Lincoln Michel and the fascinating tradition

The only way to win the genre war is not to fight it

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

Journalist Sarah Ditum once wrote a comprehensive account of “why authors are still sniffy about sci-fi”; I myself wanna summarise two increasingly phoney lines of attack in the perennial war between literature and the-everything-else that gets put in the genus of ‘genre’.

One line concerns the snobbery of literary authors towards genre, the ill- or uninformed interventions they make, and the way they shy from genre labels whenever they dabble outside of the mainstream.

John Updike, neither a snob nor uninformed, gave a thorough and thoroughly pleased notice to Ursula K Le Guin’s otherwise neglected novel The Beginning Place, and read enough science fiction stories to make a learned survey of them, ‘The Flaming Chalice’. But in it he writes:

Those rhapsodies… which Proust delivered upon the then-fresh inventions of the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane point up the larger relativities and magical connections of his great novel… The modest increments of fictional “news,” of phenomena whose presentation is unprecedented, have the cumulative weight of true science — a nudging, inching fidelity…