perfidy

The folks at Crooked Timber have posted a long, rambling, and frighteningly erudite discussion of sci-fi/fantasy author China Mieville's works, especially his new novel, Iron Council.

I hadn't heard of him before last week, when Nathaniel of The Rhine River handed me a copy of his third novel, The Scar. Despite its 650-page length, many non-reading chores that required doing, and the great rewards that obtain from reading Mieville slowly, I finished the book between Thursday and Sunday. I have to say: it's been a long time since I've read a book that imagines with such furious creativity.

Does it irritate anyone else that science fiction and fantasy writers bear the stigma of being 'merely genre'? The same would go for crime writing as well, I suppose. The minute a writer deigns to set their story in a place not derived from a) New York City, b) Paris, c) a feverishly imagined Kansas where all the families engage in incest and every barn hides a bloody thresher, or d) a law firm, they get dubbed "fantasy," or if it's the future, "science fiction."

This is especially galling since the keepers of modern literatoor seem to be laboring under just as many conventions as the most hidebound space opera. (Gay protagonist! Unhappy families!) Why can't good writing be accepted as good writing, and good storytelling as good storytelling? Or am I being hopelessly naive?

Anyway, forget all that crap. Check out China Mieville.