Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site dartvax.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!mgnetp!ihnp4!zehntel!dual!amd!decwrl!decvax!dartvax!karl
From: karl@dartvax.UUCP (S. Delage.)
Newsgroups: net.books
Subject: Top-class genre authors.
Message-ID: <2296@dartvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 14-Aug-84 13:35:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: dartvax.2296
Posted: Tue Aug 14 13:35:33 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 16-Aug-84 03:47:52 EDT
Organization: Dartmouth College
Lines: 19


allegra!don tells us it's unusual for a top-class author to write
science fiction or other ``genre'' books.
   The four he cites, C.S. Lewis, H.G. Wells, J.R.R. Tolkien, and
E.R. Burroughs, are not, by many people's standards, top-class
authors. That's fine; we all have different ideas about what makes
a good book.
   But his article implies that ``genre'' authors are somehow
inferior to whatever the other kind of author is.
-- Isn't all fiction a ``genre'' of one kind or
another? It seems that ``mainstream'' fiction is [at least] as
prescribed in its limits and is as much as ``genre'' as science
fiction, westerns, and the others allegra!don lists.
-- The general denouncement of writers who don't write what the
N.Y. Times Book Review likes, {i.e., ``genre'' authors.} is
something that no one needs. So they like to write differently
than John Updike. That doesn't make them non-``top-class''.

dartvax!karl -- karl@dartmouth