Samuel R. Delany: Another Roundtable

Recently, Locus published an online discussion of the work of Samuel R. Delany with a bunch of different writers and critics, primarily aimed at discussing Delany’s status as the newly-crowned Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Plenty of interesting things are said there, and the participants include a number of people I’m very fond of (both as writers and people), but the particular focus ended up, I thought, creating a certain narrowness to the discussion, especially regarding the post-Dhalgren works, and I thought it might be nice to gather a different group of people together to discuss Delany … differently.

So here we are. I put out the call to a wide variety of folks, and this is the group that responded. We used a Google Doc, and the discussion grew rhizomatically more than linearly, so you'll see that we sometimes refer to things said later in the roundtable. (This makes for a richer discussion, I think, but it may be a little jarring if you expect a linear conversation.)

I hope people who didn't have time or ability to join us in the "official" roundtable will feel free to offer their thoughts in the comments — as will, well, anybody else. Therefore, without further ado and all that jazz... 


PARTICIPANTS  

Matthew Cheney has published fiction and nonfiction in a wide variety of venues, including One Story, Locus, Weird Tales, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. He wrote the introductions to Wesleyan University Press’s editions of Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Starboard Wine, and The American Shore (forthcoming). Currently, he is a student in the Ph.D. in Literature program at the University of New Hampshire. 

Craig Laurance Gidney is the author of Sea, Swallow Me & Other Stories and the YA novel Bereft. 

Geoffrey H. Goodwin is a journalist, author, and rogue academic with a Bachelor’s in Literary Theory (Syracuse University) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Naropa University). Geoffrey writes fiction; has taught composition and creative writing in a wide range of settings; has interviewed speculative writers and artists for Bookslut, Tor.com, Sirenia Digest, The Mumpsimus, and during Ann Vandermeer’s helming of Weird Tales; and has worked in seven different stores that have sold comic books.
  
Keguro Macharia is a recovering academic, a lazy blogger, and an itinerant tweeter. Sometimes, he writes things on gukira.wordpress.com or tweets as @Keguro_

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Love is the Law and The Last Weekend. His short fiction has appeared everywhere from Asimov’s Science Fiction to The Mammoth Book of Threesomes and Moresomes.

Njihia Mbitiru is a screenwriter. He lives in Nairobi.

Lavelle Porter is an adjunct professor of English at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) and a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.  His dissertation The Over-Education of the Negro: Academic Novels, Higher Education and the Black Intellectual will be completed this spring. Finally. He’s on Twitter @alavelleporter.

Ethan Robinson blogs, mostly about science fiction, at maroonedoffvesta.blogspot.com, a position he will no doubt shortly be parlaying into literary fame.

Eric Schaller is a biologist, writer, and artist, living in New Hampshire and co-editor of The Revelator.


THE ROUNDTABLE

Matthew Cheney

Locus is “The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field”, and so they’re primarily interested in science fiction. We don’t have to be that narrow here. But let’s start with one of the questions they start with, and see where we go: 

How has Delany influenced your own work or views on writing and literature?

An Accidental Nonfiction Writer

In the author's note to his new collection of essays, Magic Hours, Tom Bissell calls himself "an accidental nonfiction writer", and then says:

When I first started writing for magazines, I imagined that I would use nonfiction writing as a way to fund my fiction writing. This did not go exactly as planned. Insofar as I am known as anything today, it is as a nonfiction writer. Earlier in my career, I was neurotic enough to let this bother me. When I started out as a writer, I regarded fiction — novels, especially — as the supreme achievement of the human imagination. While I still hold fiction in very high regard, and continue to write it, I no longer believe in genre chauvinism. Life is difficult enough.

Catching Up with the Caine Prize

This is my fourth post for the great 2012 Caine Prize blogathon. (See my first post for some details.)

With 2 stories remaining for our Caine Prize Blogathon of Wonder, I fell behind.

Thus, this post will be about the last two stories, "La Salle de Départ" by Melissa Tandiwe Myambo and "Hunter Emmanuel" by Constance Myburgh.

Both are solid stories with their own virtues and are, much to the jurors' credit, utterly different from each other.

"Genres Do Not Exist"

From a New Inquiry Q&A with Eileen Myles:

What ‘bad’ genres did you grow up reading—science fiction, fairy tales, romance, etc.—or read as an adult?

I resist the question entirely. I don’t think quotes ['...'] dispense with the idea of putting writing into good and bad genres. Let me say and I probably mean this in the most manifesto-ing way that genres don’t exist. They don’t exist at all. They serve the needs of marketing, of academic specialization, even as modes of work, but in terms of meaning or content or associative formations they are like traffic lights—not so interesting and most adamantly not what we are doing today. Genres for me are just a way in which we are controlled, protected I suppose but I’m not a writer to be protected at all. I love science fiction, have all my life and it’s where I met Kafka. Angela Carter is swimming around in there too. Science fiction propelled me into poetry and writing in general and if I think of the children’s books I was exposed to I can’t see the difference between sci fi, poetry, Kafka or Angela Carter. Yet they all know each other very well. That’s all I’m saying. Are there good and bad writers? I’m not sure about that either.

While I generally agree, I would offer various footnotes of minor disagreement (or nuance), most of which would just be me paraphrasing my introduction to The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and review of Gary Wolfe's Evaporating Genres. Genre is not merely something that "serves the needs of marketing", etc., but rather has been something produced by a variety of publishing practices — genre-specific magazines and book publishers, fan clubs, fanzines, conventions. Those are real, and they exist, and they profoundly influence, for better and worse, how all sorts of different texts are created, shaped, distributed, and received.

Otherwise, yes, exactly. I, too, met Kafka in science fiction. As have others.

