Quote of the Day

[coalescent]

From the interview with Michael Chabon in the latest Locus:

"It's quite obvious to me that so much of what goes on in the world of science fiction has analogies with a ghetto mentality, with a sense of clannishness and that ambivalence that you have: on the one hand wanting to keep outsiders *out* and identify all the insiders with a special language and jargon so you can tell at a glance who does and doesn't belong, and on the other hand hating that sense of confinement, wanting to move beyond the walls of the ghetto and find wider acceptance. It's a deep ambivalence. You want both at the same time: you feel confined, and you feel supported and protected. I've talked about this with Jonathan Lethem, who says we seem to be moving in opposite directions; he's moving out of the genre and working his way toward a wider mainstream readership, while I wrote a fantasy novel and now I'm doing alternate history."

Comments

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Ah, bless.

I'm sure these things have been written / talked about from the first time SF writers / fans sat down together. Probably the first time two people sat down to discuss the first issue of Amazing Stories. I blame Hugo Gernsback.

By synchroncity, a copy of The Engines Of the Night by Barry Malzberg has just arrived via abebooks. I had forgotten how good it is, there are lots of good quotes in it. One of the essays counters the 'SF would have been better if it had never ghettoised' theory, and ends 'he was a crook, old Hugo, but her made all us crooks possible'.

Anyway, if you haven't read it, you really should.

[ninebelow.livejournal.com]

I'm sure these things have been written / talked about from the first time SF writers / fans sat down together.

Yeah, but the fans never seem to pay any attention.