Say hello to the bad guy.
Today has been wonderful.
A coffee date with a friend helped me streamline my synopsis for Masada even further and I think I've got something saleable here.
Add to that, we got a letter from my brother who has a few weeks left in San Antonio for Basic Training in the Air Force, and he's already changed so much. Just looking at his sentence structure and the tone of the letter made my heart do one of those hopeful butterfly-flips it hadn't done since I first met Ms. Jones.
And I've got the Oct/Nov. issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction next to me ready to be devoured.
It has got me thinking about a recent topic of discussion that has popped up on the blogosphere of late, and it's something I've been thinking a lot about as I am in the midst of transitioning between the genres of speculative fiction and mystery/thrillers.
I recently popped over to Asimov's to read matociquala's Hugo Award-winning short story "Tideline" and ccfinlay, who put me hip to F&SF's blogging promotion, recenlty posted about a survey the magazine is doing about readership and short SF fiction. And while I've been poking about this latest issue of F&SF, I've been hesitant to delve in, and I think I've finally found the reason behind my reticence.
I'll preface this by saying that I've long since stopped reading as a reader. Ever since I started writing and especially in the past few years, everything I've read I've read as a writer. Even the television I watch, the music I listen to, the paintings I look at. All of it is story. Scenes of a story, emotional beats, plotlines. So when I read a book or a short story, I look for the narrative sleights of hand, the literary pyrotechnics, the techniques. I can still lose myself in a story, be entranced by characters, root for them and despise them and all that, but I see (or attempt to see) the author working behind it all.
That said, I've been of late mulling over the similarities and differences between mystery fiction* and speculative fiction as genres. In one, there lies this sort of obligation to intimacy. Mysteries are rarely epics. They are tied into very tiny personal universes and put the looking glass to the foibles and successes of human life in all its ordinariness. People being people. Whereas speculative fiction, while at times, maintaining that microscope focus on human life, carries with it this certain duty to what matociquala calls sensawunda. The bigness of the universe. The expansiveness of new ideas. The birth of a star. Big wheels spinning in the sky, stories spanning multiple worlds, galaxies, centuries. At the same time, though, speculative fiction is, at its root, an examination of people being people. Flowers for Algernon is a poignant example of this. There's an Elizabeth Moon book with an autistic character that serves as another good example.
That said, I think one of the main differences between the two umbrella genres is their accessibility.
This a feeling I realized for the first time while reading matociquala's Blood and Iron. The same with Ian McDonald's River of Gods and to a lesser extent crowleycrow's short fiction. Insider knowledge. There's this sense of a mountain of literature behind the story I'm reading. A dialogue, a back-and-forth that spans the entire genre, and all of that is the 95% of the glacier beneath the surface. It's this sense that I need to have read all the Jack Vance Dying Earth stories to get the true significance of Gene Wolfe's critically acclaimed Book of the New Sun tetralogy. Or that I need to have read my fair share of animal-companion stories to understand how exactly Bear and Monette subvert that particular subgenre in A Companion to Wolves.
I didn't feel that when I read Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know or Martin Cruz Smith's Wolves Eat Dogs, and I haven't felt it while reading George Pelecanos' The Night Gardener.
That's not to begrudge speculative fiction is penchant for inter-author dialogue. And it's also not to say that the mystery genre doesn't have its fair share of cross-pollination or question-answer. It's possible to argue that John Le Carre's novels, specifically his stark, unsmiling George Smiley trilogy are a direct blast at Ian Fleming's flashy James Bond novels.
That in mind, I wonder why mysteries seem so much more accessible than speculative fiction to me. Why do I not feel as though I need to have read every police procedural under the sun in order to 'get' a Pelecanos novel?
As a sidenote, back-and-forth happens across genres and is rampant in 'literary fiction'. For instance, there was a time when all the stories concerning Africa and Asia were written by the colonizers. Now they're being written by the colonized.
matociquala has remarked that sff has seemed like a bit of a club scene. Part of it may have to do with the genre's past (and present) reputation for social relevance.** Part of it may due to the vastness of the territory mined and how the buildings each novel or short story represents already have their foundations laid by a previous author. Part of it may be due to the dearth of a short fiction market for mystery fiction whereas there are a plethora of print and e-zines publishing speculative fiction these days (for free and for dollars).*** Part of it is likely something else that has yet to be named.
And part of me wonders if the only reason propelling me to read this issue of F&SF is that it was free. Or if perhaps it's an impulse to fight my intimidation and take off in that spinning wheel in the sky, not caring whose design it was based on to begin with.
* By mysteries, here I mean everything from cozy, read-by-the-fireplace detective stories to police procedurals right up to the edge of 24-style thrillers.
** see Neuromancer by William Gibson and Harm by Brian Aldiss
*** most mystery short stories are published in anthology format, and there are only about three or four major mystery magazines in North America. It may be a different situation across the Pond, I'm not sure.