Metaphor Systems, Fictive Moments, and False Arrests

Bradford Morrow, editor of Conjunctions and writer of The Diviner's Tale and The Uninnocent, in an interview conducted by Edie Meidav at The Millions:

I may be overly optimistic or utterly blind, but my view of contemporary American fiction is that it is as rich as ever. Some of the best work is being written in what until recently was considered, at least among the conventional literati, genre fiction. Horror, gothic, mystery, fantasy, fabulism. There are so many stunningly original and serious writers working these fields. I have to think that anybody reading this interview would agree. Just one example, though there are many, would be Elizabeth Hand. She composes sentences of ravishing beauty. She is capable of creating metaphor systems that are so dynamic and provocative. She can turn a fictive moment that seems deeply rooted in the everyday into something that, in fact, touches upon the sublime, the miraculous. Just read her novella Cleopatra Brimstone and tell me that American fiction isn’t pulsing with life. Like I say, I could list dozens of authors here whose work I admire and follow with care and excitement. That said, I do think that much contemporary criticism is stuck in the past and that too many reviewers want those who are exploring ways to revolutionize genre to stick to the rules. I think of them as genre police. They make too many false arrests and lead potential readers astray, keep them caged away from renegades whose work they might well dig reading.

Noted: Genre and Disgust

Some passages from books due back at the library...

From "The Politics of Genre" by Stephen Heath, in Debating World Literature edited by Christopher Prendergrast, Verso, 2004, pp.172-173:

The politics of genre turns on the distinctions it makes and the hierarchies those distinctions readily support: between high and low, sacred and secular, poetic and prosaic, literary and non-literary genres. To challenge and transform such hierarchies involves a range of shifts in perception and genre judgement, notably as to what counts as the proper matter and language of literature, as to what to recognize. The development of the novel provides a powerful middle class with a genre that seeks to represent the terms of its world in defiance of traditional genre views of the actual social life of men and women as fitting only for comedy or satire (the supreme genres are conceived as universal, expressing essential truths in abstraction from the contingencies of the everyday). Diaries, domestic journals, personal narratives, are examples of genres that recent feminist theory and practice has been concerned to accredit, calling into question the gender-ideological bases of existing genre assumptions (distinctions between objective and subjective, public and private, political and personal).

The various forms of the writing of women's lives could be seen as inferior genres because "female", the novel as low genre because of its readership (taking in the lower-middle and working classes and importantly including women) and the commercial nature of its production for this readership, the new "public" (it was often attacked as "democratic"). "The public is so stupid," commented Flaubert, whose own work marks a significant moment in the development of a split between high and low within the genre itself: on the one hand, the "literary" or "serious" novel; on the other, "popular" or "mass" fiction, the market standardization of genre products -- romance, mystery, science fiction, crime, best-sellers (all the drugstore shelf-headings). The split was increasingly supported by an academic institution of literature that elaborated canons of works and defined quality, while the power of genre conceptions in consumer mass cultural production only increased importance. Nowhere is this more visible than in television with its host of recognized -- expected -- genres: sitcoms, news, game shows, reality shows, talk shows, et al. Such genre domination is at once part of the hierarchization process -- high genres are seeen as full of individual works -- and a fact of an "entertainment industry" that aims to maximize profit by organizing production around a limited number of models. Non-standard programmes, those that cross over or upset genre distinctions, can quickly become sites of disquiet and political sensitivity (witness the need felt to keep documentary and drama separate, the controversies surrounding thier "confusion").

The strength of genre classifications is simultaneous with a theory and practice of writing that seeks to undermine them because of that strength, the hold of ready-made expectations of meaning.

From The Politics and Poetics of Transgression by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, Cornell University Press, 1986, p.77:

[Ben] Jonson constituted his identity in opposition to the theatre and the fair. Through the imaginary separation of the scholar's study and library from the theatrical marketplace, Jonson simultaneously mapped out the divisions between the "civilized" and the grotesque body, between the stunted quarto and the handsome folio, between the "author" and the hack, between "pure" literature and social hybridization. In the image of the fair, the author could rewrite the social and economic relations which determined his own existence; in the fair he could stigmatize the voices which competed against his own and reveal just how "dirty" were the hands which sullied his "pure" wares.

But disgust bears the impress of desire, and Jonson found in the huckster, the cony-catcher, and the pick-pocket an image of his own precarious and importuning craft. Proclaiming so loudly how all the other plays were mere cozenings, did not Jonson pursue the perennial techniques of the mountebank who decried the deceptions and the false wares of others the more easily to practise his own deceptions and pass of his own productions as the "real thing"?

p. 191:

The bourgeois subject continuously defined and re-defined itself through the exclusion of what it marked out as "low" -- as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating. Yet that very act of exclusion was constitutive of its identity. The low was internalized under the sign of negation and disgust.

But disgust always bears the imprint of desire. These low domains, apparently expelled as "Other", return as the object of nostalgia, longing, and fascination. The forest, the fair, the theatre, the slum, the circus, the seaside-resort, the "savage": all these, placed at the outer limit of civil life, become symbolic contents of bourgeois desire.

Elif Shafak: The Politics of Fiction

Via various Facebook folks -- this is a talk well worth watching:

Readercon Reflections

Readercon 21 was, for me, exciting and stimulating, though this year in particular it felt like I only had a few minutes to talk with everybody I wanted to talk with.  I think part of this is a result of my now living in New Hampshire rather than New Jersey, so I just don't see a lot of folks from the writing, publishing, and reading worlds much anymore.

Before I get into some thoughts on some panels and discussions, some pictures: Ellen Datlow's and Tempest Bradford's.  Tempest asked everybody to make a sad face for her, not because Readercon was a sad con (just the opposite!), but because it's fun to have people make sad faces.  The iconic picture from the weekend for me, though, is Ellen's photo of Liz Hand's back.  I covet Liz's shirt.

And now for some only vaguely coherent thoughts on some of the panels...

20 Under 40 and the Fantastic

With one post, Larry Nolen simultaneously offers a thoughtful and well-informed response to folks who got all "wwaaaahhrrr!  waaaahhhhrrr!  genre good!  waaahhhhrrrr!" about the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" promotional list (whereas I just offered snark) and he proves what we already knew -- that he was the perfect successor as Best American Fantasy series editor, because his perspective is exactly the one we wanted for the book when we created the series (and he's a much faster reader than I am, which will make the work perhaps a bit less arduous for him than it was for me).  It's a post well worth reading -- one of the things being inundated with piles of lit mags does is show you the extraordinary variety of writing out there, both in terms of content and form.

