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Nov. 14th, 2011 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferrethttp://io9.com/5856158/why-science-fiction-writers-are-like-porn-stars
Ok, so I speak as someone who preordered but has not yet read Colson Whitehead's Zone 1. I speak as someone who has loved three of Whitehead's other novels, loves zombie stories, and was eagerly anticipating the fusion. I speak as someone who's been a genre fan all his life and a litfic fan just as long. And lastly, I speak as someone who thought the NY Times reviewer sounded kind of dumb.
But Charlie Anders's rebuttal rant is even dumber, so I wanted to tackle the questions he wants to ask the Times reviewer.
Q: Have you ever dated a porn star? How did it go?
No, I haven't, and I doubt that Duncan has either. That's not the point of the metaphor, however. The point isn't to position the reader as the person experientially dating the porn star, but as the person observing the intellectual dating the porn star and wondering how their relationship works. And I, and I would assume Mr. Duncan, have done that. We've all seen relationships that seem a mismatch of high/low culture and speculated about their nature. That Anders opens with this question show only that he didn't bother thinking about the metaphor.
Q: Are you aware that "porn star" is a job, not a class of person?
Yes. Are you aware that metaphors are literary constructs that involve partially applicable comparisons? Also, are you aware that regardless of the class of person, porn star is a job that generally involves the production of shabby, unartistic films of people having sex in the most tawdry situations? Of course you're aware, or you wouldn't have been offended by the quote. So get off your pseudo-feminist high horse already. You're not pissed because Duncan denigrated porn stars, you're pissed because you got compared to a porn star.
Q: You say in your review that literary authors are "hard-wired or self-schooled to avoid the clichéd, the formulaic, the rote." Are you aware that most literary fiction is full of cliches? Elsewhere, you've written of your admiration for John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy — are you aware how many cliches those books have spawned?
Dude, Anders, are you seriously unaware of the difference between spawning cliches and containing cliches? No, really, who did you think you'd fool with the argument that John Updike didn't try to avoid the rote?
Q: There's an undercurrent, in your Times review, of frustration with the readers of your werewolf book, The Last Werewolf. Have you actually had exasperating interactions with genre fans who felt that your work included too much reality? What form did these interactions take?
I can't speak for Duncan, but I sure have. I've been talking up Colson Whitehead's zombie novel for months to friends who love zombie novels and attracted no interest. It's not what they want in a zombie novel, that kind of realism. And that's okay. That's what attracts me to a lot of genre fiction, the fact that I can escape into worlds of fantasy and imagination. And also explosions. But I do nonetheless feel an exasperation that there isn't more crossover between genre fans and litfic fans. Many of the reasons I read books like Infinite Jest are the same as the reasons I read books like Glasshouse.
Q: Have you read Dhalgren? The Female Man? House of Leaves? The Wasp Factory? The Dispossessed? Air? In what way do you feel these books failed to show readers "the strangeness of the familiar and the familiarity of the strange"? (Something that you seem to feel genre readers will be unable to cope with.)
Yes. Yes. No. No. Yes. No. More importantly, in what way do you think these extraordinary novels make up the typical fare of genre readers? What percentage of genre readers do you honestly think have read The Female Man or Dhalgren? Don't you suspect that the people who read those novels are readers of literary fiction, not readers of genre fiction, by and large? Didn't you notice that Dhalgren is a parody of Finnegans Wake and The Dispossessed has more to do with Thomas More's Utopia than it does with anything that you'll see on the new books shelf in the Barnes and Noble science fiction department? And that Danielewski's "House of Leaves" is unquestionably the work of a literary novelist slumming in genre in the exact same way Colson Whitehead's new novel is.
Q: The heart of your discontent with genre fiction seems to be that it doesn't allow writers to tackle all of reality — just the parts of it that are fantastical. That there's a certain psychological complexity, or texture, that gets lost in the fixation on monsters or whiz-bang gadgets. (William Gibson voiced a similar complaint about the state of the genre when he wrote Neuromancer the other day.) But wouldn't you agree that there's more than one way to write about "reality"?
Sure, why wouldn't I agree with that? Is that controversial? What point are you really trying to make? That genre fiction is secretly realistic through some sort of alternate route into realism? Do you really think that passes the smell test? (I have criticized Neuromancer elsewhere for cleaving too tightly to ideas about reality. I think Neuromancer is something of a failure as a genre novel because of Gibson's refusal to really let himself imagine.)
Q: You also quote from Susan Sontag saying "Whatever is happening, something else is always going on." Which actually contradicts the thrust of your review — since you seem to think that in genre fiction, whatever is happening is all that's happening. Don't you think you missed the point of the Sontag quote
Okay, now's about time to ditch the term 'genre fiction' because I think you've been willfully misunderstanding it through the whole questionnaire, but I've tolerated that. When the reviewer was writing about genre fiction, you and I both know he wasn't talking about all speculative fiction. We both know he was talking about the genre of zombie fiction, because that's what Colson Whitehead has stumbled into from his threatening position as a MacArthur fellow. And I want you to honestly tell me, Mr. Anders, that the majority of zombie novels do more than just tell about what's happening. This is a genre that is all about explosions and shotgun blasts. That's why we read it. And Whitehead is trying to do something different with it, he's trying to tell the story of what else is happening when those shotguns are being fired. That's all Duncan means, and you know that.
Look, your questions reveal a pride in your genre, and that's fine. There is plenty to admire about speculative fiction, and there is plenty of speculative fiction that is highbrow, sophisticated, thoughtful, whatever term you want to use. But this is a genre founded on bug-eyed monsters and laser blaster shootouts, and if you try to sidestep that you end up building an argument that isn't really about what genre fiction is. You can be as proud as you like, but you're not actually defending SF against the hordes. Nice try. Do better next time.
