/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18785154]

Is genre fiction worth reading?

[Anonymous No.18785209]

If It makes you happy, yes. I personally feel it's a waste to go through life abstaining from reading dune, Lotr, wolfe, or Asimov, bakker, etc. For no other reason than snobbery. if you go out of the way to avoid tolkien, you're unironically a soulless bugman. Simple as.

[Anonymous No.18785256]

>>18785154
Some is, including Dune.
There's plenty of garbage genre fiction, but its not like there isn't mountains of shitty literary fiction that gets published every year too.

[Anonymous No.18785407]

>>18785154
Yes. Any form of escapism is ultimately a wasteful inhibitor that detracts you from self-improvement. Reading Dune will take the average person 12 hours, imagine how much more productive you could use your time with that. You could spend those 12 hours on reading philosophy, or history, or the literary greats.

[Anonymous No.18786452]

>>18785407
i could spend those 12 hours posting on /lit/ and other boards

[Anonymous No.18786473]

>>18785209
>For no other reason than snobbery
everything you listed other than lotr is terribly written. genrefags keep imagining that people are forcing themselves to stay away from their gay fantasy sagas out of some kind of societal pressure when in reality the actual moment-to-moment experience of reading those things is just awful if you have any exposure to actually decent prose. this stuff is only okay for kids that don't know any better.

[Anonymous No.18786546]

>>18785209
>out of the way to avoid tolkien, you're unironically a soulless bugman.
yeah, rejection of the classical fantasy world usually comes coupled with the most cynical and annoying of social rejects
Just become a normal nerd you fucking hipsters

[Anonymous No.18786550]

>>18786473
>terribly written
You have a simple choice in life.
Read some autistic level glossolalia muh great prose about a fat Irishman farting in his tub and cumming in his pants to little girls.
Or read some basic-bitch sentences about wild ideas, cosmic consciousness, and levels of experience you would never, ever encounter anywhere else.
"Serious" fiction is no less asinine than escapism

[Anonymous No.18786575]

tolkien is literature, sorry plebs. (childrens lit but still rlly great)

[Anonymous No.18786685]

>>18786550
>Or read some basic-bitch sentences about wild ideas, cosmic consciousness, and levels of experience you would never, ever encounter anywhere else.
but that's a lie. genre books are actually extremely un-fantastical. genre fiction is generally characterized by a very dull, realist perspective, relentless categorization of all the fantastical elements into dnd-style "magic systems"/fake science, flooding the reader with tedious exposition of the "worldbuilding" and so on. if i wanted to encounter "wild ideas" i'd read italo calvino or something, who can fit more inventiveness into a couple of short stories than you'd find in an entire 10000-page fantasy saga. genre fiction is absolutely the last section in a library that you should visit if you're looking for unique experiences, they're still just rewriting tolkien with minor twists.

in fact, that's the basic, most fundamental idea of "genre": it's a marketing designation invented to allow consumers to purchase and consume an item that will very closely resemble similar items they had purchased before, and will only diverge from them in certain allowed areas, like a slightly different "magic system" or a new kind of elf or spaceship. genre fiction does not actually even attempt to execute on its marketing slogans about "visiting strange worlds of the imagination" or whatever, since the entire business model relies on extreme familiarity. amusingly, if you wrote a legitimately strange and unique piece of "genre" fiction it would almost certainly be rejected by genre publishers as unmarketable and you'd have a better chance publishing it as literature. neither the publishers nor the fans would welcome a second tolkien, they just want more brandon sanderson trash.

so the choice you have is not between great prose about the mundane and bad prose about the otherworldly; it's actually great prose about anything you want vs bad prose about a tiny set of dumbass genre tropes. the second choice is so obviously inferior that i have to assume people only make it out of a) ignorance or b) some form of mental unwellness that makes them reliant on comfort media consumption for continued functioning.

[Anonymous No.18786733]

>>18785256
This. There is good and shit everywhere, including in the genre called 'literary fiction'.

