by GGK on Jul.05, 2010, under Guy Gavriel Kay
In the small blurb to this two week guest blog it mentions that I wanted to discuss ‘defending fantasy’. I worry that, stated so baldly, this sounds either pretentious or silly (or both). Why should the genre need defending?
I approach this from various angles and, again, a blog post (not an essay) doesn’t allow proper treatment. But part of what I’ve argued is this: Dan Brown and Ian McEwan both write contemporary fiction but no one (no sensible person) measures their achievement by the same criteria, and no one diminishes the ‘value’ of contemporary fiction as a serious form by pointing to The Da Vinci Code a way of reducing the artistic legitimacy of Atonement.
But this sort of thing happens all the time with genres, fantasy and sf included. There is absolutely and emphatically nothing wrong or debased about authors aspiring only to offer ‘entertainment’ (or films or television doing the same). What is ‘wrong’ is when an entire form is disparaged or reflexively dismissed by people (usually not reading it) who are only aware of the most commercial, pop culture exemplars of the form.
My quarrel has been along these lines, my defending the genre is the same. Last year, John Mullan, a judge of the Man Booker Prize that year (England’s most important literary award), offered an example of the sort of flat-out silliness I most dislike. After first noting that he was “not aware of science fiction” (which might normally preclude going on to comment) he proceeded assert that it was “bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.”
It is against comments like this that I find myself taking up arms, or keyboard, or whatever. This is where the genres need clarification, elaboration, defending.
On the other hand, there’s another angle to this: genre readers need to be at least willing to allow themselves and their genre to stretch. That’s a part of what literature does, what it is about, surely? Not always ‘more of the same’ and not always popcorn. Art and entertainment have a complex relationship, this isn’t particular to fantasy (or history) writing, or even to literature, it runs right through all forms, and it is always worth discussing and thinking about – and sometimes rethinking.
