'"Literary fiction" seems to be synonymous with "depressingly hopeless" in some circles.'
And hopelessly depressing. The problem with literary fiction--and the reason that genres evolved and are doing as well as they are--is that literature (as we now define it) drew its boundaries ever more tightly around itself, excluding more and more of the territory that writers of fiction were once free to explore, until every story now seems pretty much like every other story. What's there isn't bad, but it's so constrained that I simply don't read much of it anymore.
Genres can be constraining, too--if you let them. But what I love about genres today is that both readers are writers are willing to bend the walls of literature and remix the concepts and settings into entirely new things. The cross-pollination has been particularly energetic in the last twenty years, as the Internet allows followers of a genre to find others who read what they like, and authors to interact with their readers.
A young woman who once worked for me left Coriolis for a career in foreign rights marketing, and one of her mainstays was lesbian pirate fiction. From there it's a short plank to Vampirates, and who knows what else. (I can only read so much, and pirates just aren't my passion.) The old Bordertown stories were a mashup of all kinds of things, and while some worked better than others, none were the Same Old Stuff. (I much liked the werewolf computer hacker.)
I read a few westerns ten or twelve years ago, and decided to play with the concept in my own way, with the Drumlins stories as the result. Howard Waldrop made War of the Worlds collide with the Old West in "Night of the Cooters." Cowboys and Aliens, same deal, and nobody's complaining.
The key: Everybody I know in genre fiction is having a great deal of fun, even if they're not getting much into print. And if it isn't fun, what's the point?
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And hopelessly depressing. The problem with literary fiction--and the reason that genres evolved and are doing as well as they are--is that literature (as we now define it) drew its boundaries ever more tightly around itself, excluding more and more of the territory that writers of fiction were once free to explore, until every story now seems pretty much like every other story. What's there isn't bad, but it's so constrained that I simply don't read much of it anymore.
Genres can be constraining, too--if you let them. But what I love about genres today is that both readers are writers are willing to bend the walls of literature and remix the concepts and settings into entirely new things. The cross-pollination has been particularly energetic in the last twenty years, as the Internet allows followers of a genre to find others who read what they like, and authors to interact with their readers.
A young woman who once worked for me left Coriolis for a career in foreign rights marketing, and one of her mainstays was lesbian pirate fiction. From there it's a short plank to Vampirates, and who knows what else. (I can only read so much, and pirates just aren't my passion.) The old Bordertown stories were a mashup of all kinds of things, and while some worked better than others, none were the Same Old Stuff. (I much liked the werewolf computer hacker.)
I read a few westerns ten or twelve years ago, and decided to play with the concept in my own way, with the Drumlins stories as the result. Howard Waldrop made War of the Worlds collide with the Old West in "Night of the Cooters." Cowboys and Aliens, same deal, and nobody's complaining.
The key: Everybody I know in genre fiction is having a great deal of fun, even if they're not getting much into print. And if it isn't fun, what's the point?