While I agree with some of what John Kessel says, and while I appreciate his defense of writers demonstrating the temerity to write fiction that doesn't fit Dave Truesdale's vision of what SF is supposed to be, I dont' think he's describing me when he refers to those who aren't writing genre SF or fantasy and don't care about genre SF or fantasy.

I am writing genre SF and fantasy, and I do care about genre SF and fantasy. More to the point, I am very much aware that everything I write is indebted to cyberpunk and New Wave and Golden Age writers.

If I seek inspiration from other genres, or the so-called mainstream, or 70's and 80's pop culture, I'm not necessarily repudiating genre SF and fantasy.

I suspect that the same might be said for many of the writers John Kessel's talking about.

I think DON’t CARE is overstating it a little. But do you feel constrained by Golden Age or New Wave or Cyberpunk expectations of what fantasy or SF should be? If so, I have to say it doesn’t show in your writing. :)

Well, not only did he overstate the case, but he did it three times in three paragraphs. :-)

But the stuff about not feeling contrained by the history of the genre, yeah, he's right, I don't, and only the stodgiest nolstagia fetishists would suggest that anyone should be.

I really think it's cool when I not only mispell words, but italicize them as well.

Actually, I don't really feel I owe any sort of debt to the Classic Genre Stuff That Has Gone Before Me. I haven't really read a ton of the stuff, to be honest with you. And the old stuff is often bad, as Steve Carper and others have noted.

Most of my genre reading has been the Good New Stuff, along with a whole shitload of non-genre stuff like Cormac McCarthy and DeLillo and the classics and what-not.

The point is that many of the older SF readers haven't really dabbled outside of the genre, from what I've seen, so they're simply perpetuating the ghetto.

There's something to be learned from ALL fiction. I just don't have time to read the bad stuff just because it's considered "classic."

I really don't care all that much if genre distinctions go away. They won't, but I do think they'll change in the coming years. And they'll change a lot.

Mike, there would be no Good New Stuff were it not for the Good Old Stuff. (And there is plenty of Good Old Stuff, as much as there is Bad New Stuff.)

True enough. But there wouldn’t be any Good New Stuff if the Good New Stuff hadn’t moved beyond the Good Old Stuff over the years, either.

I think we’re all on the same side here. It just gets my blood up when people start using mainstream as a swear word — particularly people who don’t even seem to read any of it. And so I overreact.

It doesn’t really matter, since no one can agree on which of the stuff that’s published as science fiction really is science fiction anyway, let alone the stuff that just has ‘genre sensibilities’.

Yeah, I think we're pretty firmly against nolstalgia fetishism.

But even though I'm more consciously influenced by Conjunction Junction than I am Astounding, I nonetheless feel a certain amount of debt to John W. Campbell. I couldn't have written an organidroid Gene Simmons without having read Nathan Horn, and Nathan Horn bought more than a few bus tickets to Omaha on Campbell's dollar.

Did I actually reference Conjunction Junction and claim not to be a nolstalgia fetishist?

I think that's the nerve that the Tangent discussion kept hitting for me -- the nostalgia for the good ole days, and the fact that the future didn't turn out to be White Guys in Space.

I think writers who are doing the truly interesting stuff are embracing the world as it is, in all its diversity and with all its blemishes, and trying to make sense of it, instead of trying to say "where did the genre go wrong?" Or... where did humanity go wrong?

As Carper said -- deal with it.

The one thing I would add to this is that completely rejecting and/or ignoring the history of the genre can be as bad as slavish devotion to same, because (a) it results in repeating tired old tropes that've been explored in vast detail for decades, and (b) it means you have to reinvent a lot of wheels.

Now, sometimes that's just what the field needs. New blood, new takes on tropes that everyone's got tunnel vision about, new shapes for wheels. Y'all are doing all sorts of cool stuff, so my comments here aren't aimed at you.

But there are a lot of beginning writers out there (and lit-fic writers who try to write sf without any background in it) whose lack of grounding in Fredric Brown short-shorts from the 1950s means that they're writing yet another time travel story which ends with the ~astonishing~ twist ending in which someone creates a paradox and vanishes. Their lack of grounding in folklore means that they're writing yet another story in which someone is granted a wish that goes horribly awry. Their lack of grounding in the New Wave -- and, yes, in literary fiction too (talking only about non-lit-fic writers in this case) -- means that they think it's incredibly daring and original (and inherently speculative) to break the fourth wall. And so on.

So really I guess I'm mostly just agreeing with Mike that "There's something to be learned from ALL fiction" -- but I would add that some of the classics are worth reading even though they're not so great: to avoid repeating their mistakes, to be aware of what editors and readers in the field will be familiar with, to see what it is about them that made them classics, even to take them apart and reshape them into something new and strange.

One example before I shut up (not an example directly connected to current discussion, just the first example that came to mind): if you're going to write a time travel story in which a character meets themselves at a different age, read "All You Zombies" first. You don't have to read the earlier longer less-tightly-constructed "By His Bootstraps," but "All You Zombies" is pretty much the ultimate compression of that idea, sort of what happens when that idea becomes so dense that it turns into a black hole and collapses in on itself. (In a good way.) There are still plenty of new and creative things you can do with time travel (it's been a big theme the past couple years, if the Hugo ballots are any indication), but the intricately self-looping multiple-characters-are-one story has been taken to its logical conclusion and doesn't need to be done again.

Or to approach it from one more angle: if you put an English major with no physics background in a physics lab, you might get unusual and unorthodox and even interesting results, but they're unlikely to be groundbreaking physics. I realize this is an imperfect analogy, but I vaguely think there's something to it.

I'm just not capable of being brief, am I?

This reminds me a little bit of the weird argument at the SH Oregon workshop about whether we were all trying to write the best stories we possibly could (something that at the time I dismissed as a function of Mary Anne having experience the rest of us lacked at doing sub-standard work for money, but that I’ve started to take more seriously after realizing I’d sent out a couple of broken things that I shouldn’t have just because I was tired of trying to fix them).

I spent enough of my childhood reading Heinlein and Clarke and Asimov and Bradbury and van Vogt (as well as Niven, Moorcock, Zelazny and LeGuin) that I don’t need to be conscious of them to be influenced by them; I’m already as influenced by them as I’m ever going to be. That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of holes in my knowledge of the genre, but I’ve read enough of it that I’m not likely to accidentally rewrite “The Cold Equations” or “A Sound of Thunder”. (Not to say I might not rewrite them on purpose, of course.)

I suppose it’s all in what sample you select. When I think about this stuff I tend to compare myself to an older generation of more hard-core fans and writers, against whom I tend to think I must stack up as barely genre-literate. It wouldn’t immediately occur to me that I might still be well out on a long right tail of the bell curve of aspiring SF writers.

I realize that I’ve been making an unconscious assumption, when I talk about how people ought to blow off all that Old Skool stuff, that said people have actually read it. You’re in a good position, Jed, to see that that’s not necessarily the case.

Like the range, David. "Zero" to "lots." I think more graphs should use this system.

I also find this debate interesting, but I can't say I spend a lot of time thinking about genre boundaries in the first place. I write what I write (whether I'm successful with the result is another matter. For example, I think my plotting skills are pitiful), but I don't much worry about how it fits into the whole scope of speculative fiction.

Maybe I'm just not very aware of what's going on. I worry about that from time to time.