Jastermereel Good Karma
Joined: 10 Jul 2006 Posts: 1155 Location: Right next to where I'm not.
|
Posted: Thu Feb 18, 2010 7:01 pm Post subject: The upside to describing some writing in terms of genres |
|
|
Genres Aren't Boxes, They're Reading Instructions
http://io9.com/5464396/genres-arent-boxes-theyre-reading-instructions
Quote: | Where would we be without genre labels? Free to write new and weird idioms, possibly. But a couple of recent blog posts make the case that genres aren't cages, they're toolkits that tell you how to read a particular text.
Writing over at Tor.com a while back, Jo Walton quotes Samuel Delany as saying that people who read science fiction regularly most likely have developed a set of skills to allow them to read SF books. That's why you don't get tripped up by the inclusion of futuristic technology (like the tachyon drive in Joe Haldeman's The Forever War) and you tend to take a certain amount of strange world-building for granted. She mentions a reviewer who wanted to make the zombies in Kelly Link's story "Zombie Contingency Plans" into metaphors, when in fact they're actual zombies. |
_________________ The old Jastermereel account seems to have been killed in an unfortunate email changing accident. I am an illegal clone manufactured on a little known island state off the coast of...well...never you mind. Pretend nothing happened and you won't have to face the combined wrath of the Guild of Calamitous Intent and the League of Awesomeness. |
|