Fantastic Metropolis

As a boy, I read voraciously, anything and everything, from DC Comics to the Black Stallion, from Roald Dahl to Tom Swift, from Lewis Carroll to the Hardy Boys, from C.S. Lewis to Isaac Asimov. I ran roughshod over genres. I didn’t know that one book was fantasy and another science fiction and yet another mainstream, but I damn well knew a good book from a bad book. I would have stared blankly at any adult who tried to tell me Carroll was fantasy and Asimov science fiction. Categories didn’t matter. All that mattered was: good book or bad book? And what most often separated a good book from a bad book was the depth and breadth, the uniqueness, of the imagination behind it.

As an adult, I find this is precisely where the majority of novels and short stories in the field (SF, Fantasy, Horror) now fail for me: in that province the field has always claimed for itself, the imagination. Whether it be through spaceships, dragons, or vampires, the field has always stood for the transcendence, the primacy, of the imagination. And, precisely because of such tawdry, tired tropes as spaceships, dragons, and vampires, the field finds itself threatened with increasing irrelevancy and, increasingly, the death of its collective imagination. Spaceships, dragons, and vampires have become hollow symbols, things for publishers to hang a label on: is it science fiction, fantasy, horror? Publishers will insist they need those labels, and they will continue to use such labels (mostly meaningless, for it is like defining a lamp by its shape rather than by the kind and brightness of the light it sheds), but do we as readers and writers have to adhere to them? Of course not. It may come as a shock, but there is a wealth of imaginative literature published in the so-called “mainstream” every year, and every year the vast majority of genre readers and writers never discover these books because they don’t carry the right label. For example, in 1991, Mark Helprin published A Soldier of the Great War, a book that stands as one of the greatest novels of the past 10 years, a book more imaginative, more daring, and more relevant to our times than any pop-culture-influenced cyberpunk adventure. The same could be said of Brooks Hansen’s The Chess Garden and many other amazing books.

Things could be worse—some intra-genre fertilization already occurs, mostly in the magazine markets. Just as a mainstream literary magazine like Boulevard will publish a fantastical story from time to time, so too will F&SF and Asimov’s SF Magazine publish a story that is not, by the field’s rather restrictive standards, genre fiction. Such cross-pollination, such hybridization is how species thrive. Yet when the editors themselves don’t come under attack for publishing such work, the work itself comes under fire from genre critics who, perhaps because their own reading is too narrow, cannot grok borderline genre stories. Time and time again, I have read reviews in which critics (often writers in the field themselves) fumble and bumble their way around such pieces, like blind men with an elephant, spending more verbiage cataloguing the type of fiction on display than in critiquing the relative merits of the story itself. Even more irritating and pointless, critics will clack and rattle on about what is “lost” when a “literary” element is added to a “speculative” story, as if such a discussion has any intrinsic significance at all. Such “critical bewilderment” exemplifies a certain stagnation in the field. It also demonstrates the ultimate effect of the unthinking adoption of marketing labels by readers and writers alike.

Despite this, a number of magazines and book publishers have appeared in recent years who espouse the strange, the different, the unique. Some, like Crank! and The Silver Web are moribund at this time but might rise again. Others, like Century, trudge on erratically, delivering a marvelous bounty of fiction from time to time. Presses like Fiction Collective 2, Black Ice Books, Small Beer Press, and my own Ministry of Whimsy have attempted to publish work that does not fit any preconceived definition of fiction or of genre.