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coaxmetal

Escapist and Genre Fiction is not a bad thing.

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Not that anyone said it was, but I feel an implicit need to defend it, since most of what is brought up on the casts Is not that, and the general attitude seems to be negative toward escapism and/or genre fiction. Which is totally fair, and I don't think anyone is disparaging the literary taste of others. I certainly am not. But sometimes listening to people talk about fiction makes me feel irrationally guilty, and i've realized that, though I don't dislike more serious and contemporary fiction, I much prefer reading genre fiction. For me, it isn't even necessarily a qualitative thing; I can enjoy something I consider "bad". I recently finished a series by L.E. Modesitt, the Imager Portfolio. I don't think it was very good, but it was competent and I enjoyed reading it. I'm currently reading Glen Cook's The Black Company series, which I really like so far.

 

I've found that, in general, I enjoy reading genre fiction, stuff like the Dresden Files, the Black Company, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Black Company, Malazan, etc, more than, uh, non-genre fiction. I just wanted to make a post about it, and to reaffirm, for myself, and hopefully for others, that there is nothing wrong with just enjoying books and fiction that is just fun to read, and maybe has no other merit, maybe is riddled with cliches, but things are cliche for a reason, right? I like when someone takes a genre and it's cliches and twists it, but I sometimes I just like me some good fantasy tropes. I wanted to make this thread to stake a claim that there is nothing shameful about genre fiction, though part of that is to convince myself and have people back me up. Which, I suppose, isn't an incredibly confident claim.

 

So, What how do you guys feel about pure escapist, and genre fiction, like fantasy or scifi series? (I have focused on fantasy in particular, because I like it a lot, but also because it is almost always escapist, and good scfi is often speculative. Which I also love, but is not what I am addressing here). I think in the end, I am looking for vindication that genre fantasy books are still cool, and fun to read. Because they are (or can be, certainly many of them are still bad).

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So, What how do you guys feel about pure escapist, and genre fiction, like fantasy or scifi series? (I have focused on fantasy in particular, because I like it a lot, but also because it is almost always escapist, and good scfi is often speculative. Which I also love, but is not what I am addressing here). I think in the end, I am looking for vindication that genre fantasy books are still cool, and fun to read. Because they are (or can be, certainly many of them are still bad).

 

It's funny, before I went to grad school, I consumed fantasy voraciously. I wasn't a Tolkien nerd or anything, not that it's a bad thing, but I really just liked medieval history but was enough of an aesthete to dislike most historical writing. I figured that was the draw of genre fiction for me. But when I actually went for a Ph.D in medieval history, I quickly lost my taste for anything with swords or magic, not that the latter ever had much draw for me, and found myself reading a great deal of sci-fi.

 

I'm thankful for the shift, not only because it introduced me to my favorite writer, the late Iain M. Banks, but because it showed me that I enjoy fiction that is different more than anything. Certainly, I enjoy more mainstream fiction if it's written from an interesting perspective or in an interesting way, but so much of what makes me like genre fiction so much is that it needs to be interesting from its premise in order to be successful at all. Even though the most recent book I read, Blindsight by Peter Watts, turned out not to be my taste at all, mostly because its efforts to be interesting in composition obscured its other strengths, the way he explored how intelligence could exist without sentience made it worth it anyway. It's usually the case with books that are less successful too, like Asimov's Foundation series, the ideas in which have aged terribly.

 

I actually have an odd relationship with the media I consume right now: if I want something that's the same, I watch a TV show, but if I want something that's different, I read a book.

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With the difference that I never consumed all that much fantasy fiction what Gormongous wrote almost exactly describes my attitude.

 

I like David Cronenberg movies. I like Phillip K Dick novels and Cordwainer Smith short stories - here's a story about cats piloting little spaceships! I like things that are imaginative, weird, prickly, gross and obtuse. The first time someone said this it was probably super clever but now it's very trite: fantasy fiction is some of the least fantastic stuff around. It's often fantastic in an extremely narrow, well-defined range. Basically a wizard shooting a fireball at an orc. (Maybe I would like "urban fantasy" or something other than sword and sorcery stuff.)

 

As far as escapist fiction: to me calling something "escapist" is the same as calling it "just escapist" - the written equivalent of empty calories. I'd like to think that there's something more than escapism to the things I read. It doesn't have to "have something to say" or be a staggering work of literary genius, but hopefully it has good writing, or interesting ideas, superior execution, or something other than just being comfort food.