Now if I can just get him to stop calling it "mimetic fiction", I'll have achieved all of my goals for world domination, bwahahahahahahahaaaa!

Update: The link for "20 Under 40" above goes to interviews with the 20.  Here are some questions and responses:

Chris Adrian:

Who are your favorite writers over forty?

Ursula K. Le Guin and Marilynne Robinson, John Crowley and Padgett Powell.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

What was the inspiration for the piece included in the “20 Under 40” series?

Kate Bernheimer asked me to contribute a piece to her new anthology of fairy tales, “My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me,” and I was excited to have a chance to revisit a story that disturbs me: Goethe’s “The Erlking.”

What are you working on now?

A story about a haunted house.

Karen Russell

What was the inspiration for the piece included in the “20 Under 40” series?

[...]I wanted to try a sort of fantastical-historical story—Hitchcock meets the swamp.

What are you working on now?

New stories and a novel about a whacked-out imaginary town during the Dust Bowl drought.

Who are your favorite writers over forty?

Just a very few on a long list would be George Saunders, Kelly Link, Joy Williams, Ben Marcus, Jim Shepard, and whole cemeteries of the well-over-forty deceased ones.

Rude Words and Piracy: A High Wind in Jamaica and the Child Reader

Richard Hughes's first and most famous book, A High Wind in Jamaica, is one of the strangest novels I've ever read, which is really saying something. It's both delightful and disturbing in the way it presents -- in an unfailingly light tone -- children as amoral aliens. The novel is rich with irony, and it's not a satire so much as a relentless attack on sentimental notions of childhood. The possible interpretations of the novel are likely endless, but in many ways the book itself is about interpretation -- about the futility of trying to interpret a child's experiences and thoughts through adult eyes. (It's also worth noting that the novel was first published in the U.S. under the title The Innocent Voyage, which I'm rather more fond of than its better-known title. It was also once illustrated by Lynd Ward.)

I was surprised this morning to discover an essay by British teacher Victoria de Rijke in a 1995 issue of Children's Literature in Education, "Reading the Child Invention", in which de Rijke explores the very concept of "children's literature" by having children read A High Wind in Jamaica. The majority of the essay consists of transcripts of a conversations de Rijke had with an 11-year-old who read the novel, Ayeshea Zacharkiw. It's possible that Zacharkiw was extremely precocious, but de Rijke writes of many other children who read and appreciated the book, too. Toward the end of the discussion, she asks Zacharkiw if she thinks Hughes's novel is a book for children or for grown-ups, and Zacharkiw says she thinks it depends on reading ability, and a child's willingness to use a dictionary.

AZ: ...It’s an old book as well, so it’s got all these old expressions, but I think anyone could read it whether they’re children or grown-ups. Yeah. It might take the children longer than older people, but cut at two year olds, cos you have to be sensible about ages.
VdR: Right. I agree. And do you think there’s anything in it that adults now wouldn’t like children to read?
AZ: I don’t know why it’s been republished for adults. There are words in it I suppose, rude words (laughs) and piracy, but you can get horror books especially for children, but adults read them. Well, anyone can read any book. It’s just what level you are at reading, whether you like that particular type of book, and if you don’t like it, you can always put the book down.
VdR: Mmm, absolutely. You’re free to do that, aren’t you? It’s not in control of you! (laughs)
AZ: (laughs) No, course not. Once you’ve bought it. It doesn’t matter who you publish it for. Anyone can buy it and read it, or get it out of the library.
VdR: So what kind of particular type of book do you think this is?
AZ: Well, it’s about life. It’s about life on the schooner, and about children, as they’re the man characters, and about the difference between grown-ups and children, who’s in control.

De Rijke draws some interesting conclusions from this exchange:

Children’s observations are often valued by grown-ups for their blunt honesty and wisdom, for cutting through the adult flannel and exposing simple truths, most often because adults are already uncomfortable about hypocrisies which they are concealing. Ayeshea reminded me that there are a number of basic requirements for effective reading: a level of basic literacy, information retrieval and developmental skills ("cut at two year olds, cos you have to be sensible about ages"). What a terrifically blunt reminder of the low expectations teachers and adults have of reading potential! ... The act of reading cannot be controlled by publishers’ reading-age targeting, or price, given access to the library and a free choice of genre. In conversation, Ayeshea and I also emphasized, by the repetitive use we made of the word control the significance the book places on power relations, in terms of its subject. The term subject could be applied to both reader and plot.

It's a fine reminder not to underestimate readers.

For another view of the book, Francine Prose's introduction (PDF) to the NYRB edition is a good overview of some of its strange wonders and terrors. And I'm entirely in agreement with Mr. Waggish: "The sheer oddness of this book really defies summary."

In place of summary or analysis, I'll leave you with a direct quote from the middle of A High Wind in Jamaica:

In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.

It is true they look human -- but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.

Subconsciously, too, everyone recognizes they are animals -- why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a Praying Mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely.

Possibly a case might be made out that children are not human either: but I should not accept it. Agreed that their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are mad in fact): but one can, by an effort of will and imagination, think like a child at least in a partial degree -- and even if one's success is infinitesimal it invalidates the case: while one can no more think like a baby, in the smallest respect, than one can think like a bee.

How then can one begin to describe the inside of Laura, where the child-mind lived in the midst of the familiar relics of the baby-mind, like a Fascist in Rome?