A coffee date with a friend helped me streamline my synopsis for Masada even further and I think I've got something saleable here.
Add to that, we got a letter from my brother who has a few weeks left in San Antonio for Basic Training in the Air Force, and he's already changed so much. Just looking at his sentence structure and the tone of the letter made my heart do one of those hopeful butterfly-flips it hadn't done since I first met Ms. Jones.
And I've got the Oct/Nov. issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction next to me ready to be devoured.
It has got me thinking about a recent topic of discussion that has popped up on the blogosphere of late, and it's something I've been thinking a lot about as I am in the midst of transitioning between the genres of speculative fiction and mystery/thrillers.
I recently popped over to Asimov's to read matociquala's Hugo Award-winning short story "Tideline" and ccfinlay, who put me hip to F&SF's blogging promotion, recenlty posted about a survey the magazine is doing about readership and short SF fiction. And while I've been poking about this latest issue of F&SF, I've been hesitant to delve in, and I think I've finally found the reason behind my reticence.
I'll preface this by saying that I've long since stopped reading as a reader. Ever since I started writing and especially in the past few years, everything I've read I've read as a writer. Even the television I watch, the music I listen to, the paintings I look at. All of it is story. Scenes of a story, emotional beats, plotlines. So when I read a book or a short story, I look for the narrative sleights of hand, the literary pyrotechnics, the techniques. I can still lose myself in a story, be entranced by characters, root for them and despise them and all that, but I see (or attempt to see) the author working behind it all.
That said, I've been of late mulling over the similarities and differences between mystery fiction* and speculative fiction as genres. In one, there lies this sort of obligation to intimacy. Mysteries are rarely epics. They are tied into very tiny personal universes and put the looking glass to the foibles and successes of human life in all its ordinariness. People being people. Whereas speculative fiction, while at times, maintaining that microscope focus on human life, carries with it this certain duty to what matociquala calls sensawunda. The bigness of the universe. The expansiveness of new ideas. The birth of a star. Big wheels spinning in the sky, stories spanning multiple worlds, galaxies, centuries. At the same time, though, speculative fiction is, at its root, an examination of people being people. Flowers for Algernon is a poignant example of this. There's an Elizabeth Moon book with an autistic character that serves as another good example.
That said, I think one of the main differences between the two umbrella genres is their accessibility.
This a feeling I realized for the first time while reading matociquala's Blood and Iron. The same with Ian McDonald's River of Gods and to a lesser extent crowleycrow's short fiction. Insider knowledge. There's this sense of a mountain of literature behind the story I'm reading. A dialogue, a back-and-forth that spans the entire genre, and all of that is the 95% of the glacier beneath the surface. It's this sense that I need to have read all the Jack Vance Dying Earth stories to get the true significance of Gene Wolfe's critically acclaimed Book of the New Sun tetralogy. Or that I need to have read my fair share of animal-companion stories to understand how exactly Bear and Monette subvert that particular subgenre in A Companion to Wolves.
I didn't feel that when I read Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know or Martin Cruz Smith's Wolves Eat Dogs, and I haven't felt it while reading George Pelecanos' The Night Gardener.
That's not to begrudge speculative fiction is penchant for inter-author dialogue. And it's also not to say that the mystery genre doesn't have its fair share of cross-pollination or question-answer. It's possible to argue that John Le Carre's novels, specifically his stark, unsmiling George Smiley trilogy are a direct blast at Ian Fleming's flashy James Bond novels.
That in mind, I wonder why mysteries seem so much more accessible than speculative fiction to me. Why do I not feel as though I need to have read every police procedural under the sun in order to 'get' a Pelecanos novel?
As a sidenote, back-and-forth happens across genres and is rampant in 'literary fiction'. For instance, there was a time when all the stories concerning Africa and Asia were written by the colonizers. Now they're being written by the colonized.
matociquala has remarked that sff has seemed like a bit of a club scene. Part of it may have to do with the genre's past (and present) reputation for social relevance.** Part of it may due to the vastness of the territory mined and how the buildings each novel or short story represents already have their foundations laid by a previous author. Part of it may be due to the dearth of a short fiction market for mystery fiction whereas there are a plethora of print and e-zines publishing speculative fiction these days (for free and for dollars).*** Part of it is likely something else that has yet to be named.
And part of me wonders if the only reason propelling me to read this issue of F&SF is that it was free. Or if perhaps it's an impulse to fight my intimidation and take off in that spinning wheel in the sky, not caring whose design it was based on to begin with.
* By mysteries, here I mean everything from cozy, read-by-the-fireplace detective stories to police procedurals right up to the edge of 24-style thrillers.
** see Neuromancer by William Gibson and Harm by Brian Aldiss
*** most mystery short stories are published in anthology format, and there are only about three or four major mystery magazines in North America. It may be a different situation across the Pond, I'm not sure.