/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6548632]

Is there anything inherently wrong with genre fiction?

[Anonymous No.6548640]

No but it allows the gateway to oblivion

[Anonymous No.6548652]

it's a consumer product, not art

[Anonymous No.6548661]

>>6548632
All fiction is genre fiction, you fucking moron.

[Anonymous No.6548663]

>>6548652
Couldn't finding the best formula to appeal to customers be considered an artform?

[Anonymous No.6548666]

>>6548652
that's up for the indidivual to decide

[Anonymous No.6548673]

>>6548632
The biggest problem inherent with genre fiction (by which you presumably mean science fiction and fantasy) is its speculative nature. The genre writer is writing about experiences that people could have if the world were vastly different from the one we know. Nobody has actually fought a dragon or encountered space aliens, so nobody can know how human characters would deal with them.

Furthermore, taking such fantastical entities seriously allows the writer to make up whatever he/she wants about them. This dragon can only be defeated by the Gem of Such-and-Such? Who cares? Real problems don't have magical solutions, and literature with such problems is of little use or relevance to people in the complicated real world.

Using these elements also leaves room for the criticism that, if these writers had serious literary ambitions, then why create this unreal world with its unreal problems? If you want to write a story about a real problem, e.g., social rejection or war, there's plenty of real-world experience for you to draw on.

[Anonymous No.6548675]

>>6548652
>it's a consumer product, not art
Every published book ever is obviously both.

[Anonymous No.6548678]

>>6548632

GO READ SOME PHILLIP K. DICK, M8

[Anonymous No.6548679]

>>6548661
Don't call me the moron. Save that title for the self-proclaimed intellectuals who say they're too good for anything without a political moral at the core of the story and made up the term "genre fiction" to separate themselves from the books they don't like.

[Anonymous No.6548684]

>>6548663
>art
>commercially branded 'products' packed from a conveyor belt awaiting the sloven pleb's trough

pick one

[Anonymous No.6548690]

>>6548678
Phillip K. Dick has the unfortunate burden of having good ideas but style that is mediocre at best. A lot of his stuff feels rushed (and some even has honest-to-God spelling errors!)

>>6548663
Warhol pls leave

[Anonymous No.6548695]

>>6548684
Write a book within six months to a year (that's what I'd define as conveyer belt speed) and see how commercially well it does. Don't concern yourself with characters or setting, just make them as generic as possible. After all, it all appeals to brainless sheep, right?

If you have a movie and/or TV series within four years, you're right. If not, I'm right.

[Anonymous No.6548696]

>>6548679
Nobody seriously uses the phrase "genre fiction" outside of a small circlejerk of memester idiots.

[Anonymous No.6548698]

>>6548696
Yes, that's why I used it here.

[Anonymous No.6548701]

>>6548696
You are plainly incorrect. If that were true, where would these "memester idiots" have even gotten the phrase from?

[Anonymous No.6548703]

People get too involved with the world and forget that it's a story about characters and not the setting
Not just readers but authors

[Anonymous No.6548707]

>>6548673
The dragons and space aliens are metaphors. Suppose you're a corporal in the British army in ww1, the whistle blows and you go over the top across machine gun fire Nd barbed wire. After the nightmare of war ends, it's not that muc of a stretch of the imagination that the barbed wire can become the twisted brambles surrounding the castle of a dark wizard. It's not too much of a stretch that the whizzing bullets become deadly bees from the Planet X-51 once they reach the page. Apples and oranges, i suppose. Whether your character is a pirate on a Spanish galleon in 1587 or laying down fire to raid a cargo vessel off the shoulder of Orion it's all about imagination. It's a shame some people can't stop going all "full metal potato" long enough to respect the different tastes of others. I write science fiction but it's not the only thing I'll write. I like cyberpunk but if I paint my self into the corner with Ghost in the shell and blade runner then I'm going to miss out on a lot by being so single minded. That's called maturity, you shit asses. (Ironic Eye roll)

[Anonymous No.6548708]

>>6548695
>if you can't execute it that way that means that it is not executed that way
Dear god please save this poor soul

[Anonymous No.6548709]

>>6548690
Sometimes a normal style is all you're looking for. Brevity is the soul of wit and all that

[Anonymous No.6548734]

>>6548707
>the dragons and space aliens are metaphors
With all due respect, I simply don't believe that's true in most cases. There may be analogies (e.g., the emotion chemicals in Electric Sheep to media-based emotional manipulation), but these would hit harder by directly addressing the fixtures of the world that the reader really lives in. By relegating this to the future, the reader is given the luxury of thinking that the culture is going to hell, but it fortunately hasn't gotten really bad yet, and is thus spared from thinking too deeply about his/her situation.