 

I like some pulp fiction. I mean actual pulp fiction, not some sort of retro attempt. (If that's a thing that exists). Pulp fiction is pretty clearly escapist, but just the writing style alone can be interesting from a modern perspective. It's a window into a different time period. So while at the time it may have been "just escapist" it's something more now. (Or maybe that's just what I tell myself)

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I don't mind genre fiction as long as it's aware of what it's doing, and I feel the same way about literary fiction too. But I still end up avoiding fantasy/sci-fi because so many use tropes just because they're obligatory or familiar, rather than dealing with their implications. It's not so much that I find them BAD, but instead that I find them BORING.

Literary fiction has that problem too to an extent, but at least there I'm more familiar with the different schools of thought and am able to avoid the stuff I find gross. Also, a lot of the more sophisticated genre stuff gets sucked into literary fiction, for some reason. For example, Murakami is pretty fantastical in some books, but he's considered to be firmly in the literary fiction camp.

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I don't mind genre fiction as long as it's aware of what it's doing, and I feel the same way about literary fiction too. But I still end up avoiding fantasy/sci-fi because so many use tropes just because they're obligatory or familiar, rather than dealing with their implications. It's not so much that I find them BAD, but instead that I find them BORING.

Literary fiction has that problem too to an extent, but at least there I'm more familiar with the different schools of thought and am able to avoid the stuff I find gross. Also, a lot of the more sophisticated genre stuff gets sucked into literary fiction, for some reason. For example, Murakami is pretty fantastical in some books, but he's considered to be firmly in the literary fiction camp.

 

Any good genre fiction from at latest the nineties is well aware of its tropes. I think it's emblematic of the genre ghetto, diminished but not gone, that genre fiction is defined by its worst and mainstream fiction is defined by its best. Anything too good in genre fiction gets assimilated into the mainstream discourse and anything too bad in mainstream fiction gets demoted to genre. Honestly, it's a fairly fascinating form of culture-policing.

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Yeah, I wrote something similar then deleted it. I don't think the concept of genre is very useful, it's more often than not just a qualitative judgement.

 

There are some rigid fiction forms. Every Clive Cussler novel is basically the same book. A lot of murder mystery pot-boilers are very similar. In those cases I think it's useful to talk about working within an established form.

 

However "science fiction" is not a form. It's not even a theme. It's a setting - or really just a time period. A Star Wars novel and "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" have almost nothing in common. They appeal to different types of people and are thematically completely different. They have different structures. Putting them in the same genre communicates almost nothing. Meanwhile "The Road" somehow isn't science fiction, even though there are 20 syfy movies of the week that are just lesser versions of the same story.

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Yeah, I wrote something similar then deleted it. I don't think the concept of genre is very useful, it's more often than not just a qualitative judgement.

 

There are some rigid fiction forms. Every Clive Cussler novel is basically the same book. A lot of murder mystery pot-boilers are very similar. In those cases I think it's useful to talk about working within an established form.

 

However "science fiction" is not a form. It's not even a theme. It's a setting - or really just a time period. A Star Wars novel and "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" have almost nothing in common. They appeal to different types of people and are thematically completely different. They have different structures. Putting them in the same genre communicates almost nothing. Meanwhile "The Road" somehow isn't science fiction, even though there are 20 syfy movies of the week that are just lesser versions of the same story.

 

I think the term genre fiction has meaning, but it is usually used disparagingly, Also its really hard to type this, my cat is trying to help.

 

Ok that's better, she moved to my laptop and is now typing in irc. Anyway, I definitely agree wrt science fiction. There can be purely escapist scifi, but the best scifi is mostly speculative, and explores a lot of ideas. There are a lot of directions it can be taken. I think my main thrust with this thread though is to defend the legitimacy of something that uses common scifi or fantasy (or mystery or crime etc) tropes. Certainly, leaning on them too hard will just make a work predictable and boring, but I think even working within the confines of what is usually considered genre fiction can make works that are fun to read. I think that I tend to consume more media that is just satisfying, rather than thought provoking. Not that I am adverse to that, but I certainly engage in far less. Often when I go to a book, I don't want to work.

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I'd have to say there's nothing wrong with reading some brain candy now and then.  Sometimes I like to pretend that I only engage in serious literary experience as I peer over my glasses at all the plebeian bestseller pap oh ho ho but then I realize I'm being a self-involved doofus and get over myself.  In particular, I like really dumb westerns now and then, even though they're chock-full of mustache-twirling villains and astoundingly racist caricatures and really poorly written female characters.  They're just fun sometimes, and it's totally okay to engage in that.