[Anonymous No.18786740]

literature: a pointless exercise in mundanity
>IN VAIN, GREAT-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.
>As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

genre fic: a stunning journey to the edges of consciousness
>Szeth could feel the Light’s warmth, its fury, like a tempest that had been injected directly into his veins. The power of it was invigorating but dangerous. It pushed him to act. To move. To strike.
>Holding his breath, he clung to the Stormlight. He could still feel it leaking out. Stormlight could be held for only a short time, a few minutes at most. It leaked away, the human body too porous a container. He had heard that the Voidbringers could hold it in perfectly. But, then, did they even exist? His punishment declared that they didn’t. His honor demanded that they did.
>Afire with holy energy, Szeth turned to the guards. They could see that he was leaking Stormlight, wisps of it curling from his skin like luminescent smoke. The lead guard squinted, frowning. Szeth was sure the man had never seen anything like it before. As far as he knew, Szeth had killed every stonewalker who had ever seen what he could do.
>“What … what are you?” The guard’s voice had lost its certainty. “Spirit or man?”
>“What am I?” Szeth whispered, a bit of Light leaking from his lips as he looked past the man down the long hallway. “I’m … sorry.”

[Anonymous No.18786745]

>>18785154
The greatest work of genre fiction is The Lord of the Rings, but within the fantasy genre it is a profound exception to the rule. Science fiction rather is the genre that has most elevated itself above pulp, broadly speaking.

[Anonymous No.18787053]

>>18786745
>The Lord of the Rings, but within the fantasy genre it is a profound exception
that's because lotr is not genre. tolkien was not a genre writer like elvis was not an elvis impersonator.

[Anonymous No.18787073]

>>18787053
I figured someone would say this. While I do think it's arguably true, you're fighting a losing battle on this one as he is almost universally perceived as a fantasy writer.

[Anonymous No.18787129]

I enjoy sci-fi like I enjoy dreaming.
I also read it too to train my visual and abstract thinking in a more entertaining way than usual.

[Anonymous No.18787204]

>>18785154
no
it's terrible in general dune especially

[Anonymous No.18787229]

>>18785407
cringe, no one needs to be constantly striving for self-improvement. some people are perfectly fine the way they are, give as much as they need to society and can allow themselves to spend their free time doing whatever makes them happy. only pretentious losers who lack an identity think that they're any better because they're constantly striving for 'self-improvement'. you can improve yourself by retreating into escapism occasionally and giving the people around you a break from your obnoxiousness

[Anonymous No.18787245]

>>18786745
I was thinking about that just yesterday. Science fiction has given us lots of great works, but fantasy hasn't. Fantasy remains, by and large, just genre shit for fans of more of the same to gobble up.

[Anonymous No.18787259]

>>18786685
> in fact, that's the basic, most fundamental idea of "genre": it's a marketing designation invented to allow consumers to purchase and consume an item that will very closely resemble similar items they had purchased before, and will only diverge from them in certain allowed areas, like a slightly different "magic system" or a new kind of elf or spaceship. genre fiction does not actually even attempt to execute on its marketing slogans about "visiting strange worlds of the imagination" or whatever, since the entire business model relies on extreme familiarity. amusingly, if you wrote a legitimately strange and unique piece of "genre" fiction it would almost certainly be rejected by genre publishers as unmarketable and you'd have a better chance publishing it as literature. neither the publishers nor the fans would welcome a second tolkien, they just want more brandon sanderson trash.

Accurate. People always larp as wanting something novel, but when given something actually different you just see a confused look on their face. If it happens that you are that something you can almost hear their thoughts "should I call the cops now?"

Riding this pseudo novelty wave is the basis of all marketing. Make something completely the same as your competition and your sales are mediocre. Make something too novel and they drop completely. Give people just a feeling of novelty while keeping them in comfort of their assumed framework and you will get this sweet, sweet raise the next quarter.