What on EARTH are Baen playing at?

[DawnFalcon]

You're entitled to your view, of course. I view it as pretentious snobbery, especially the casual dismissal of a genre. At least I dislike most fantasy for a reason - as overly focused on the Hero's Journey.

Starship Troopers is, as far as I am concerned, a work which will in a few hundred years be studied in schools, after the Shakespeare. (Most military services don't...like scifi, institutionally. But, there's a reason Starship Troopers is on military reading lists).

But you dismiss it as an equal to Battlefield Earth.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

You're entitled to your view, of course. I view it as pretentious snobbery, especially the casual dismissal of a genre.

Starship Troopers is, as far as I am concerned, a work which will in a few hundred years be studied in schools, after the Shakespeare. (Most military services don't...like scifi, institutionally. But, there's a reason Starship Troopers is on military reading lists).

But you dismiss it as an equal to Battlefield Earth.

My dismissal is not casual, it has taken all of twenty years for me to come to the conclusion that 'genre' no longer attracts, interests or has any worth to me. And let me say this again, this is a personal opinion (in case that wasn't clear). I can't tell you how to think or what to do, but I can make statements on how I believe genre has become less and less challenging over time (if it ever was) and how it serves nobody, not writer, not audience and certainly not culture, but it does serve those who wish to sell that culture as product. It places restrictions on writing and pens in those ideas that might not be 'saleable' and rewards similarity and the unadventurous (not all, but most of the genre). Look at Baen's main web page. That is not the page of fiction that an adult should be attracted toward, that is a page with big spaceships and explosions. It caters to a predominantly male, juvenile, militaristic and fetishised audience with those images. It's big guns, big fights in space. It's WWE with spaceships (and again before I'm accused of something I never said. I am talking directly about the background image that greets you on http://www.baen.com)

And lets be clear, I never once mentioned Battlefield Earth (a book I have read, for all my sins) or would ever compare it to Starship Troopers.

Oh and your over-familiarity with the Hero's Journey in fantasy is the same patterning that occurs in a lot (if not all) of beginning-middle-end genre fiction. Especially the reinstatement of the status-quo by the end of the story (And I blame Lucas and Vogler in equal parts for their hyping up of the mythic structures in storytelling until we're at a point where everybody thinks that it's a magical panacea for all fiction).

[DawnFalcon]

Except you did directly dismiss it in the same breath, as "sci-fi". So all we've established there is that you're prepared to lie in defence of your literary snobbery. Again, I am utterly unsurprised. I'm convinced they slip you some sort of magic pill when you take Masters Lit, honestly...

And yes, the Hero's Journey is *common* in fiction, but the super majority of high fantasy uses it, and the vast majority of low fantasy too. With Elves.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

And I am still no clearer what you're talking about. Unless it's some allusion to a fanboy backlash over calling Card a homophobic Mormon nutjob (which he is and will ever remain.)

Oh, there's always hope. He could get abducted by hippies, eat a ten-strip of LSD, and convert to Wicca.

I don't consider this particularly *likely*, but I'd put it ahead of some of his own novels' possibilities.

[PKFFW]

Frankly I tend to agree with Moejoe in that most genre fiction(SF, fantasy, crime, etc) is formulaic crap that is not terribly well written or worth reading.

Of course so is most all other fiction, be it genre or "literary".

So if one is to dismiss an entire genre based on the idea that most of it is crap then one must logically dismiss most fiction of any variety/genre for the same reason.

In any field of writing you will have exceptional writers and stories and you will have crap writers and stories. From my reading experience I can't say that I notice much difference between genre and literary fiction with regards to the ratio of crap to quality.

My advice.......read whatever floats your boat and don't waste too much time worrying about what other people read or about what other people think of what you read.

Cheers,
PKFFW

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by PKFFW

Frankly I tend to agree with Moejoe in that most genre fiction(SF, fantasy, crime, etc) is formulaic crap that is not terribly well written or worth reading.

Of course so is most all other fiction, be it genre or "literary".

So if one is to dismiss an entire genre based on the idea that most of it is crap then one must logically dismiss most fiction of any variety/genre for the same reason.

In any field of writing you will have exceptional writers and stories and you will have crap writers and stories. From my reading experience I can't say that I notice much difference between genre and literary fiction with regards to the ratio of crap to quality.

My advice.......read whatever floats your boat and don't waste too much time worrying about what other people read or about what other people think of what you read.

Cheers,
PKFFW

Sturgeon's (a genre writer) Law - 90 percent of everything is crap.

[jgaiser]

Ok, my turn....

We read what we like. We like what we read.

The world is full of interesting people, but there are some I wouldn't want to go out to lunch with.

Enough already...