I would like to believe that there are genuinely talented writers in sci-fi and fantasy, but it's hard to shake the feeling that the field is dominated by escapists.

>>6548709
Good style and brevity aren't mutually exclusive.

[Anonymous No.6548737]

>>6548673
I don't read much Fantasy, but you're an idiot for taking it so literally.

[Anonymous No.6548743]

>>6548708
That's my point. Just because a notorious few are done that way doesn't mean all are done that way. There are people who are really passionate about writing genre fiction and don't do it for the money.

[Anonymous No.6548746]

>>6548737
Sometimes it's true that there are deeper levels to fantasy. I just said that in most cases, I doubt that the author has these deeper levels in mind. Even Tolkien resisted readers looking too deeply into LotR as an analogy/metaphor, he thought of it mostly as just an epic story.

[Anonymous No.6548755]

>>6548695
Ok I will. See you in six months. Or actually I won't because I'll be making bank off pseudo-intellectual teens and illiterate housewives.

[Anonymous No.6548773]

>>6548755
Question to you, good sir. And I'd like you think carefully and then answer.dont be a smartass and your option will be respected.
You wake up tomorrow on Sunday morning and there's the manuscripts for a full series of teen-ya, sci fantasy book built on the MONOMYTH story structure lying in the middle of the floor that reads: do what you want with it. What do you do? It's got cat people aliens, jetpacks, laser pistols, time play, space pirates, and androids in it. Be honest, throw it up on amazon? Traditional publish? Create a blog and post chapters? I'm asking because this is my reality and I have no freaking clue how to progress. Genuine feedback is appreciated

[Anonymous No.6548792]

>>6548773
How good is the prose? If good, go traditional publish and probably Amazon too. Otherwise, just Amazon.

[Anonymous No.6548801]

Would you let your kids read Red Wall? Why or why not?

[Anonymous No.6548808]

>>6548746
I believe Tolkien's position was that just because a story isn't allegory doesn't mean you can't learn anything valuable from it.

[Anonymous No.6548811]

>>6548808
I know, you can still learn things from it. But the position stated earlier in the thread was that fantastic elements in fantasies/sci fi were (seemingly as a rule) metaphors.

[Anonymous No.6548837]

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water ruining in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time -look- like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight-- Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck-- tonight you could almost -touch- Time.

This is a book about colonizing Mars.

[Anonymous No.6548911]

>>6548837
Why is time capitalized?

[Anonymous No.6548936]

>>6548911
Because it was written in the '40s.

[Anonymous No.6548974]

>>6548936
Oh, I thought you were citing one of your own works in progress.

[Anonymous No.6548977]

>>6548743
But being "passionate" about it or not seeking any money doesn't mean that it's any good at all. Come on anon

[Anonymous No.6549008]

>>6548977
The argument wasn't whether or not it's good, the argument was whether or not it's nothing but a consumer product.

[Anonymous No.6549036]

>>6548632
ITT Autists claiming that fantastical elements preclude literary value while still claiming to have read the Iliad or Beowulf.

OP: check ouf The Once and Future King by TH White if you want a more modern example of literary fantasy

[Anonymous No.6549039]

>>6548974
No, that was Ray Bradbury. The Martian Chronicles.

[Anonymous No.6549054]

>>6548837
That's not good at all.

[Anonymous No.6549064]

>>6548673
My view is that it is fine for a fantastical setting to do anything as long as it doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamics.

[Anonymous No.6549066]

>>6548746
>Tolkien resisted readers looking too deeply into LotR as an analogy/metaphor
Because more often than not people just make shit up according to their own views and dont try to understand the story within its own context, which requires you to just expeirence the thing unencumbered.

[Anonymous No.6549082]

>>6548673
>Real problems don't have magical solutions
pls

[Anonymous No.6549089]

>>6548811
They aren't metaphors for anything in particular. They are, however, applicable to things that have parallels in real life. Tolkien rejected people looking at the One Ring as the atomic bomb, because the situations didn't match and because trying to conflate the two directly ignores the subtleties of both. However, the One Ring is already a symbol of any external thing that is destructive and corrupting while still being powerful and necessary.

That's what he was getting at. The quote in >>6548737 is similar. The dragon isn't a metaphor for any one particular seemingly-insurmountable obstacle, it's a metaphor for any seemingly-insurmountable obstacle the reader faces after the story is over. Applicability, not Analogy.

[Anonymous No.6549109]

>>6548792
Need s a little grammatical editing but the story is tight and action packed

[Anonymous No.6549125]

>>6548773
That sounds like the plot of a teen-ya sci fantasy novel. Trash the book and write this instead.