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Any good genre fiction from at latest the nineties is well aware of its tropes. I think it's emblematic of the genre ghetto, diminished but not gone, that genre fiction is defined by its worst and mainstream fiction is defined by its best. Anything too good in genre fiction gets assimilated into the mainstream discourse and anything too bad in mainstream fiction gets demoted to genre. Honestly, it's a fairly fascinating form of culture-policing.

 

I have friends who are heavily involved in sci-fi professionally.  It's almost a constant battle to get a great sci-fi/speculative fiction books recognized as such when they hit the mainstream.  The weird thing is that sci-fi cinema and television is incredibly highly regarded.  We don't condemn it as being a "genre" cinema and try to pretend that 2001 or Alien aren't sci-fi. 

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I have friends who are heavily involved in sci-fi professionally.  It's almost a constant battle to get a great sci-fi/speculative fiction books recognized as such when they hit the mainstream.  The weird thing is that sci-fi cinema and television is incredibly highly regarded.  We don't condemn it as being a "genre" cinema and try to pretend that 2001 or Alien aren't sci-fi. 

 

I'd say that's the case for 2001, but that might just be because Kubrick is Kubrick. While Alien is generally regarded as a great film, it doesn't hold the same kind of cultural capital as something like a Bergman or Kurosawa film does (not saying this is good, but that the distinctions between genre and art films are still drawn). 

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Sci-fi has had a very long history in film, though.  Think about early film history and there are a few things that really stick out - Voyage dans le lune and Metropolis in particular.  I think the speculative nature of the genre allows for more (and easier) metatextual cultural commentary than you get with most other genres.

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Any good genre fiction from at latest the nineties is well aware of its tropes. I think it's emblematic of the genre ghetto, diminished but not gone, that genre fiction is defined by its worst and mainstream fiction is defined by its best. Anything too good in genre fiction gets assimilated into the mainstream discourse and anything too bad in mainstream fiction gets demoted to genre. Honestly, it's a fairly fascinating form of culture-policing.

I missed this last time I glanced at this thread. That's a really good point, one I hadn't though of.

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I'd say that's the case for 2001, but that might just be because Kubrick is Kubrick. While Alien is generally regarded as a great film, it doesn't hold the same kind of cultural capital as something like a Bergman or Kurosawa film does (not saying this is good, but that the distinctions between genre and art films are still drawn). 

 

Probably an interesting discussion for another thread, but I think a pretty compelling argument could be made that there are a number of sci-fi film/tv works which have been as influential and carry the capital of even the great masters of cinema.  Alien has probably spawned as many academic analyses as any one Bergman film (maybe not Kurosawa). 

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Probably an interesting discussion for another thread, but I think a pretty compelling argument could be made that there are a number of sci-fi film/tv works which have been as influential and carry the capital of even the great masters of cinema.  Alien has probably spawned as many academic analyses as any one Bergman film (maybe not Kurosawa). 

 

I don't mean that they don't get discussed, or that articles aren't published about them (Carol Clover's chapter on Alien from Men, Women, and Chainsaws is a personal favorite). I just know a fair number of people in film studies departments who turn their nose up at genre films, with exceptions made for Kubrick and a few others. The high/low divide has been eroded a bit in the university, but there are still quite a few pockets of conservatism about canonical films hanging around.

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I don't mean that they don't get discussed, or that articles aren't published about them (Carol Clover's chapter on Alien from Men, Women, and Chainsaws is a personal favorite). I just know a fair number of people in film studies departments who turn their nose up at genre films, with exceptions made for Kubrick and a few others. The high/low divide has been eroded a bit in the university, but there are still quite a few pockets of conservatism about canonical films hanging around.

 

To be fair, I live in a weird bubble.  The local university has a dedicated office for the study of science fiction, which was the first of its kind founded decades ago.  I hang around with a bunch of people who have worked there or been grad students in that program, so I get a picture that is heavily skewed in favor of a positive view on sci-fi in all its forms, even in academic circles.  I know that isn't a common department to find at a university. in other departments in that college, it seems genre fiction is a bit more accepted as there are respected advocates on campus to advocate for its importance.

