When I was about 10, I went on a serious Sci-Fi/Fantasy binge. It started, as most do, with Tolkien, and from there moved into some Asimov, Bradbury, McCaffery, and finally to Piers Anthony. I read the first few books of Xanth, and it finally dawned on me: this is the same old shit I read in the last book, and really not very interesting anymore. I didn’t touch another SF book for 20 years.

When I was around 30, I read an article by Michael Dirda. In it, though I don’t remember the context, he stated that Gene Wolfe was one of the greatest writers of the 20 ^th century. I remembered Wolfe’s name, because a friend of mine in college read him and held the same opinion. I had never picked up his books, because the covers were all muscular men in cloaks carrying swords and slaying dragons, or some such thing. (That’s right; I judged a book by its cover.) I thought it would be about as enlightening as watching a Conan (the Barbarian, not the Talk Show Host) movie.

Based on Dirda’s recommendation, I picked up one of Wolfe’s earlier books, The Fifth Head of Cerberus. I was blown away. It was so dense with symbolism, so thick with meaning, I immediately re-read it, something I rarely do. I picked up one of his short-story collections, and was back in the SF ghetto. From there, I looked into cyberpunk, by then come and gone as the hot new thing, and then all the way back down through the classics. While not all of them are great, or for that matter, even good, many of them were outstanding. So much so, that I revised my previous definitions of great literature.

By far the most difficult part of doing this was finding out what the classics were. Ask most SF aficionados, and they will gladly give you a list of their favorites. Go to any SF website, and there is undoubtedly a “Best 100 SF Novels” list. The trouble with this is that these people are already on the inside; they understand how SF works, and are more willing to put up with its flaws because they understand that its rewards can be so great. Possibly the worst part of doing this was hearing from those who, after discovering an author they love, who has created a single great novel, swear by all of the books in the same series, which are almost never as good as the first.

I imagine the temptation to write a whole octology based around the same characters in the same worlds is overwhelming. Creating a new universe for every book would be exhausting, and since the readers expect more of the same, why not give it to them? (The same goes for Philip Roth and John Updike as well as Robert Jordan and Terry Brooks.) This is where SF gets its bad reputation. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series is 12 volumes and will run over 10,000 pages when completed. I find it very hard to believe that it is a great masterwork that will be revered through the ages, yet it appears on just about every top 100 list I saw.

Outsiders see this sort of thing as pure escapism, and it can be (whether it’s Narnia or Zuckerman’s New York). I knew this when I was reading Xanth, when I’d have marathon reading sessions that left me feeling like I just ate all of my Halloween candy in one sitting. Much as in mystery series, people want to read (and write) these series because they are familiar, and they don’t have to spend the first sections of the book getting acquainted with the terrain and the characters. This is literary escapism, no matter the genre, and that’s OK. I do it all the time, and I am not making any judgments about it. But if that is all a book is good for, then it can’t really be called a Great Book.

Some of the books in these series are Great. Dune is a seminal work in the field, but its sequels just cannot hold the sense of wonder that the reader feels while reading the first one. Hyperion is one of my favorite novels of all time, partly because it ends without the main story being completely resolved. Resolving it wrapped things up a little too neatly, and detracted from some of the themes in the first book (which didn’t stop me from reading all 4 books).

When an author creates a world that is completely foreign to the reader, it makes the reader’s brain work in a way that cannot be equaled by mainstream fiction. In his post on genre, Luc Reid quotes the first sentence of Hyperion:

The Hegemony Consul sat on the balcony of his ebony spaceship and played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp Minor on an ancient but well-maintained Steinway while great, green saurian things surged and bellowed in the swamps below.

Reid goes on to say that the main difference between mainstream fiction and SF is in how “how it expects its readers to deal with speculative elements, their tolerance and ability to grok them.” Essentially, that this sentence from Hyperion is so foreign to non-SF readers it would instantly turn them off. I agree with what he is saying completely, but disagree with the idea that it should turn them off.