[Anonymous No.6549133]

>>6548734
>would hit harder by directly addressing the fixtures of the world that the reader really lives in

I don't think so. If someone writes a book that says 'wowow look at these Republicunts and Liebrals, red same as blue it doesn't matter guys RuPaul 2016' people tune it out because they immediately apply their own biases and current cultural spooks to it.

I think sci fi and fantasy has the advantage of bypassing people's filters via analogy and metaphor.

[Anonymous No.6549154]

>>6549125
Is someone writing the manuscripts and throwing them into the protagonist's house? Or is the environment such that text now automatically organizes itself into YA novels, the way atoms once organized themselves into amino acids? Is Teenage Catgirl Alien Waifu Muses About Fitting Into Modern Society the primordial soup of a new culture?

[Anonymous No.6549155]

>>6548673
if this is legit why would anyone use any kind of metaphor at all?
Let's say someone writes a story about the absurdity of life. Why write the story? It's made up. Just write "life is absurd".

[Anonymous No.6549235]

>>6549155
metaphor is okay

it's when the entire book is written in metaphor, a shoddy one at best, that it becomes a problem. And it's really more akin to an extended simile really

[Anonymous No.6549244]

>>6548632

Not for what it is, but if you want prestige, you're going to have to write something else. You can make tons of money from suburban sperglords though, more than you would from literary readers, so that's worth bearing in mind.

[Anonymous No.6549251]

>>6548737

He never said that, and in any case you won't beat your dragons - at best, you're going to spend your whole life working a job you hate, kicking the debt can down the road, and you'll die of something quick instead of something slow. At best. If you're lucky.

[Anonymous No.6549263]

>>6548632

No; although contemporary fiction is useless, genre fiction can at least be entertaining.

[Anonymous No.6549269]

>>6549263

Nooooooooooooooooot to people who aren't fooooooooooleeeeeeeeeesh

[Anonymous No.6549272]

>>6548652
>art isn't commerical

[Anonymous No.6549283]

>>6549272

Why do you want to call the shit you like art? What does it gain by being called 'art' instead of 'entertainment', bearing in mind that you're the kind of person who wants to put intellectuals into gas chambers?

[Anonymous No.6549385]

>>6549235
>it's when the entire book is written in metaphor, a shoddy one at best, that it becomes a problem.
Answer to the rest of the post though. All books are metaphors.

[Anonymous No.6549561]

>>6548632
Nope. Jizzing over Jamba Juice's wife's farts for over 100 years is boring.

>>6548755
>Ok I will. See you in six months. Or actually I won't because I'll be making bank off pseudo-intellectual teens and illiterate housewives.
Why are you a meanie towards your little sister and your mom? They are smarter than you.

[Anonymous No.6549643]

>>6549154
The manuscripts are a manifestation of nature. It's a rare phenomenon. Bonus points if it only happens to SPECIAL PEOPLE.

[Anonymous No.6549667]

>>6548632
Pic related.

[Anonymous No.6550417]

>>6548773
I'm >>6548746

If I were in that situation I'd probably try traditional publishing it. Mostly because self-publishing involves more work on your end when it comes to advertising, for probably less money because you won't be able to charge as much and still make the same kinds of sales as you would through a traditional publisher (assuming you get one of the ones that's worth anything).

Though I'd still read it first just to see if it's even publishable to begin with. Also if you're impatient Amazon is a LOT faster than traditional publishing and better than blogposting or whatever since you have a chance of actually making money with it and can easily use a pseudonym.

[Anonymous No.6550423]

>>6550417
Fuck. I misquoted that. I meant to say I'm >>6548755

[Anonymous No.6550427]

>>6549244
Pff

Shakespeare wrote for the common man and patricians alike, fuck this false divison idiots have built up over the years.

[Anonymous No.6550461]

>>6550427
Shakespeare was from an era where there weren't exactly many choices when it came to entertainment. These days you're not going to appeal to the unwashed masses unless you write something they find DEEP in their superficial way, yet not actually meaningful or challenging because they conflate anything that's meaningful or difficult enough with being pretentious.

[Anonymous No.6550518]

>>6550461
Plot development hurts their little heads

[Anonymous No.6550579]

>>6550518
>Caring about plot at all
How plebeian can someone be?

[Anonymous No.6550640]

>>6548632
Fantastical content is often used as a crutch by crappy authors to distract the reader from a weak or overly cliche plot and characterization. When you spend page after page rambling on with techno-babble about space ships, nobody notices the protagonists is a cheap ripoff of Captain Kirk, and the antagonist is Nazi Germany in space.

