grumble at wolfe comment made attached to guardian article

Lane Haygood · 07 Feb 2011, 02:44 · from 2011-February.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: lhaygood at gmail.com (Lane Haygood)
Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2011 20:44:16 -0600
Subject: (urth) grumble at wolfe comment made attached to guardian
	article
In-Reply-To: <204039.62838.qm at web161803.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
References: <5E7C716A-934A-4F7A-93B3-1CA215AEE4DA at gmail.com>
	<204039.62838.qm at web161803.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTi=qRQy7fT4janRPtc4jEZaqWEBtczxEkpm4g49U at mail.gmail.com>

SF to me has no significant differences from "literary" fiction.  Sure,
there are stylistic conventions and structural differences, but those are
there in the difference between a frame story and first-person narrative,
for example.  Each "genre," so to speak, may contain different story
structures, literary techniques, etc.  And plenty of genre fiction is
uninteresting schlock... but so is your average perusal of the literary
fiction section.  Good writers are good writers are good writers, no matter
what they write.

And I'm reminded of the Wolfe quote that what we call "sf" is what was once
called "literature."  For instance, if Homer were to write "The Odyssey"
today, it would be called epic quest fantasy.  The same for the Kalevala or
the Eddas, which were Tolkien's primary influences.

And yeah, it is unjust that sf, for entirely political reasons, gets short
shrift from prize committees and critics and other image conscious types.
 On the other hand, their approval of what I read was never requested, nor
is it important to me, although I will continue to tell anyone who will
listen that there are truly wonderful writers working in sf (Wolfe, Le Guin,
Bakker, Lynch, etc.).

LH

On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 7:04 PM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>
> --- On Sun, 2/6/11, Lane Haygood <lhaygood at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > From: Lane Haygood <lhaygood at gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: (urth) grumble at wolfe comment made attached to guardian
> article
> > To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> > Date: Sunday, February 6, 2011, 4:38 PM
> > Literary fiction is entitled to its
> > pretensions. That is, after all, what distinguishes one made
> > up story from another sufficient to call it "literary."
> >
> >
>
> I guess.  But then you know there are these grants and stuff, like Vollman
> getting 50,000 tax free for five years, for, as you said, creating a made up
> story.  Just reeks of ... injustice?  I don't know.  But those pretentions
> are so ... repetitive and boring?  The best SF is sometimes pretentious in
> novel and interesting ways.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20110206/e70cfa9b/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net