The thrill of SF is opening your mind completely to someone else’s imagination. That first sentence packs so much information, requires such a leap of imagination, that there is simply no matching it in contemporary literature. And almost every good SF novel does that in the first few pages. It presents a foreign world that the reader must slowly build in her mind. Things are not explained, for it is a trope of SF, that the story must assume, or at least seem like it assumes, that the reader is of the world in the text, and would know exactly what is being described. The good writer can pull this off seamlessly, letting you into the world as the needs of the story dictate. The good reader is patient, and doesn’t let something like “great, green saurian things” close their mind to a new universe.

It is only when the writer becomes lazy, when he stops creating and starts using previously imagined worlds as a crutch, that SF is tedious and clichéd. Just like any other genre, SF that defies the formulaic rises above its contemporaries. Works like A Canticle for Liebowitz, or Neuromancer, redefine what an SF book, or for that matter, any book, can do. A good book is a good book regardless of where it is housed in the bookstore. Or even what is on the cover.

In my previous post, I admitted that I am sometimes ashamed of what I read. By admitting this, I may have inadvertently stepped into the genre wars. For many years, books that have been labeled “Science Fiction” or “Mystery” or “Horror” have been pushed off into their own little corners of bookstores, apparently to make it easier for the people who like reading exclusively in one genre. While I know that these people exist, I find it hard to understand them. In my effort to accomplish #25 – Develop a deeper understanding of literature, I have walked into most corners of the bookstore to root out good writing, labels be damned.

And this was when I stumbled onto the Genre Ghetto debate. Apparently, it’s been going on in the Science Fiction world for decades and now some of the other genres are getting in on the action. The people who love a specific genre are wringing their hands over how difficult it is for their beloved writers to be recognized by the mainstream reading public, while “literary” writers are lauded for daring works that might otherwise be labeled “Science Fiction.” If only those darn marketers and the publishing houses would label everything “Fiction” everyone would be exposed to the wonder that is Speculative Fiction. Most of what these people do not understand is that the genre labels actually help them, because otherwise they’d have to pore through a lot of books to find stories about space pirates or elves or whatever else they seem to love exclusively. In a good article about the necessity of genre labels, Luc Reid states that “mainstream vs. genre is a meaningful distinction that is useful to readers, because it helps them select books that are or are not suited to their tastes.”

But, I might be a little unfair. Many who are in this debate are only claiming that great work is being passed over because of a seemingly arbitrary label, and recent trends would seem to bear this out. I know that when I am looking to discover new books, I often have to cross into several worlds in order to find the best of each of these genres. Sometimes, this is excruciating, as with the book I abandoned earlier this week. Other times, I am amazed. As I have ventured into these realms, I have slowly amassed lists of their greatest works, works that will never be included in Harold Bloom’s next book, but nonetheless should be considered as great works of literature. I have one list for mystery, one for horror, and one for SF (Speculative Fiction; it’s much easier than trying to delineate Science Fiction, Fantasy and whatever else). I have read many books that I loved, many that I loathed, but most importantly, discovered that some of those books stashed in the back aisles of most bookstores are truly great reading.

But, I have also discovered the truth in Thomas Disch’s statement: 80% of everything is crap. For some of these genres, it is actually more like 95%. I have found very little horror that is great, that acts on anything more than terror and dread. Many, like King, Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, do this very well, and I will pick them up when I want the bejeezus scared out of me. A few, like Poe, manage to elicit something more, though I am not certain I can define what it is. Perhaps when the roots of terror and dread are explored is when a work can be said to transcend its genre. At any rate, most of the best in this category are just ripping good yarns, with little else to offer.

Mystery and thriller novels, as a whole, are the ones that I usually find to be the least appealing. Though they have been around almost as long as SF (yes, yes, I know de Bergerac wrote about cities on the moon, and Plato wrote about Atlantis. If we want to go back we can even say that the Bible is SF. But I mean SF in its traditional Wellesian/Vernian sense), mysteries seem the most confined to their genre, most formulaic in their execution. Someone is murdered, someone else investigates, and someone else again is caught and/or punished. Authors then rehash the same main character again and again in a series of increasingly derivative books. However, within this basic framework, I also find that the 20% (probably more like 5%) that is not crap is really quite good. Chandler, Hammett, and Ross MacDonald, to name only three, are great writers who manage to explore as many themes within the relatively strict formula of a mystery as any book labeled Literary Fiction. Quite frankly, I would choose MacDonald over DeLillo every time.

