The weird thing about the genre conversation is that it wasn’t even possible to have it until recently. As Gene Wolfe noted (and I’m damned if I can find out where), for a long while, “genre” lay at the center of literature:  the ILIAD, the ODYSSEY, Dante’s INFERNO, etc. It’s only been relatively recently that writing about the “mundane” became the default literature and those who were writing about the fantastic increasingly found themselves marginalized. That’s a development that would have struck the classical writers as more than a little strange. Not only would they probably have been bored shitless by most of the stuff in bookstores, but they would have wondered how one can address the fundamental questions that plague humanity without recourse to archetypal tropes.

Now that we live in a science-fiction age, that marginalization has become particularly complex, as mainstream writers cherrypick genre themes for readers who wouldn’t be caught dead reading SF….though some of those writers happily acknowledge their genre debt (e.g., Michael Chabon), others are a little more conflicted about it (like Margaret Atwood). And arguably, within genre itself, the turning away from science fiction toward fantasy (the latter outsells the former by an ever-increasing margin) is precisely due to the fact that we DO live in a future that’s increasingly out of control. Peak oil…global warming…there’s a sense in which science-fiction is TOO relevant to the concerns of today. Those seeking escape must look elsewhere.

Or simply go deeper. Perhaps the whole thing is really an illusion anyway. Like Joyce Carol Oates once wrote, “all writers of fiction are science fiction writers, most of them just don’t know it.” Tolkein might have said the same thing about fantasy, even as he took untold shit from his colleagues in academia for writing something that wasn’t very “serious.” And we all know how important is is to be Serious. The only thing that’s more important than being Serious, of course, is Selling Books, and perhaps that’s all genre is anyway…a bunch of marketing labels that reflect what George R. R. Martin called the Furniture Rule. For example, my debut is more science-fiction than it is fantasy: everything that the characters call Magic is really Tech…but as a Product it’s far more likely to make inroads on the fantasy audience, largely  thanks to the fact that the cover has guys with axes carving each other up while a city burns down around them. So it’s better to just call it steampunk, which as we all know is code for a kind of alternate history in which technology has evolved in a way that rattles and clanks and with any luck crushes things while it’s at it. Including the reader’s brain, I hope.