Hybrid Books and the Marketplace of Literary Respectability

I previously mentioned the "Best of the Millennium (So Far)" list at The Millions, and Andrew Seal posted some ruminations on why the results were what they were. In the comments to his post, there's some interesting discussion, well worth reading, but one paragraph of Seal's original remarks does not seem, so far, to have been discussed, and I think it's among the most interesting of his observations, so I'm posting it here to see if anybody wants to say anything. I haven't thought too much about it, so am not proposing agreement or disagreement, just that I think it's an interesting observation about how the value of fiction is constructed in the U.S. especially (since most of the panelists are U.S.-based):

The writer-heaviness [of the panelists] also, I think, accounts for why so many of the works included are of the hybrid variety—"literary fiction" that cleverly incorporate genre (SFF, thriller) elements—while there are so few (actually none) books which are actually categorized as genre fiction. Writers who practice this boundary-crossing (while keeping a strong "literary fiction" audience) are simply the most empowering models for aspirant writers: an ambitious young writer would be a fool not to like them. These hybrid books suggest the extent of a writer's powers (crossing or playing with genre boundaries is assumed to be a proof of the writer's talent and imagination) while also instructing on how to rein that power in before falling all the way into genre. "You can play with reality," these books say, "and if you do it like me, you can still be shelved in a respectable location in Barnes and Noble."

It's a Plot!

I don't have time or desire to expose all the errors and bad assumptions in Lev Grossman's essay "Good Novels Don't Have to be Hard", but thankfully I don't have to: Andrew Seal has already shown how wrong Grossman is about so much.

Grossman's essay reminds me of a lot of things I've read in science fiction fanzines and blogs over the years where people want to justify their taste and pleasures against armies of straw people marching through an alternate literary history. But I don't really feel any malice toward SF fans and amateur critics who are passionate about what they spend most of their time reading; that they don't have a nuanced understanding of Modernism is really not a big deal.

That a man who has a degree from Harvard in literature and did work toward a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale, has written for Lingua Franca, the Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, Salon and the New York Times, and has been Time's book critic since 2002 -- that a man of those qualifications can write something this clueless, though, is impressive. After all, plenty of fanzine and blog writers produce better-informed and more thoughtful stuff.

A few quick points before I go...

• "Modernism" can be, and often is, used as a term to describe an era rather than a set of techniques primarily associated with an era -- an era and set of techniques fiercely debated just about from the moment they first appeared -- but pretending that "Modernism" is a settled term is likely to lead you toward the same sorts of problems you encounter by assuming that, for instance, "science fiction" is a settled term.
• Books are not popular or unpopular simply because of their accessibility. Consider Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury does, indeed, sell quite well these days. Before teachers realized how much fun it can be in classrooms, it didn't do nearly as well. The bestselling novel in 1929, the year Sound and the Fury was published, was All Quiet on the Western Front (an episodic novel that is not especially suspenseful, at least not in the way we generally talk of popular fiction being suspenseful). In 1931, Faulkner's "pot-boiler" Sanctuary sold well and helped raise the sales of his backlist, but still not in the way his Nobel Prize and academic canonization did. And then a few years ago Oprah helped.
• Which is just to say that confusing what makes a book popular with how a book is written is likely to lead to distorting simplifications and confusions.
  
• Also, confusing the popularity of a book within an academic context with its popularity within a general context is likely to lead to distorting simplifications and confusions.
  
• Also, confusing a book's reputation with its popularity is likely to lead to distoriting simplifications and confusions.
  
• There is no link between the ideas that A.) a group of writers Lev Grossman defines as Modernists wrote books that are hard to read, and Z.) "millions of readers" "need something they're not getting elsewhere". Look at the lists of 1920s and 1930s bestsellers. Most of the names have been forgotten, but of the ones people today might possibly recognize -- Zane Grey, Sinclair Lewis, Edna Ferber, Rafael Sabatini, John Galsworthy, Booth Tarkington, Edith Wharton, Thornton Wilder, J. B. Priestley, Pearl S. Buck, Willa Cather, James Hilton, Isak Dinesen, Franz Werfel, Margaret Mitchell, George Santayana, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, Kenneth Roberts, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, John Steinbeck -- hardly any of them are bestsellers with books that are "difficult" because of the reasons Lev Grossman identifies. (One notable exception is Virginia Woolf's The Years in 1937, though it's a more "accessible" novel than many of her others.)
• Here's an interesting analysis of bestseller lists that is relevant to this discussion.
• Lev Grossman sez: "The revolution is under way. The novel is getting entertaining again." This is a meaningless statement outside of a personal context. Its meaning is closer to, "I've recently enjoyed more of the novels that 1.) I have encountered, 2.) have been published within the last few years, and 3.) I identify as 'literary fiction'."
• Lev Grossman sez: "This is the future of fiction." Do not trust anyone who utters such a sentence. They are likely a charlatan, a mesmerist, or a dolt.
• Lev Grossman sez: "Old hierarchies of taste are collapsing. Genres are hybridizing." This is called The History of the Novel. Those two statements could have been made at any time during the last 300 years at least.
• Lev Grossman sez: "The balance of power is swinging from the writer back to the reader, and compromises with the public taste are being struck all over the place." When did writers have power, exactly? Writers do not have power (well, at least before they establish a proven track record of bestsellers). Publishers, editors, marketing executives, reviewers, teachers, booksellers, and readers have power. And what are these "compromises with public taste" of which you speak? Are people writing on walls with their feces or something?
  
• Lev Grossman sez: "Lyricism is on the wane, and suspense and humor and pacing are shedding their stigmas and taking their place as the core literary technologies of the 21st century." I'll agree that within this article, lyricism is on the wane.
  
• Lev Grossman often sez "the novel". This is even less useful than talking in general about "the internet". It can be done. But it's seldom enlightening.
• Lev Grossman sez: "In fact the true postmodern novel is here, hiding in plain sight. We just haven't noticed it because we're looking in the wrong aisle. We were trained—by the Modernists, who else—to expect a literary revolution to be a revolution of the avant-garde: typographically altered, grammatically shattered, rhetorically obscure." Whoa, man, you are, like, soooo 1960s!
• "Lev Grossman is the book critic at Time magazine and the author of 'The Magicians,' a novel." Lev Grossman seems to have mistaken the indefinite article a after The Magicians for the definite article the.