And now that I have invoked that name, I suppose I must necessarily address the genre of Literary Fiction, which is just as much a genre as any of the others, albeit a more all-encompassing one. True, literary fiction can include any book from any genre, provided it has the chops. For what is Blood Meridian if not a Western novel; Emma if not a Romance; and Frankenstein if not SF? These have all made it into The Canon, and you will find all of them in the Literature section of your local bookstore. This would seem to say that it cannot be a genre, because you cannot define it by its content. You could argue that it addresses more themes, uses more polished language, and explores the essence of humanity in ways greater than any novel about elves possibly could, and these elements are what make it Literature. And you would be wrong. 80% of Literary Fiction is crap. It is only because it has been around for thousands of years that we have been able to weed out the bad stuff. All plays staged in Periclean Athens were not great works of literature. Probably 80% were hissed off the stage, and no one thought they were worth saving. Only plays that were in the 20% (though, unfortunately, not all of them) lasted into our time.

Great literature has filtered through to us because it deserved to. When these works first came out, their contemporaries evaluated them. Those that made it out of their decade were reviewed by later generations, and those that made it out of their century by still later generations. Many, many people over many, many years have read these books and picked them as the great works of their times, still deserving of being read today.

Anything recently published by a Literary author (usually meaning someone who has been to the right MFA program and all the right workshops) should not automatically get the same respect as Dostoyevsky just because the author’s last name is Doston, and happens to sit on the shelf next to The Idiot. Just like anything else that is published today, 80% of these workshopped/MFA novels are crap. And they are a genre unto themselves, just like any other. While other people mock a story merely because it has an alien in it, I will gladly shred any new book that comes out whose main character is an English professor working through some sort of mid-life angst. Just because a book was written by somebody who has an MFA, and was reviewed positively by someone else with an MFA, does not mean that the book is worth anyone else’s time.

Literature is supposed to move you, to expand your consciousness, to open you up to new ideas. I would much rather read Hugo’s descriptions of 15^th century Paris, than yet another disillusioned white-man’s thoughts about his dissatisfaction with modern life. I know what modern life is like, but I have no idea what life was like in Paris of the 1480′s. So much of modern Literary Fiction is focused on such tiny slices of modern life, reading it can only serve to reinforce one’s own ideas about the current era. Is this really any different than finding comfort only in the Land of Wizards? Can you really say that reading your 7 ^th Philip Roth Zuckerman novel was more rewarding and mind-expanding than if you had read last year’s Nebula Award winner (Seeker by Jack McDevitt)?

Though I have not read Seeker, and have read only one Zuckerman novel, I know, without knowing the first thing about McDevitt or his book, I’d pick McDevitt.

I abandoned a book the other night. It had been with me for a few months, sitting in my closet bookshelf, and I finally decided it was time to pay it a little attention. I generally keep my guilty pleasure books in the closet. Thrillers, mysteries, SF, you know what I mean. I try to justify that these are books that I read once, and then will never look at them again; or that their covers are too lurid to keep in the living room; or that, since most of them are mass-market paperbacks, they don’t fill the nice bookcase properly, and waste valuable vertical space. But, the truth is, I’m a little embarrassed by most of them.

These books are also, ironically, the ones I spend the most time acquiring. For most other genres, I know exactly what I am looking for, and when I stumble across it, I pick it up. For these black sheep, however, I spend hours trolling reviews, message boards, and reader recommendations finding that one book I know will give me exactly what I am seeking. Usually, I begin this process about a month before I leave on a long trip. I find that I cannot concentrate enough during the flight on anything too “serious”; and while I am away, I usually have moments during the trip when I can steal a chapter or two, and nothing is better for that than these types of books. The only problem is that most of these types of books are really, really bad. Therefore, I must scour newspapers, online forums, and friends’ bookshelves to find the ones that are exceptional. In the weeks before I leave, I get 5 or 6 books, and then decide which 2 I’ll be taking with me. This leaves me with 3 or 4 books that don’t go with me, and end up in my closet.

