Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature

280 Pages·2011·1.917 MB·English

by  Gary K. Wolfe

Evaporating Genres
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Gary K. Wolfe
Genres
ESSAYS ON FANTASTIC LITERATURE
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, Connecticut
Published by Wesleyan University Press,
Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress
2011 ∫ Gary Wolfe
All rights reserved.
Printed in U. S. A.
54321
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wolfe, Gary K., 1946–
Evaporating genres : essays on fantastic literature / Gary K. Wolfe.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8195-6936-3 (cloth : alk. paper) —
isbn 978-0-8195-6937-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Fantasy fiction—History and criticism. 2. Science fiction—
History and criticism. 3. Horror tales—History and criticism. I. Title.
pn3435.w65 2011
809.3 876—dc22 2009026962
Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green
Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their
minimum requirement for recycled paper.
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Part I: Genres
1
1. Malebolge, or the Ordnance of Genre 3
2. Evaporating Genres 18
3. Tales of Stasis and Chaos 54
4. The Encounter with Fantasy 68
5. The Artifact as Icon in Science Fiction 83
6. The Remaking of Zero 99
7. Frontiers in Space 121
Part II: Writers
139
8. The Lives of Fantasists 141
9. Peter Straub and the New Horror (with Amelia Beamer) 151
10. Twenty-First-Century Stories (with Amelia Beamer) 164
Part III: Critics and Criticism
187
11. Pilgrims of the Fall 189
Notes 215
Works Cited 237
Index 249
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Preface
This book consists of a series of eleven essays on fantastic literature that for the
most part initially were conceived and written, over a period of decades, with-
out benefit of an overarching thesis or argument. My original intention was
simply to gather some of the scores of essays that I had published in a wide
variety of venues—some now long out of print, some incomplete or truncated
even in their original published form—and to re-examine these ideas in light of
my current thinking and more recent developments in these genres. But in
revisiting this material, a few things quickly became obvious: For one thing, I
realized I would have to be pretty selective to keep the volume down to a
reasonable size, and for another, that didn’t turn out to be as much of a
problem as I thought it would be. Many of those earlier pieces deserve to
remain well-buried, as some reveal the pretentiousness and methodological
trendiness of an ambitious younger scholar and others focus on such a narrow
range of texts that they might be of interest only to a few specialists. By the time
I had narrowed the list to a couple dozen pieces—still more than I needed—a
pattern had begun to emerge, reflected both in the title of this book and in its
longest essay. There was a kind of overarching argument regarding the chronic
instabilities of the fantastic genres, and while this argument is constructed most
explicitly in the three opening essays, parts of it were evident in germinal form
even in those earlier thematic pieces, which at first might seem to point in a
contrary direction by tracing apparently stable tropes such as the artifact, the
post-apocalyptic world, and the frontier. Such tropes, as these essays show (and
as I’ve tried to make clearer in afterwords to some of them), may have been
persistent and recurrent, but they were anything but stable, and the manner in
which writers have employed them evolved as the genres themselves evolved.
The book’s title dates back to an observation that struck me with some force
when, in 1994, I was reviewing for Locus magazine Ellen Datlow and Terri
viii Preface
Windling’s annual anthology The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Here’s what I
wrote then: ‘‘Fantasy is evaporating. I don’t mean that it’s disappearing alto-
gether—quite the opposite—but that it’s growing more di√use, leaching out
into the air around it, imparting a strange smell to the literary atmosphere,
probably even getting into our clothes.’’ Something of a joke, to be sure, but one
drawn from years of reading annual ‘‘year’s best’’ anthologies, from a variety of
editors, in the fields of fantasy, science fiction, and horror: The borders were
growing more di√use, not only among genres themselves but between the
whole notion of genre fiction and literary fiction. If anything, this pattern
accelerated markedly after I wrote that 1994 review, not only in the year’s best
anthologies I continued to read, but in the variety of fiction I encountered in
my monthly review column in Locus magazine. A few years later, when Joan
Gordon and Veronica Hollinger invited me to contribute to a collection of
critical essays that they were editing on postmodern culture and science fiction,
it was an idea that seemed to demand developing at greater length. That essay,
‘‘Evaporating Genre,’’ originally was written in 2001 (at less than half the length
of the rewritten and updated version here), and the patterns it sought to de-
scribe have continued to evolve rapidly in the years since. Those years have seen
considerable discussion—in academic papers, at scholarly and literary con-
ferences, in writers’ own musings on their work—about the blurring of bound-
aries between genres, between genre and literary fiction, between traditional
and postmodern forms, even between fiction and allied narrative forms such as
graphic novels, movies, video, hypertexts, gaming, memoirs, and various forms
of performance art.
This has been especially evident in the genres of fantastic literature—science
fiction, fantasy, and horror—which have given rise to a whole gaggle of terms
and movements to describe this weakening of boundaries, some of which are
mentioned in the essay ‘‘Twenty-First-Century Stories.’’ The essays I ended up
including touched upon these issues, or upon writers particularly relevant to
these issues—even though many of the essays in their original form predated
the current debates. For this reason, I’ve considerably revised and updated all of
the material here, and appended afterwords to three of the essays—‘‘The En-
counter with Fantasy,’’ ‘‘The Artifact as Icon in Science Fiction,’’ and ‘‘The
Remaking of Zero.’’ In both the internal revisions and the afterwords, my goal
was to bring into the argument some much more current examples; when such
examples seemed to buttress the structure of the original essay, I incorporated
them internally; when the purpose was merely to show how a particular theme
Preface ix
had evolved in recent years, I added an afterword. The broad question of what
is happening to genre fiction, and the related question of what this might imply
about how we read and talk about genre fiction, provided a template for orga-
nizing all the essays into what I hope will achieve a semblance of coherence.
***
The first section of essays, on genres, explores various aspects of fantastic genre
literature and how we read it, and the first three chapters in particular concern
di√erent aspects of genre instability, of that blurring of boundaries. ‘‘Male-
bolge, or the Ordnance of Genre’’ (written not for a scholarly publication but
for the literary journal Conjunctions) o√ers a general historical perspective on
how, over the course of nearly two centuries, we ‘‘unlearned’’ how to read the
fantastic as serious literature—including how the mechanisms of genre rein-
forced that disdain—and how a group of modern writers have set about re-
claiming it. Several of the contemporary authors mentioned here were featured
in that special issue of Conjunctions, edited by Peter Straub, which since its
appearance in 2002 has become something of a touchstone among anthologies
that seek to loosen genre boundaries. ‘‘Evaporating Genres’’—which, revised
and expanded to nearly twice the length of the version that appeared in 2002, is
really the seminal essay for this book—also begins with an historical approach,
examining in more detail how contemporary genres such as science fiction
developed their specific market identities, then moving on to explore the vari-
ous strategies that writers of science fiction, fantasy, or horror have employed to
subvert or transform the genre expectations that largely derived from those
market identities. ‘‘Tales of Stasis and Chaos,’’ by burrowing even further into
the specific histories of genres in terms of their content, looks at genre in-
stability from yet another viewpoint, the tension between static and dynamic
world-models, arguing that the latter tend to displace the former as genres
evolve and grow more complex over time.
‘‘The Encounter with Fantasy’’ is the first essay to examine a particular genre
in more depth, returning to the question of how we read the fantastic and
fantasy in particular, and focusing on the experience of the individual reader
when confronting a text that depicts manifestly impossible events and beings.
What keeps us engaged with such a text beyond the introduction of various
marvels and the simple exigencies of plot? How do we know when a fantasy is a
fantasy? Here again, we interrogate the boundaries of literary fantasy, seeking to