If you are a genre writer I’m sure you’ve had this conversation:
Them: “Oh you’re a writer? Me too! What do you write?”
Me: “Lots of things, mostly fantasy and sci-fi.”
Them: “Oh.”
Me: “What do you do?” (Already knowing the answer.)
Them: “I write literary.”
Ah yes, literary, where an apple is an apple and never a magical fruit. That’s not quite right; an apple would be a metaphor, perhaps standing in for a woman who can never be pregnant. Did you get that? A metaphor, usually presented over and over just in case you were too dense to understand the first time. Sigh.
Lately some fantasy and sci-fi writers, perhaps to get literary recognition, have dived into that (to me) pompous arena. Over the past couple of years I’ve read, and I kid you not, at least ten stories about metaphoric spacial wormholes appearing in human flesh: brains, hearts, legs, arms, one day they woke up and there it was. Of course, they weren't just wormholes, they were really talking about alienation.
I’ve railed before about Ant Rand. Love her stories, but I don’t like Objectivisim jammed down my throat. My husband asked me the other day if I thought literary works and Ayn Rand books were the same.
Not to me. Was Ayn Rand an intellectual snob? Yeah. She believed intelligent people should get better treatment and more stuff. But she made no pretense of this and never tried to hide her beliefs. You know from the first few pages what she is going to pound you with.
Literary works, in my opinion, are a totally different animal. They try to hide the “real” meaning within heavy, confusing prose, but then present their goal again and again just in case you don’t “get” it. Every time I read one of those stories it feels like the author is saying I’m smart, can you tell I’m smart, and if you can’t figure out the puzzle you’re stupid.
I used to be able to avoid literary fiction, but now it’s in every fantasy and sci-fi collection I pick up. But then I read something by one of genre’s (and proud of it) best writers and laughed my ass off.
Luckily, there was no wormhole in it.
The Return of the Zombie-Genre by Ursula K. Le Guin
Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. There, again — the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door. As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics — the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understand the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream? No, she would not look at the thing that had squelched its way into her bedroom and stood over her, reeking of rocket fuel and kryptonite, creaking like an old mansion on the moors in a wuthering wind, its brain rotting like a pear from within, dripping little grey cells through its ears. But its call on her attention was, somehow, imperative, and as it stretched out its hand to her she saw on one of the half-putrefied fingers a fiery golden ring. She moaned. How could they have buried it in such a shallow grave and then just walked away, abandoning it? "Dig it deeper, dig it deeper!" she had screamed, but they hadn't listened to her, and now where were they, all the other serious writers and critics, when she needed them? Where was her copy of Ulysses? All she had on her bedside table was a Philip Roth novel she had been using to prop up the reading lamp. She pulled the slender volume free and raised it up between her and the ghastly golem — but it was not enough. Not even Roth could save her. The monster laid its squamous hand on her, and the ring branded her like a burning coal. Genre breathed its corpse-breath in her face, and she was lost. She was defiled. She might as well be dead. She would never, ever get invited to write for Granta now.