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I don't think that's totally different from my experience. The faculty I work with all have a generally positive view of genre fiction, mainly because that's what I work on. There are just as many around who have their hangups about it, so really it's just a bit more of a contested issue here. Then again, nobody's saying don't read sci-fi, they just would rather focus their attention on fancy modernist literature and the like.

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I don't think that's totally different from my experience. The faculty I work with all have a generally positive view of genre fiction, mainly because that's what I work on. There are just as many around who have their hangups about it, so really it's just a bit more of a contested issue here. Then again, nobody's saying don't read sci-fi, they just would rather focus their attention on fancy modernist literature and the like.

yeah, that's the feeling I get. People don't say bad things about genre fiction, but they are often casually, and likely unintentionally, dismissive of it, which sometimes rubs me the wrong way.

 

It's cool to hear that there are academic studies of it though, I didn't realize that. It makes sense. I've often wondered why things like high-school required reading never includes some classic scifi, something like Dune, or Vonnegut or something.

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It's cool to hear that there are academic studies of it though, I didn't realize that. It makes sense. I've often wondered why things like high-school required reading never includes some classic scifi, something like Dune, or Vonnegut or something.

 

Man, maybe I just got lucky.  I had 2 amazing high school English teachers that did incorporate some of the best sci-fi into their class.  One introduced me to Ray Bradbury (There will come soft rains) and the other to Vonnegut (Harrison Bergeron).  Those are still two of my favorite short stories ever. 

 

If you ever want a guided tour through the history of sci-fi, I'd suggest The Road to Science Fiction.   It's six volumes long and has short stories and excerpts that trace and explain the development of science fiction as a genre.  It was edited by James Gunn, the guy who founded the science fiction office at KU.  I have the first four volumes, and they are some of my favorite short story collections of all time.

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Man, maybe I just got lucky.  I had 2 amazing high school English teachers that did incorporate some of the best sci-fi into their class.  One introduced me to Ray Bradbury (There will come soft rains) and the other to Vonnegut (Harrison Bergeron).  Those are still two of my favorite short stories ever. 

 

If you ever want a guided tour through the history of sci-fi, I'd suggest The Road to Science Fiction.   It's six volumes long and has short stories and excerpts that trace and explain the development of science fiction as a genre.  It was edited by James Gunn, the guy who founded the science fiction office at KU.  I have the first four volumes, and they are some of my favorite short story collections of all time.

That looks really cool, I'm definitely going to check it out. Also, apparently it was (re) published by White Wolf, which seems like an odd fit. But then, maybe white wolf does other publishing, I guess I always though of them as the people who made the world of darkness games (to which my only connection is I like the game Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines a lot)

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Oh, I never saw that. Thanks for sharing. I strongly disagree, as you might expect. That is a slightly different argument, but in general I don't like the sentiment that reading something just to enjoy it is somehow embarrassing, or even that work written simply to be enjoyed isn't worth respecting.

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Oh, I never saw that. Thanks for sharing. I strongly disagree, as you might expect. That is a slightly different argument, but in general I don't like the sentiment that reading something just to enjoy it is somehow embarrassing, or even that work written simply to be enjoyed isn't worth respecting.

 

Worth pointing out that if you go through that thread, you'll find that the original piece was one of 7 different views on the role of YA fiction published at the same time in the NYT.  It's still a troubling opinion to me, but I feel that in context his extreme tone makes more sense when you view it as being presented concurrently with many other views. 

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Worth pointing out that if you go through that thread, you'll find that the original piece was one of 7 different views on the role of YA fiction published at the same time in the NYT.  It's still a troubling opinion to me, but I feel that in context his extreme tone makes more sense when you view it as being presented concurrently with many other views. 

 

Fair enough, but it's still an argument implying that someone who reads erudite, challenging fiction is somehow living a more fulfilled and learned life, when it's all just imaginary stuff by dudes who were born and have lived the same way as everyone else. It's bearable in the context of six other dissenting opinions, but still the opinion of an elitist jerk who is worried that other people will have access to his intellectual cache without all the effort he sees himself as having expended.

 

This should probably go in the Drunk thread, because I am, but I really am tired of having people judge me for reading fun books that expand my mind in different ways than they see as culturally legitimate. My job is reading really challenging books all day, so I don't see why someone who spends his free time reading Infinite Jest after a day of whatever is somehow more intellectually curious than me who reads Gormenghast after a day of learning about mechanisms of pre-modern familial power structures.

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