A View From Corona #7

May 16th 2002 at 11:36 am

“Just because someone can read does not mean that he necessarily can read SF…” – David G. Hartwell

SF (including its sibling genres fantasy and horror) has a rich and varied history which infects, permeates, and informs most contemporary forms of the genre. This is at once a Good Thing(tm) as well as a Bad Thing(tm). It is a Good Thing because it means the even the most “low brow”, reader friendly space opera/fantasy/horror epic will by its very nature have a depth and complexity to it… simply because the author will be (usually intimately) familiar with the tropes and traditions of the genre, and there will be (at the very least, subconsciously in the authors mind) a dialog with what has gone before. Contemporary genre fiction is littered with winking allusions to previous genre works, both landmark and obscure. And a good percentage of the readers of genre fiction expect and like these allusions. They allow a reader to observe and participate in an ongoing dialog between multiple generations of writers who have all read the same things. This is one of the big pleasures of reading genre fiction of any stripe, be it SF/fantasy/horror, or Mystery/Crime, or Western or Romance.