Alternately, where the author is a legitimately skillful writer, the ingrained formulaic expectations of genre fiction can hold back the author's creativity and lead to a lower quality novel than he could otherwise write. Everything in genre fiction is about reproducing or subverting common tropes, with little room for true originality. Like, in fantasy literature, you almost always see the story focus on some heroic adventurer doing battle with an ancient evil. It's always LoTR with a name swap. You never see a Jane Austen style social drama about the aristocratic families of a random fantasy city-state and the scandal when one of their daughters dates an elf prince or something.

[Anonymous No.6550646]

>>6550640
>You always see stories following story constraints A
>I never read about them following story constraints B
>Therefore it is inherently worse

[Anonymous No.6550680]

>>6550646
I don't mean to suggest that my example is the only type of story with literary merit, or that classical adventure is never a good thing, but rather simply point out the notable absence of variations in genre fiction storylines.

The problem I'm trying to get at is that the fantasy genre has come to be synonymous with a very narrow scope of story, rather than being a setting in which any type of story can take place.

[Anonymous No.6550720]

>>6550640
>You never see a Jane Austen style social drama about the aristocratic families of a random fantasy city-state and the scandal when one of their daughters dates an elf prince or something.
Ha! I wrote that very plot line in the middle of my space LOTR epic!
Take that, you catcher in the rye spewing newfag.

[Anonymous No.6550766]

>>6548690
>feels rushed

Dick doing a ton of meth at the time might've had something to do with it

[Anonymous No.6550809]

>>6548673
All fiction is fantasy.
>not useful to people in real life
Clearly not the case as people seem to love reading it. How exactly are we defining useful here? Because I don't spend $15 a pop for shit firewood.

[Anonymous No.6550843]

>there are people who honestly don't realize that all but the most novel of literature was originally genre fiction

[Anonymous No.6550912]

>>6550809
Fantasy is retarded as a genre because as you say, all speculative fiction is fantastical to some extent or another. Though in the commonly accepted usage, "fantasy" as a genre mostly refers to D&D/Tolkien inspired shit.

I don't think anyone would seriously say that incorporating any fantastical elements into something makes it part of the "fantasy" genre. The main distinction between literary and genre fiction is that literary fiction focuses on prose, symbolism that isn't simplistic, and non standardized story-telling modes without necessarily being restricted to a specific genre.

>>6550843
The fact that it was genre fiction is exactly the problem though, all of today's genre fiction adds nothing to its particular genre that wasn't already done in a much better way hundreds of years ago.

[Anonymous No.6550923]

>>6550912
>all
Nope. You could've said "a lot of" and you'd have had it, but the same can be said of a fair deal of "literature". Not everything that makes its way to critical fame is really great.

[Anonymous No.6550960]

>>6550923
It depends on how broad your definition of fantasy is. In the broadest sense it means anything that isn't real. The most realistic fiction is still technically "fantasy" in that sense because realism isn't the same thing as actual reality.

You must be thinking in terms of things that we don't think are possible, when in fact that's genre-think and the general concept of fantasy includes anything that isn't strictly real regardless of plausibility.

[Anonymous No.6550978]

>>6550960
I'm not talking about fantasy at all, just the stupid distinction people make between "genre fiction" and "literature". Literature is just critically praised works of fiction, and all that really means is that scholars think they're good and they're old enough to have been analyzed by scholars.

Not to say that I don't find a general value to that scholarly critical analysis, but people who just broadly say genre fiction is all eclipsed by literature are being stupid.

[Anonymous No.6551103]

>>6549251
Life is never going to be perfect for anyone. The point is you can cower and be complacent, or you can face the seemingly impossible.

Your point is pessimistic and too tangible. It could be something as simple as a kid with social anxiety introducing himself to his classmates.

There's always something more to confront, and you're already dooming yourself to your own insecurities.

inb4 I'm a realist.

[Anonymous No.6551122]

>>6548632
genre fiction is hellbent on escapism and pandering to the reader, and it's rarely ever challenging or requires any thought to understand.

[Anonymous No.6551130]

>>6548663
pretty sure these days you can all most anything art ~except~ that.

[Anonymous No.6551136]

>>6550960
>The most realistic fiction is still technically "fantasy" in that sense because realism isn't the same thing as actual reality.
Fantasy relates to that which is fantastic, that is, magical and beyond the immediate reality. You're confusing fictitious with fantastic.

[Anonymous No.6551139]

>>6551136
That's the genre definition. Not the definition of the word itself.