I don't have anything against Lev Grossman. I'm not his Mortal Enemy. I didn't call him "the Uwe Boll of the book reviewing world". I read The Magicians and thought it was a fun idea not very well executed overall, but entertaining sometimes. If this were just one insipid article I wouldn't really care. But it works from assumptions and misperceptions that keep getting trotted out, and my tolerance for it all is low at this point.

Tin House Genre Fiction

A reader writes to Tin House:

I have read several issues of Tin House, including the most recent. Two vegetarians go on a hunting trip . . . enough said. I feel that I have several pieces that would fit the magazine, however, I am struggling with just one thing. This question is geared not only toward the magazine but the writing workshop as well. Do you accept genre fiction? I was also wondering how I might go about determining whether or not my piece fits into a specific genre and what general fiction is. Thank you in advance.
—Confused in LA

And Tin House responds.

Now, I happen to like Tin House very much. We've reprinted stories from the magazine in each volume of Best American Fantasy. Their "Fantastic Women" issue was awesome. Their current anniversary issue is also awesome. Just about all of their issues are awesome.

But the response to Concerned in LA is not awesome. It's disappointing.

I spend too much time, perhaps, defending writers, editors, and publishers of "literary fiction" from being maligned by writers, editors, and publishers who would never utter the term "literary fiction" without a sneer. I do this because some of my best friends happily embrace the term "literary fiction" for themselves. I don't even mind being seen in public with such people, any more than I mind being seen in public with my friends who insist the only thing they write is "science fiction". I'm all about the kumbaya.

So please, literary fiction people, STOP MAKING MY LIFE SO DIFFICULT!

Let me try to address some of the things I dislike in the three paragraphs that most annoyed me in the response, one by one:

I think you know genre fiction when you read it. My personal definition goes something like this: fiction that almost purposefully avoids the literary, in hopes of keeping the reader (or the writer, for that matter) from having to “work” too hard. It also tends to employ some stock tricks, like ending very short chapters with cliffhangers, often hopping predictably from one POV to another. Characters tend to be one-dimensional, with the kind of awkward and false-sounding dialog you’d expect.

Maybe I'll mail Tin House a copy of Peter Swirsky's useful book From Lowbrow to Nobrow, which counters some of the assumptions about certain forms that appear in "genre fiction" and are supposedly absent from "literary fiction". But I actually don't have a big problem with this paragraph on its own; it's a statement of personal taste, and there are certainly general differences that it is, generally, somewhat accurate in general about, sort of. How this paragraph moves on to the next bothers me more:

Genre writers know their audience, and it’s a large one: John Grisham sold 60,742,288 books during the 1990s. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at, and I won’t do that here. But that audience, for reasons that sometimes seem obvious and sometimes are madly mysterious, is almost universally not interested in the same things we are.

We move from: Genre fiction is lazy, formulaic, predictable, one-dimensional, awkward, and false ... to: it's more popular than the Pope ... to: why is it so popular? huh. ... to: that's not what we're interested in.

What are they interested in? So glad you asked:

We’re interested in good stories. Contrary to what many people think, it’s not work to read them. A good story is a thing to savor, something you want to make copies of and pass around, something you might find yourself inexplicably wanting to read out loud. (Or not so inexplicably—good writers all have musicians living somewhere inside them, whether they know it or not, and have perfect pitch when it comes to the sounds of the words they use). If you read a lot of good stories, then you know what they are. If you don’t, then you should start, beginning with the summer reading titles on this blog. Sometimes it takes me days to parse out what made a good story so damned good, sometimes I never can.

Ah haaaaa! Genre fiction is not good stories! So all these writers who just want to write crap for the masses are not interested in good stories! And the fans who love cliffhangers and want good plots and hate stories about two vegetarians on a hunting trip -- they don't want good stories, either! These gazillions of people making those genre fiction lame-os rich don't savor what they read, don't pass it around, don't want to read it aloud. And why? Because they haven't read good stories and don't know what they are. (Oh, and though genre fiction makes sure you "don't 'work' too hard", "it's not work to read [litfic]". Apparently the economy has hit Tin House hard, too, because ain't nobody working around there...)

The problem here is one I've blathered on at length about many times before -- the problem of confusing descriptive and evaluative labels. (Come to think of it, in the package including From Lowbrow to Nobrow, maybe I'll include a copy of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw...) There is simply no such thing as a universal "good story", and so using a term like "good stories" as a euphemism for "stuff I like" is not useful. Replace the term "good story" in the Tin House post and much of it becomes less objectionable. Banal, but less objectionable. There are still contradictions and ignorances, but none of us could survive without contradictions and ignorances, so I'm not as upset about those.

I could go on. I don't have time or energy. (Ugh, that James Wood quote later in the post! Who is this universal "the reader" and why should that person's narrow idea of what is worth falling in love with matter for anybody else? If I think a work of fiction has taught me how to read it, am I wrong if you think otherwise? Vice versa?)

Please -- friends, Romans, countrywomen -- send your best writing to Tin House, regardless of whatever label happens to seem appropriate to it right now. It's a great magazine. The new issue even includes a poem by Stephen King. They publish all sorts of different stuff, and that eclecticism is part of what keeps me coming back to read it again and again. They publish what I think are often really good stories (and poems and essays and interviews and miscellanea...). But don't listen to what they say on their blog about "good stories". That's just crazytalk.

Update 8/13/09: Tonaya Thompson, the assistant editor at Tin House who wrote the post I criticized, responded thoughtfully in the comments section to this post, as did her friend and co-worker Tony. I wrote a comment that was way too longer for Blogger's commenting system to handle, so I'm posting it here:

Thanks to Tony and Tonaya for responding and clarifying -- I expect if we were sitting around chatting, we'd probably agree way more than we disagree, once we were able to figure out terminology, or at least show how we're using terminology, what assumptions we're bringing to it, etc. I expect, too, that we'd find our tastes in fiction even overlap a lot (I do, after all, love a lot of the fiction in Tin House).

