Quote:
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).