Everything old is new again
Plus ça change.... It's been a while since I've made the rounds of the journals of what Nick calls the Amorphous Blobs, so I missed a whole micro-wave of outrage and ferment earlier this week. But that also means I get to skip ahead to the responses. (But it also means any of you who have any interest in this stuff probably already know everything I'm about to say. Feel free to skim or skip.) In particular, "frequent propagandist" Alan DeNiro provides a nicely perspective-inducing reprint of an old cyberpunk article, "Report on the Sophomore Class Dress Code": "We all want to think we're the first to discover sex and dissolution and good writing." The article takes an idea that's always been a peeve of mine (the speculative-fiction genre-insider's blindness to anything going on in lit-fic) and turns it into sort of a virtue; which is to say, it recommends borrowing heavily from outside the genre. (Clarification: I do like speculative fiction that brings in stuff from outside the genre; the part I object to, which this article also objects to, is people inside the genre pointing at borrowings from outside and saying "Wow! We're so cool and original! Nobody outside of sf has ever done anything like this!")
That sure came out muddled, didn't it? What I'm really trying to say is, I like that old cpunk article (thanks, Alan!), and I'm wryly amused that we're reinventing the same arguments. I imagine that literary movements outside of the genre since time immemorial have done similarly, but I've got my genre blinders on.
Meanwhile, literary hipkid Nick Mamatas has a well-written modern variation of a similar idea: we've got a bunch of writers who are publishing a bunch of cool and widely varied stuff in a bunch of different venues, and borrowing from all over the place in doing so. "Booker's complaint and the consternation over it comes down to trying to set a perimeter around a movement that denies perimeters." I'll buy that. I'll take that a step further and suggest a slogan (because all movements need slogans): Evert All Perimeters!
(Remember the bit in The Dispossessed about the wall? "Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.")
Btw, not quite related to any of the above, and yet not entirely unrelated: frequent nominee Tim Pratt has a story on the recently released Stoker ballot. Go, Tim!