I think it's important, though, for editors and spokespeople especially to be careful in how they talk about their perceptions of fiction -- and I mean this for editors of magazines, journals, and anthologies devoted to all sorts of fiction. We're at an exciting time, I think, in the history of short stories and novels, a time when we've all learned a lot about what this thing called "fiction" can do and be. I'm especially excited by publications such as Tin House (and Conjunctions and McSweeney's and A Public Space and One Story and LCRW and Electric Velocipede and Weird Tales and, when Gordon's feeling particularly edgy, F&SF, not to mention a plethora of wonderful webzines, anthologies, etc.) that do not have as settled a sense of what fiction is and can be as do some more conservative venues. (And honestly, I think we need both -- because there are all sorts of different types of readers and writers, but more importantly because a vital dialogue exists between cleary "core" types of writing [die-hard kitchen-sink realism; hard science fiction] and the crazier kids on the margins. It's the crazy kids at the margins that particularly excite me, but that's just me.)

And that's why I responded so vociferously to your post -- I don't question that it represents what you think you are looking for, or that it's what at least a part of the staff at Tin House thinks the magazine represents ... but as a loyal (premiere-issue owning!) reader, I'm saying I think what the magazine does is actually bigger, greater, and more complex than you've found the words for. And that the words you have found, at least in the original post, could lead to some unfortunate misperceptions and misconceptions.

I like your response here a lot, Tonaya, and so if I dig into it a little bit more, I hope my tone does not come off as that of someone trying to -- well, I don't know, but I fear that I'll sound smug and patronizing when I mean to simply offer a perspective of somebody who has enthusiastically attended both Bread Loaf and science fiction conventions.

Editors frequently say they want "good stories" and don't want "lazy writing" -- I don't know a genre editor who would say the opposite! Actually, the best response to the question I know of is one written by Nick Mamatas when he was editing the online (genre) magazine Clarkesworld. Nick's penultimate paragraph could fit Tin House, too, I suspect. And I love that!

The question of genre -- what it is, if it is, how it is -- is a huge one, and I've written tens of thousands of words about the topic over the years, with very few of those words ever really getting at what I was hoping to get at. (Thus, I keep trying...)

Take your example, a wonderful one -- Player Piano. I've got a first edition of the paperback of the book, and it's been renamed Utopia 14. You can see the cover here. Is it a science fiction novel? You betcha! Genre? That's a thornier question. By my definition, yes, because to my mind a "genre" is a set of publishing practices and reader expectations. Science fiction is, in that sense, a genre -- one that became particularly differentiated in the U.S. in the 1920s, developed its own groups of writers, editors, fans, and publishers, then history, which affected expectations that in turn affected production in a complex way.

Only the tiny minority of science fiction readers who think SF must always include complex astrophysics would not recognize that novel as a science fiction novel. Would non-SF readers recognize it as a literary novel? When it came out in hardcover, some did, sure (see the original NYT review), because it was a dystopian novel and so fit into a tradition broader than that of SF, though one which SF is generally happy to overlap with and exploit. But Bantam clearly thought the key to sales for Vonnegut was to market him as an SF writer. It didn't work all that well, for various reasons -- he was about ten years ahead of his time in the SF world (though C.M. Kornbluth, William Tenn, and Robert Sheckley were doing somewhat similar things to what he was up to) and when he did become popular, it was through a widening of his audience among the younger readers who liked the Beats, etc., but many of whom were also happy enough to read Stranger in a Strange Land and Dune. Also, Vonnegut wrote in a marvelously -- deceptively! -- simple and accessible style, which is helpful in reaching a mass audience.

You're absolutely right that what any sensitive reader would probably be tempted to identify as lazy writing gets published within certain marketing categories -- some of those categories rely on tried-and-true formulas that their audiences enjoy, and it would be self-defeating to stretch those formulas too much because then it would be something other than what it's expected to be. If Harlequin were to sell Jane Austen novels using the same packaging and marketing they use for their regular books ... well, they'd have some pretty perplexed and annoyed customers (as well as some who discovered a new favorite writer). If genre fiction is fiction that is necessarily formulaic in a particularly narrow way because the audience will not recognize it otherwise, then of course it would be foolish and silly of any of you at Tin House to say it's something you're open to reading.

But I'm betting that's not what Confused was asking. I would guess that Confused wanted to know what you emphasized in evaluating a story -- if you, for instance, like stories that are more plot than character. Or stories that are more about stuff than people. Or stories that use such things as aliens and dragons as primarily literal items within the narrative rather than primarily as metaphors.

To which I would also bet your most honest answer would be something along the lines of, "Well, it depends." What does it depend on? Language is one thing, maybe the thing -- by "not lazy writing" what I take you to mean is prose that achieves a certain deliberate effect, that is, in and of itself, a kind of music. Go ahead, put Mars in your story, but tell that story the way, for instance, Theodore Sturgeon did with "The Man Who Lost the Sea" (or, rather, don't tell it like that; find your own voice, but find a voice). After all, why publish a story that sounds just like ten thousand other stories? That's no fun!

And don't be afraid to make the reader work -- great art is demanding, and I think Tin House is in the business of seeking out great art. Why bother otherwise -- I somehow doubt the work is making you astoundingly wealthy.

"Demanding" isn't a bad thing for writing to be. Not every novel has to be Gaddis. The beauty of Vonnegut's best writing is that there's a whole lot more to it than will be perceived on a superficial reading, and, indeed, the apparent ease of reading him can conceal the complexity of what he offers (I've taught Mother Night at both the high school and college level and every time have learned something new from the book. It is a wonder.)

Perhaps really what we're talking about is readers and their expectations and desires. If I can put words in your mouth for a moment, you want readers who are seeking stories that they do not treat as disposable consumer items. Adventurous sorts of readers, ones who have neither a narrow idea that all stories must be a Raymond Carver spin-off or ones who think all stories have to have a clear plot, rising action, and "transparent" prose (prose is transparent when it is at its most conventional, and prose at its most conventional is not particularly fulfilling for readers who desire music and stories that don't sound like ten thousand other stories).

