. There ARE people expressing the wish that some authors there were doing more with their tools. But that may not be something authors want to do. More on this at the bottom of this post.
There's a question of what an author wants to write, what audience an author is aiming towards. I do not doubt that there are authors out there with exceptional word-craft skills who could go on to write the Next Great Literary Classic, but who instead, through either love of a certain story type or the desire to sell lots and lots of books, use their skills to write something else, something that won't be recognized in such a way, something that will leave their name off the lists of University-Approved greatness. And I'm thrilled to see them doing that. They're writing what they want to write.
But I seriously doubt people like Chabon or Carroll or Crowley are sitting there saying to themselves, "Gosh, I want to write this epic fantasy, but then all the literati will just sneer at me, so I'd best just write something literary instead." They're also writing what they want to write. And people buy it and read it and like it. And, really, they're not doing that because they're told these are authors you should read because they're writing the right kind of things.
As I said above: Different people are different. That's actually one of the nice things about the human race. There are lots of us, and we have lots of different tastes and ideas. If that weren't the case, we'd be like a colony of ants. But when people refuse to see the point of other people having different ideas, that's when problems arise. We get wars....or fights on discussion forums. And, yes, some people will feel superior to others in some way or another, whether that's a founded or unfounded feeling.
molybdenum said:
I can't disagree here, either.
As an aside: I do find that I find that people who are writing secondary-world fantasy that is not swords-and-fireballs fantasy tend to be writing things I find much more engaging on some level or another: Cat Valente, Carol Berg, Patricia McKillip, Robin Hobb, C.J. Cherryh, Guy Kay, Ellen Kushner, Sarah Monette. (Only after getting halfway through that list did I realize I'm naming mostly female authors.)
