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The Tragedy of Genre By: Brian Webber on 11/17/2002; 12:30 AM This article was plagarized from im-ur.com
RE: The Tragedy of Genre By: Brian Carnell on 4/23/2001; 7:17 AM I pretty much disagreed with every statement in this piece. 1. There are almost 70,000 books published in the United States every year. Far from there being only a few repetitive novels, there is instead a veritable explosion of fiction of all kinds. 2. From your characterization of it, it doesn't sound like you've read a lot of the genre fiction you're criticizing. Your characterization, for example, of crime novels: "Equally, crime novels are novels about the solving of a crime, usually murder, with red herrings and a host of equally likely suspects typifying texts" is way off base. In fact some of the best fiction writing going on today, IMO, is occuring in the crime/detective genre in novels that Agatha Christie would not have recognized. Same thing with science fiction. Far from being written toward predictability, science fiction novels are all over the map with different takes on the future (which, of course, are really ultimately about the present). Fantasy based only on Tolkein? Certainly not the fantasy I've been reading (OTOH if your definition of fantasy is books with elves and evil wizards...) It's also unclear whether or not you are including horror within the fantasy genre -- there was some amazing horror fiction published within the last 20 years. Your take on romance novels is even more off the mark since there are dozens and dozens of very historically accurate novels that are published within the romance genre every year (in fact you'd be surprised how many PhDs moonlight and write novels within the genres you mention -- it was published as fantasy, but Mary Gentle's Book of Ash has some of the most accurate depictions of medieval warfare that I've ever read). And, of course, general nongenre fiction is booming as well. There are hundreds of extremely talented folks writing thought provoking, very original novels out there (and don't forget the very large number of foreign fiction that are released in English translation every year -- if you wanted to you could probably forego genre fiction entirely and simply read a new novel by an African author every week). 3. The major problem with fiction today -- and I want to enlarge this here to go beyond books -- is not that there is a dearth of good material to choose from, but just the opposite: there's a glut of incredibly good fiction. I could go through the annual forthcoming books issues of magazines and easily pick out 300-400 novels I'd like to read, but realistically only have time for 30 or 40. I think future historians will likely describe the 20th century as part of a flowering of arts and culture that was simply unprecedented in human history and will ultimately rivals the Renaissance in its long term impact on human societies.
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