karl@dartvax.UUCP (S. Delage.) (08/14/84)
allegra!don tells us it's unusual for a top-class author to write
science fiction or other ``genre'' books.
The four he cites, C.S. Lewis, H.G. Wells, J.R.R. Tolkien, and
E.R. Burroughs, are not, by many people's standards, top-class
authors. That's fine; we all have different ideas about what makes
a good book.
But his article implies that ``genre'' authors are somehow
inferior to whatever the other kind of author is.
-- Isn't all fiction a ``genre'' of one kind or
another? It seems that ``mainstream'' fiction is [at least] as
prescribed in its limits and is as much as ``genre'' as science
fiction, westerns, and the others allegra!don lists.
-- The general denouncement of writers who don't write what the
N.Y. Times Book Review likes, {i.e., ``genre'' authors.} is
something that no one needs. So they like to write differently
than John Updike. That doesn't make them non-``top-class''.
dartvax!karl -- karl@dartmouthmoriarty@fluke.UUCP (Jeff Meyer) (08/19/84)
Hear, Hear! I quite agree with karl@dartmouth, though I did not read the
original article. An author's skill should, in no way, be influenced by how
many genres his stories have fallen into. Obviously a "first-class" writer
is one whose work has the qualities which make "first-class" books, and this
is dependent on who is reading and/or reviewing them. A reader who
places storytelling ability and vivid language may point to John Updike (I
doubt I would, but that's me); but I think one could make a case for John
Le Carre with those standards to judge against. It seems that often books
which can be labelled (they are often MIS-labelled by a journalistic
community too intent on whittling events and objects into neat,
easily-identifiable categories) by a genre are thus considered incapable of
becoming "literature", which is perhaps a genre in itself -- the genre for
books which do not fit in genres!
Anyway, we should be careful of generalities such as the one reacted to in
this article; in any art form there is little that can be (or is) accepted
as universally good; one person's zenith is another's trash. Whoops, I'm
sounding preachy... where's the scotch?
"....and his hideous clockwork dog, Toto...."
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc.
UUCP:
{cornell,decvax,ihnp4,sdcsvax,tektronix,utcsrgv}!uw-beaver \
{allegra,gatech!sb1,hplabs!lbl-csam,decwrl!sun,ssc-vax} -- !fluke!moriarty
ARPA:
fluke!moriarty@uw-beaver.ARPAmike@smu.UUCP (08/24/84)
#R:dartvax:-229600:smu:11300007:000:130 smu!mike Aug 24 09:04:00 1984 Wrong Burroughs. I believe the reference was to William S. Burroughs, not Edgar Rice Burroughs. Mike McNally ...convex!smu!mike