[Anonymous No.6551145]

>>6548652
>10,000 leagues under the sea
>From the Earth to the Moon
>Frankenstein
>Dracula
>1984
>LOTR
>WOT
>Chronicles of Narnia
>The list goes on and on
>not works of art

[Anonymous No.6551164]

>>6551139
Don't know since english isn't my first language but in my first language there are those two words too and fantasy implies a more outright lie that is unlikely or unreal whereas fictitious is milder and simply imply made-up story.

Sorry to barge in

[Anonymous No.6551165]

>>6551145
>1984
>LOTR

are both pleb garbage, I'd put Frankenstein in there too but Shelley was too important in the Romantic movement.

Otherwise these are kids books
>10,000 leagues under the sea
>From the Earth to the Moon
>Frankenstein
>Dracula
>Chronicles of Narnia

Don't know what WOT is.

[Anonymous No.6551230]

>>6551165
Wheel of time.
Wot as art = AhahahahahahahaahahahahahahhhhhaahahahaaahahahahhAhhahHhHhHhHhhh

[Anonymous No.6551321]

Genre fiction often sucks because it doesn't have to be good.
It can be good, but it doesn't have to be.

If you write literary fiction and it's not good, publishers will get confused and tell you that it's not what they are looking for. But if you add recognizable troupes like spaceships, dragons, or teenage heroines, publishers will be more likely to decided "That's what readers want" and less likely to care about quality or literary merit.

The prevalence of shitty genre fiction is simply a consequence of capitalism, not the inclusion of fantastic/speculative elements. A good piece of genre fiction will be called "Speculative fiction" or "Magical realism" by pretentious reviewers, but there is really no reason why this should be.

[Anonymous No.6551679]

>>6550461
Speaking of the refined tastes of the patricians, consider the Nat Tate hoax.

>Back in 1998, author William Boyd wrote a biography of Tate, an abstract painter who lived from 1928 to 1960. Tate was a troubled genius, who created brilliant paintings but eventually destroyed them all before committing suicide. The book included photographs of Tate and his work, as well as recollections about the man by other famous artists. Oh yeah, and the whole thing was a hoax.

>The book was intended as a satire of the New York art community, but Boyd wasn't content to stop at that. He recruited the one group of people with more spare time and boredom on their hands than even our Georgia Tech student up there: celebrities.

>He called up Gore Vidal, who promoted and endorsed the book and the claim of it being true, and David Bowie, who arranged a huge launch party for the book in New York on April Fools' Day. Invited were famous artists, collectors, historians and dealers.

>So with that many experts on art in one place the scam was quickly revealed, right? Not quite. As Bowie read excerpts from the book everyone nodded sagely and talked about their familiarity with Tate's work.

>Only a single newspaper editor realized it was a joke, because he was the only one who would admit to having never heard of Tate. So he did some real in-depth investigation and uncovered the truth. By which we mean he flipped through the book and discovered it had obvious flaws, like using names of supposedly famous art galleries which didn't actually exist.

This is the patricians in a nutshell. It's an eco chamber where everyone is constantly rephrasing the collective wisdom of Bulius Ebola and Jamba Juice. No fun allowed.

[Anonymous No.6551692]

people shouldn't need jetpacks, battles, dragons, bleak dystopian features, or magic systems to aesthetically get off. needing those things is a sign of being an emotionally immature reader.

[Anonymous No.6551698]

>>6551692
And needing to not have them to not feel an immature reader is a sign of being an emotionally immature person.

[Anonymous No.6551701]

>>6551698
i dont think books are worse for having those things so i agree. im glad we are in agreement

[Anonymous No.6551720]

>>6550766
Speed, not meth.

[Anonymous No.6551729]

>>6548632
I was getting ready to write some genre fiction, if that genre is Capitalistic plutocratic...I've confused myself with wording. I'll probably blow it off.

[Anonymous No.6551804]

>>6550640
I'm willing to bet if that were to happen (and I'm not sure it hasn't) there'd be a bunch of people complaining that the author only did it because he wanted to "subvert common tropes".

[Anonymous No.6551819]

>>6551321
>If you write literary fiction and it's not good, publishers will get confused and tell you that it's not what they are looking for.
Make some examples.

[Anonymous No.6551821]

>>6551679
>No fun allowed
That's their way of having fun i guess

[Anonymous No.6552423]

>>6550579
>caring about pretty words instead
Truly you are the king of plebeians.

[Anonymous No.6552506]

>>6551165

>Frankenstein is a kids book

[Anonymous No.6552539]

>>6551321
I'd go even further and say they have no idea whether it's actually good or not because they're thinking in terms of marketability rather than quality all the time, since that's what their actual job entails.

If they can't figure out how to sell something, or who to sell it to, they won't bother with it.