This has usually worked out for me. I’ve been doing it 3 or 4 times a year for more than 10 years, and I’ve discovered some terrific books. Ross MacDonald, Gene Wolfe, Ian Rankin, Tim Powers, Jonathan Carroll, all have moved out of my closet, and unread copies of their books sit waiting for me in my living room. I’ve also picked some real dogs, things that I started reading just as I sat down on the plane, and then realized it was going to be a very long flight. Those, I just make a mental note to never look for that author again, and pick up a new book in the city I’m visiting. But, this process also leaves several books a year at home, and I sometimes read them between trips when I am in the right mood.

The other night, I was in just such a mood. I’m going on another long trip in a few weeks, and thought I’d check out an author I had never read. I won’t even mention his name, because it’s just not worth it. If you happen to read him in the future, and I might have prevented it by mentioning his name here, then I apologize in advance. After about 20 pages, and giving it several chances along the way, I finally pitched the book into the Bookmooch bin. But, what made me abandon it? For that matter, what makes anyone abandon a book after starting it?

About 4 years ago, it dawned on me that I did not have to finish every book that I started. Before that epiphany, I would always stick it out. Sometimes, I dreaded going to bed, because it meant I would have to face the book again, or at least my own failure to conquer it. It could take me weeks to finish a small, uncomplicated book, just because I loathed reading more than a few pages at a time. Learning to abandon a book was one of the most rewarding lessons of my life. It led me to the realization that I could walk out of movies, change the channel before a show was over, and turn off the stereo in the middle of a song.

I know other people who have rules about when they can abandon a book. Most of them are based on page count: if after 50 (25, 100, whatever) pages the book hasn’t hooked them, they can stop reading. My problem with that is I have read plenty of books that didn’t “hook” me until well into the middle, and also plenty that hooked me right off with a fascinating idea and then finished with a truly awful conclusion. So, my rule is that I have to be able to name three things, in the text, that I think are particularly bad. Not things that I don’t like, or that I think are boring, but things that make a book bad. This is especially useful because if I encounter these three things in the first 20-30 pages, it is a good sign that the rest of the book will be even worse.

One trip, in the spring of 2003, I read a review in Salon about a great summer read. The hype hadn’t started yet, so I knew very little about it. I picked up The DaVinci Code at a kiosk at Kennedy, and got on my plane. Had I not been on the plane, I probably would have ditched the book in the first 20 pages. If I remember correctly, Brown hit all three eye-rollers in a paragraph or two. First, the main character was a professor of Symbology (which my spellchecker doesn’t even recognize as a word, let alone an actual academic discipline), then he describes the same character’s appearance by having him look in a mirror (unforgiveable cliché), and finally wraps up his introduction to the character by saying he looked like Harrison Ford (already casting the movie; either that or not giving his readers enough credit to have the imagination to create their own mental pictures). I ended up finishing the book because there was nothing else to do on the plane, and overall it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

But, this latest book, before I had read 30 pages: gruff cop main character (forgivable cliché), serial killer toying with the police (cliché, but I could have withstood it; I love serial killer fiction), but finally, it was this that sent the book flying (am quoting from memory, as I don’t want to have to touch the book again unless I am disposing of it):

He could feel it already. This wasn’t the convenient copper’s hunch of a thriller novel – he knew it.

Chances are, if you’re writing a thriller novel, and your detective feels/knows something, it’s exactly like that kind of feeling a detective in a thriller novel would have. If you need to make it seem like you’re not writing a typical thriller novel, by saying something to the effect of “My character is in a thriller novel, but his actions are not those of a typical character in a typical thriller novel,” you’re probably writing a less-than-typical thriller novel. And by less-than, I mean worse-than.

This author will not be considered for my next trip, which is in 3 weeks. I have, however, picked up 5 others, and I’ll be narrowing those down to 2 over the next few days. I’ll write about my selection process here, and maybe it will open my eyes as to why I choose what I choose.