Ok, so I speak as someone who preordered but has not yet read Colson Whitehead's Zone 1. I speak as someone who has loved three of Whitehead's other novels, loves zombie stories, and was eagerly anticipating the fusion. I speak as someone who's been a genre fan all his life and a litfic fan just as long. And lastly, I speak as someone who thought the NY Times reviewer sounded kind of dumb.
But Charlie Anders's rebuttal rant is even dumber, so I wanted to tackle the questions he wants to ask the Times reviewer.
Q: Have you ever dated a porn star? How did it go?
No, I haven't, and I doubt that Duncan has either. That's not the point of the metaphor, however. The point isn't to position the reader as the person experientially dating the porn star, but as the person observing the intellectual dating the porn star and wondering how their relationship works. And I, and I would assume Mr. Duncan, have done that. We've all seen relationships that seem a mismatch of high/low culture and speculated about their nature. That Anders opens with this question show only that he didn't bother thinking about the metaphor.
Q: Are you aware that "porn star" is a job, not a class of person?
Yes. Are you aware that metaphors are literary constructs that involve partially applicable comparisons? Also, are you aware that regardless of the class of person, porn star is a job that generally involves the production of shabby, unartistic films of people having sex in the most tawdry situations? Of course you're aware, or you wouldn't have been offended by the quote. So get off your pseudo-feminist high horse already. You're not pissed because Duncan denigrated porn stars, you're pissed because you got compared to a porn star.
Q: You say in your review that literary authors are "hard-wired or self-schooled to avoid the clichéd, the formulaic, the rote." Are you aware that most literary fiction is full of cliches? Elsewhere, you've written of your admiration for John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy — are you aware how many cliches those books have spawned?
Dude, Anders, are you seriously unaware of the difference between spawning cliches and containing cliches? No, really, who did you think you'd fool with the argument that John Updike didn't try to avoid the rote?
Q: There's an undercurrent, in your Times review, of frustration with the readers of your werewolf book, The Last Werewolf. Have you actually had exasperating interactions with genre fans who felt that your work included too much reality? What form did these interactions take?
I can't speak for Duncan, but I sure have. I've been talking up Colson Whitehead's zombie novel for months to friends who love zombie novels and attracted no interest. It's not what they want in a zombie novel, that kind of realism. And that's okay. That's what attracts me to a lot of genre fiction, the fact that I can escape into worlds of fantasy and imagination. And also explosions. But I do nonetheless feel an exasperation that there isn't more crossover between genre fans and litfic fans. Many of the reasons I read books like Infinite Jest are the same as the reasons I read books like Glasshouse.
Q: Have you read Dhalgren? The Female Man? House of Leaves? The Wasp Factory? The Dispossessed? Air? In what way do you feel these books failed to show readers "the strangeness of the familiar and the familiarity of the strange"? (Something that you seem to feel genre readers will be unable to cope with.)
Yes. Yes. No. No. Yes. No. More importantly, in what way do you think these extraordinary novels make up the typical fare of genre readers? What percentage of genre readers do you honestly think have read The Female Man or Dhalgren? Don't you suspect that the people who read those novels are readers of literary fiction, not readers of genre fiction, by and large? Didn't you notice that Dhalgren is a parody of Finnegans Wake and The Dispossessed has more to do with Thomas More's Utopia than it does with anything that you'll see on the new books shelf in the Barnes and Noble science fiction department? And that Danielewski's "House of Leaves" is unquestionably the work of a literary novelist slumming in genre in the exact same way Colson Whitehead's new novel is.
Q: The heart of your discontent with genre fiction seems to be that it doesn't allow writers to tackle all of reality — just the parts of it that are fantastical. That there's a certain psychological complexity, or texture, that gets lost in the fixation on monsters or whiz-bang gadgets. (William Gibson voiced a similar complaint about the state of the genre when he wrote Neuromancer the other day.) But wouldn't you agree that there's more than one way to write about "reality"?
Sure, why wouldn't I agree with that? Is that controversial? What point are you really trying to make? That genre fiction is secretly realistic through some sort of alternate route into realism? Do you really think that passes the smell test? (I have criticized Neuromancer elsewhere for cleaving too tightly to ideas about reality. I think Neuromancer is something of a failure as a genre novel because of Gibson's refusal to really let himself imagine.)
Q: You also quote from Susan Sontag saying "Whatever is happening, something else is always going on." Which actually contradicts the thrust of your review — since you seem to think that in genre fiction, whatever is happening is all that's happening. Don't you think you missed the point of the Sontag quote
Okay, now's about time to ditch the term 'genre fiction' because I think you've been willfully misunderstanding it through the whole questionnaire, but I've tolerated that. When the reviewer was writing about genre fiction, you and I both know he wasn't talking about all speculative fiction. We both know he was talking about the genre of zombie fiction, because that's what Colson Whitehead has stumbled into from his threatening position as a MacArthur fellow. And I want you to honestly tell me, Mr. Anders, that the majority of zombie novels do more than just tell about what's happening. This is a genre that is all about explosions and shotgun blasts. That's why we read it. And Whitehead is trying to do something different with it, he's trying to tell the story of what else is happening when those shotguns are being fired. That's all Duncan means, and you know that.
Look, your questions reveal a pride in your genre, and that's fine. There is plenty to admire about speculative fiction, and there is plenty of speculative fiction that is highbrow, sophisticated, thoughtful, whatever term you want to use. But this is a genre founded on bug-eyed monsters and laser blaster shootouts, and if you try to sidestep that you end up building an argument that isn't really about what genre fiction is. You can be as proud as you like, but you're not actually defending SF against the hordes. Nice try. Do better next time.