You raise an important issue (or two or three!) at the end of your response to me -- dozens of manuscripts arriving daily that are obviously inappropriate to the magazine, and the mass popularity of certain things that are not Tin House. I think these issues are significant ones, but tangential to the idea of what makes a story exciting to those of us who are excited by the sorts of stories Tin House publishes.

I can assure you that editors around the world face the same problem of receiving lots of manuscripts apparently sent to them at random. Heck, even with Best American Fantasy, a series of explicitly reprint anthologies, I inevitably receive a pile of unpublished manuscripts every year. We human beings have an extraordinary capacity for obliviousness.

If Tin House sold 60 million copies, it would no longer be the Tin House we love; it would be toilet paper. The kind of person who possesses both the interest and the skills to appreciate complex literary expression is probably roughly the size of the part of the population that possesses the interest and skills to appreciate advanced theoretical mathematics. There are lots of reasons certain books are bestsellers, and those reasons have little to do with genre -- bestsellers are their own category. Some of them are even pretty good by the standards of somebody who actually does appreciate complex literary expression (I'm in a minority that fervently believes Neil Gaiman's American Gods has been underestimated by many readers who mistake the genius of its structure for raggedness; I also think Thomas Harris's Red Dragon is among the great American novels of the 20th century, better than any of Hemingway's novels -- yeah, I'm a weirdo, and should probably burn my Literary Elitist membership card right now...)

Anyway, I'm rambling now. Thanks for the work you do, Tonaya. I hope my criticisms are of the sort that spur you on rather than bum you out.

And meanwhile, everybody should subscribe to Tin House because, as I said before, it's awesome.

Readercon Summary

A grand time was had by all at Readercon this year, and it was a great thrill for me to get to see one of my oldest friends in the writing world, James Patrick Kelly, as guest of honor -- honored so well and appropriately.

The two panels I was on seemed to go well, though I arrived at the con only half an hour before I was on the "Triumphing Over Competence" panel and hadn't quite adjusted yet, so my contributions were few. Adam Golaski did a fine job of moderating, but it was a tough topic to focus in on in a way that would lead to real insights. Saturday's "The Career of James Patrick Kelly" panel felt much more successful to me, and one of its strengths was the diversity in the backgrounds of the panelists -- we had all discovered Jim's writings (and Jim himself) at different times and in different ways. Of course, afterward I thought of many things I should have said instead of what I did, in fact say, but I probably talked too much anyway, so it's good I didn't think of them. Mostly, they would have been elaborations on my (nascent) ideas about Jim as a regional writer, particularly with relationship to Burn, a story that nicely meshes two of the primary types of stories Jim writes: tales rooted in a sense of place (with that place often redolent of northern New England) and tales that are set way out in the universe. In some ways, the earlier novel Look Into the Sun brought the universe to New Hampshire, while Burn brings New Hampshire out into the universe.

I didn't attend too many panels, because after seeing a few, I began to get immensely frustrated with people who didn't know when to shut up. Panels are almost always unbalanced, since it's difficult for everybody to speak for equal amounts of time, but it wasn't unbalance that bothered me -- it was hijacking. In one case, it involved an insufferable moderator who thought the entire point of being moderator was to pose questions to himself.

The conversation between Jonathan Lethem and Gordon van Gelder, though, was well worth attending. The goal of the discussion was to explore the similarities and differences between the worlds of (for lack of better terms) genre fiction and literary fiction by using the two men's careers and experiences as lenses, since, as van Gelder pointed out, they began at similar spots and ended up at very different places, with Gordon starting out as a book editor and then becoming editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Lethem beginning with stories in Aboriginal SF and Asimov's and F&SF, then becoming, well, Jonathan Lethem. I didn't have a notebook with me, so didn't take notes (Scott Edelman did take a few), but what stuck with me were such moments as Gordon wondering if there are ways to talk about the differences between types of writing without feeling the need to valorize one type over the other and Lethem saying that what has changed in his writing as it has developed is not his interest in questioning and subverting core genre values, which has been there from the beginning, but rather his ability to let his fiction absorb a genre exoskeleton rather than wear it. The genre-as-exoskeleton image was one he played with for a bit, saying that his earlier work wore the exoskeleton and let the body underneath it be something else, while now he feels like he doesn't need to wear it anymore, that there is a more organic or internalized sense of the fantastic (or mysterious) in his work. He said people sometimes see him as moving away from genre fiction and Michael Chabon as moving toward it, while he doesn't feel that way at all -- he still feels like the influences on his work are the same, and the genre writers who interest him remain the ones who complexify and question the traditions they inherit -- he could not, he said, write a sword-and-sorcery novel, as Chabon recently did, and he noted that Chabon has long been a much bigger fanboy than he, Lethem, ever was -- Chabon wrote (unpublished) science fiction novels before he wrote Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Lethem noted. What I liked about these distinctions was that they countered the simple narrative of moving toward or away from the SF field, and instead suggested that a writer's relationship to the texts and social environment of SF can be a complex one, and the results in the writer's work (and life) can be unpredictable.

One of the ideas that could have used a bit more time for exploration and explanation was the idea of the difference between the worlds of genre fiction and literary fiction being substantially one of class, with class anxiety explaining some of the tendency toward belittling different types of writing that Gordon brought up. Lethem also pointed out that people deeply committed to one type or writing rather than another often have tremendous misconceptions about the world of the other type of writing, and this idea, too, deserves a lot more exploration. I sometimes wish we could have the writing equivalent of a take-your-child-to-work day -- we could initiate Take a Litfic Writer to a Science Fiction Convention Day and Take a Science Fiction Writer to Bread Loaf Day (heck, Asimov went to Bread Loaf a couple times).

I refrained from buying too many books in the bookroom, though I did pick up JPK's new collection, The Wreck of the Godspeed and David Schwartz's novella The Sun Inside.