[Greg Anos]

It boils down to purpose and values. And I'm not speaking in a political sense. To use Moejoe's example about the Ford Fiesta, yes it's not a Mercedes in durability or a Ferrari in performance, and person who is serious about car qualities and the subtleties of performance would sneer at the Ford Fiesta.

However, somebody looking for cheap transportation to and from the stores and work may not care. With a long warranty, it may be the best answer for that person. A person who hauls plywood sheets are more concern about things like cargo capacity over other concerns.

So why do you read? I personally read for entertainment, and I could care less about the subtleties of say, Joyce's Ulysses. But your typical Mas. Lit. spent long years learning about these sort of subtleties, and having spent the time (and with the interest in them) learning about them, have little concern about "entertainment". Rather like a race car driver sneering at a Ford Fiesta. But not everybody wants to be a race car driver. There interests and concerns lie elsewhere. They just want transportation (entertainment). That doesn't make them a lesser person.

[ardeegee]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Sturgeon's (a genre writer) Law - 90 percent of everything is crap.

[Worldwalker]

Flying carp. Now I've seen everything.

But flying over the water or not, I would so love a poster of that.

[TimMason]

Joyce's 'Ulysses' is vastly entertaining. Don't leave it to the MAs.

[TimMason]

That doesn't make them a lesser person.

Absolutely not. But there are books which perform like a Ferrari, have all the durability of a Mercedes, and you can pile your plywood into them as well. Just look to Homer, who gave us the first-ever fantasy novel. We're still reading his books today. That's pretty good.

[Iphinome]

Originally Posted by TimMason

Joyce's 'Ulysses' is vastly entertaining. Don't leave it to the MAs.

But Finnegans Wake will make you bleed from your eyeballs and have a stroke.

[weateallthepies]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

I'd like to claify that Orwell was not pro socialist, nor was he a science fiction writer, he was more in line with the anarcho syndacilists and he saw in socialism (at least organised socialism at the time) the same dangers as he saw in communism, stalinism etc. His only work that edges near to science fiction is 1984, but it so transcends all the restrictions of genre, I don't believe it deserves that name. Just as Animal Farm is not a 'children's book', 1984 is not 'science-fiction'. Orwell was a great writer and there endeth that story, you can't lump him in with people like Asimov and Dick, that's an insult to his capability. It's like putting James Joyce in a list with Maeve Binchy. *shudder*

It so clearly is science fiction though, even if it is many other things. Something doesn't become 'not science fiction' because it has literary merit. It's just a classification, not a restriction. Sure the publishers use genres as a way of marketing to specific audiences, and modern literary fiction is as much a genre in that sense but that doesn't mean literary fiction can't also be science fiction.

Ursula K LeGuin sums it up nicely:

To define science fiction as a purely commercial category of fiction, inherently trashy, having nothing to do with literature, is a tall order. It involves both denying that any work of science fiction can have literary merit, and maintaining that any book of literary merit that uses the tropes of science fiction (such as Brave New World, or 1984, or A Handmaid’s Tale, or most of the works of J.G. Ballard) is not science fiction. This definition-by-negation leads to remarkable mental gymnastics. For instance, one must insist that certain works of dubious literary merit that use familiar science-fictional devices such as alternate history, or well-worn science-fiction plots such as Men-Crossing-the-Continent-After-the Holocaust, and are in every way definable as science fiction, are not science fiction — because their authors are known to be literary authors, and literary authors are incapable by definition of committing science fiction.

[Lo Zeno]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

His only work that edges near to science fiction is 1984, but it so transcends all the restrictions of genre, I don't believe it deserves that name. Just as Animal Farm is not a 'children's book', 1984 is not 'science-fiction'.

I'm with weateallthepies here.
"Restrictions of genre"? That's (frankly) a stupid concept. No genre has restrictions, any single literary work can and does belong to more than one genre.

Sience-fiction isn't defined by exclusion (it's sci-fi what is NOT <insert something>) but is defined by inclusion (it's sci-fi if it includes at least one of <insert list>), and so do any other genre, and by any I mean ANY.

The Iliad, for example, and the Odyssey, are both poetry and fiction, but also religious texts, political texts, propaganda and adventure.
1984 is science fiction. Hell yes, it is! Because it dabbles with so many typical sci-fi topos, like possible futuristic technological advances (futuristic when compared to Orwell's times, of course), or like the control, by a higher political/social body, of the collective historical memory (it's the same ground that Asimov explored in his Foundations series, even if he followed a different approach).
I'd like to point out also that Animal's Farm, while not a children book, is a fable. Not a children book, I agree, but it remains a fable, because it uses many typical topos of the fable genre, and the plot development is typical of a fable.