The tide is slowly turning in the age of the geek. While some might be figuring out what they have been missing, it is no longer a shock to find out that ‘famous person X’ is a gamer, comic book enthusiast or a Fantasy champion.

I totally understand most peoples snobbery when it comes to ‘genre’ fiction. However, I think they are idiots. I love a good story. It doesn’t NEED to be more than that for me because I love losing myself in these worlds and their characters. I have a tough time understanding how people can invalidate excellent works like the Lord Of The Rings trilogy and the new hot epic series, A Song Of Fire And Ice because the characters happen to carry swords.

Maybe they grew up thinking that ‘good’ fantasy as more like Peter Beagle or Neil Gaiman, and that the giant, multi-volume epic sagas, while fun, were ultimately self indulgent, redundant and kind of ‘Silly’. Basically, It’s what you would end up with if you decided to turn your D&D campaign into a series of cinderblock sized novels.

Genres serve a twofold function: they’re aesthetic choices, for people who like to read and write a certain type of story, and they’re a marketing choice for people with varying levels of specificity in what they want out of entertainment. For example, If you like this book about a talking dog who fights as a armed combatant in an arena for the honor of Rome, you’ll love this novel about a amphibious wizard and his school of magic.

These types of archetypical bending books can be ‘literature’ even if they lack subtext. Many could say they simply qualify as lit because it is written text. Whether they are good or bad, that’s another issue.

Maybe the real problem here is the binary that stuff isn’t ‘good’ unless it’s ‘literature’. There’s a lot of room for well-written genre fiction that isn’t ‘about’ anything except giving the reader a good time. Even a writer who’s interested in just telling an adventure story can create perceptive takes on human behavior.

Writing that is not caught up trying to make the tale into some allegory that you can relate to or discuss philosophically in ‘genre hater’ conversations with your friends. When you write an allegory you care more about the message and less about the medium, when you write a genre novel the story IS the focus and in the right hands it can be amazing.

I think Fantasy suffers from a terrible self-esteem problem (not entirely self-inflicted) and that the reaction has generally been one of two ways: scorn ‘lit’ry’ aspirations and enshrine flat prose, two-dimensional characterization, and tired plots as ‘good writing,’ or out-literary the literary giants with massively allusive, ambitious and convoluted daring works. The best writers are the ones who find a middle way, and just do their own thing. Let posterity decide.

I expect to see a lot more ‘mainstream’ books involving time travel, zombies, swords, sorcery and superheroes. This isn’t a case of the literary mafia co-opting genre stuff; it’s more like boundaries falling down. I read Fantasy even if it’s considered ‘genre’ fiction, not general fiction, and that my friends…is the curse of it.

-Dagobot.