I watched the election night coverage here (until I got depressed about 4 am and turned it off), and I was struck by something about that red/blue map.
Ignoring what the map really means, it struck me that from an Irish perspective all the bits of America which are familiar are blue: Boston and New England, NY, DC, California and the West coast, all pure blue. Even Chicago, somewhat less familiar, is there in the zone.
I don't mean personally familiar to me, I've spent time in Dallas and in Idaho myself, I mean all the bits of the USA which are familiar elements of our popular culture here.
But no, I had forgotten one. Disneyworld is red. The America that elected Bush is not the America we think we know over here, it's a Mickey Mouse America.
Despite never having heard the term genre fantasy used in the sense Abigail intends, I was able to read and understand Teresa's
piece On writing genre fantasy which Tim refers to above. The point of it is that when writing genre fantasy novels it is not enough to set a bunch of standard genre fantasy characters in a standard genre fantasy setting.
The clear meaning is that it is possible to write a genre fantasy novel which is something else, and indeed the only worthwhile genre fantasy novels are something else.
This is an odd piece to cite as evidence that "genre fantasy" means the standard characters in the standard setting.
I think I have been talking at cross purposes with Abigail, since I have never heard the term genre fantasy used as she does. I certainly agree that Potter, Miéville and Tolkien himself do not belong in the category she describes, which I label (in my head) "comparable to Tolkien at his best", and the denizens of rasff call Extruded Fantasy Product, or EFP.
I do think the term genre fantasy is a really clumsy one to use when the category being discussed is such a narrow and derivative subset of the fantasy genre.
Abigail, your assertion that Potter "most certainly" can't be genre fantasy because it is not Tolkienesque would make China's head explode because it is a complete surrender of the genre to the tide of derivitave crap.
To paraphrase Amis:
"It's all Tolkien!"
They tell us with great scorn.
Bott's Jelly Beans?
Well then, it isn't "genre"!
Oh, and Miéville is quite venomous on the subject of Tolkien and the effect his popularity has had on the genre. Abigails comment above: The Harry Potter series is not fantasy (and if it was, it most certainly wouldn't be genre fantasy, which tends to be of a Tolkienist persuasion) is the kind of thing which would make China's head explode.
The last heavily-hyped big fantasy novel by an unknown (to me) author I bought was Perdido Street Station, although that was Miéville's second novel, not his first (King Rat).
A desultory google doesn't show much surviving hype, but I seem to remember reading at the time of Miéville getting a huge advance and of big print runs in hardback.
Good book, too.
Patrick is obviously not just a scholar, but a scholar and a gentleman.
I was looking through my early postings about 9/11, and I saw this:
Ken MacLeod wrote in message ...
[Bin Laden]
>He wants to turn America into 'a shadow of itself'.
I think the risk is more that America might turn into a big, angry, green and very muscular version of itself, clad only in mysteriously stretchy jeans.
Sadly, Ogged is right. What's happened is too disgusting for comicbooks, I must go back to Robert Louis Stevenson:
The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn toward the
monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity.
This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centred on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 9 |
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