Ultimately, and as always, the best thing about the con was getting to see folks I seldom see, or, in some cases, have only met via email before -- it was great finally to get to meet Christopher Rowe (whose reading from a novel-in-progress is among the best readings I've ever been to), John Kessel, and Brian Slattery, and to at least wave to all sorts of people who I wish lived within easy walking distance of my house. But if they did, I would not need to go to Readercon, and the joy of renewed acquaintances would be lost.

Texts and Contexts

Susanna Mandel offered a thoughtful column at Strange Horizons this week, "On SF and the Mainstream, or, Rapidly Changing Scenery", writing from the perspective of someone who hasn't had the chance to keep up with a lot of what's been going on in the science fiction/fantasy community over the last five or so years. I sympathized a lot, having started this blog, in fact, as someone in just about exactly that position. (I'm really interested, too, to see what she's going to discuss in her future columns, which she says will be about pre-1800 writings.)

Richard Larson was inspired by the column to ask for some discussion that moves beyond content to probe the differences between SF and other sorts of things:

I would love for someone to be engaging the SF/mainstream literature discussion with the goal of making formal distinctions, of ignoring content completely and trying to figure out how the experience of reading mainstream literature differs from that of reading genre fiction, and what formal factors are contributing to that experience.

Earlier, Paul Di Filippo posted the results of a panel at Readercon about a "slipstream canon", and Paul Kincaid responded, raising the point that there's hardly any such thing as a "pure genre" (no matter how you define "genre") and that the "canon" is a fine list of wonderful things to read, but these aren't texts that really have a whole lot in common.

Sarah Monette responded to both the list and to Kincaid's response by wondering if "genre" isn't the wrong word, and misleading. She proposes "modality" instead:

Contrarealism--or unrealism--(science fiction, fantasy, supernatural horror, magic realism . . . slipstream) is a modality. Because these things inflect a story on a level a priori to the narrative itself. If a genre is a kind of story, a modality is a kind of approach to a story. You can tell the same story in any modality. E.g., Cinderella. You can tell it as Coal Miner's Daughter (realism). You can tell it as a pararealistic Horatio Alger story. (Which I suppose some may argue is what Coal Miner's Daughter is. Not actually having seen the movie, I can't testify personally. The new Will Smith thing about the homeless man who becomes a stockbroker is also Cinderella. Realistic or para-?) Or you can tell it as a fantasy (Disney!). (I'm sure also that you can tell it as a science fiction story ... ooh, wait. Psion.) The narrative elements will not change. (Whereas, if you tell Cinderella as a horror story, the narrative elements do change. Hence we conclude that horror is a genre. QED.)

It's worth also bringing into this some of the reviews of Interfictions, the response to which I've enjoyed watching. Three recent ones that come to mind are the -- very different! -- reviews by Mikita Brottman, Daniel Green, and David Soyka. The anthology makes an attempt to chart, or at least provide a space for, fiction that doesn't fit into a clear category, and yet that in and of itself is clearly something difficult to assess, at least among the stories in the book. (For my own story there, I wasn't exactly thinking of categories, but rather of mixing up different kinds of texts, different sorts of allusions, different levels of seriousness and unseriousness, and see if I could hold it all together.)

Meanwhile, the old New Weird discussions have been made public once again.

Okay, so there's a bunch of stuff. And it all brings me back to what Richard Larson asked -- how does the experience of reading something called X differ from the experience of something called Y (or not-X)? That's a question I find far more interesting than how to define X, Y, and not-X.

It all brings me back, as so much does, to Samuel Delany, who has done a little bit of what Larson seems to be looking for (mostly in Starboard Wine, which is very difficult to get hold of, but it will be generally available again either in the fall of 2008 or spring of 2009. More on that later).

Delany has called SF a "field phenomenon" that can only be described, not defined. He has argued that "There's no reason to run SF too much back before 1926" because

More, Kepler, Cyrano, and even Bellamy would be absolutely at sea with the codic conventions by which we make sense of the sentences in a contemporary SF text. Indeed, they would be at sea with most modern and post modern writing. It's just pedagogic snobbery (or insecurity), constructing these preposterous and historically insensitive genealogies, with Mary Shelley for our grandmother or Lucian of Samosata as our great great grandfather.

(Adam Roberts has an interesting take on this in his history of science fiction, but I'm no longer near the library I borrowed the book from, and my memory of it is too unspecific to be able to paraphrase accurately.)

In one of his most important essays, "Dichtung und Science Fiction" (in Starboard Wine), Delany says, "For an originary assertion to mean something for a contemporary text, one must establish a chain of reading and preferably a chain of discussion as well." In another essay, "Science Fiction and Literature", he states, "To say that a phenomenon does have a significant history is to say that its history is different from the history of something else: that's what makes it significant."

I've said before that where a text is published can affect how it is read, including how it is categorized and understood by the reader. We see that in some of the reviews for Interfictions, where many of the stories are judged based on the purpose of the anthology, which of course is justifiable, but I also wonder how at least some of them would fare in an entirely different context. In fact, much of what is new about what's happening in the SF community right now -- the changes Susannah Mandel and others notice -- may be more the creation of new contexts than the creation of new types of fiction (about which I've got some of the same questions as Dan Green poses in his review and Paul Kincaid raises in his response to the "slipstream canon").

I'm wary of a form/content distinction, because it seems to me more an occasionally-useful illusion than an idea that really fosters good analysis, but how texts create reading experiences, and how those experiences change in different eras and circumstances does, indeed, interest me. That's an idea worth applying to those New Weird discussions -- what were the circumstances that made such discussions so energetic, combative, and sometimes insane? What was the effect of those discussions on writers' practices (if any), and why does it matter? Was the New Weird a momentary blip, more passion than substance, or was it a historically important argument/label/concern/whatever? What was it trying to be different from, and why?

If we want to map the topography of literary history, including all the little hills and dales, then texts alone will not explain vastly different reading experiences, because the contexts in which the texts are produced, distributed, received, and discussed contribute to that history. Such a conversation would, I think, allow more insight than yet another argument about how to define and delineate different types of fiction based on the texts alone, or on some mythical essential qualities those texts are supposed to possess.