Here's another repost from a discussion on Amazon started by yours truly. It's amazing what happens when a bunch of fans get together to shoot the breeze...
"Why doesn't fantasy get the respect?
Over the last fifty or sixty years, it seems, there been a split in the world of literature, between those who write genre or popular fiction, and those who write literary. And while the genre writers tend to make the money, the literary guys get the respect. Which, I will admit, does seem a bit confusing.
Back on the old, old, really days, there wasn't such a distinction. Writers were writers, full stop. Arthur Conan Doyle created The Lost World along with Sherlock Holmes. Edgar Allen Poe was the godfather of horror, and one of the greatest writers in American letters. Heck, Isaac Asimov wrote about EVERYTHING, not just scifi. But nowadays if you mention the fact that you read fantasy, scifi or horror, let alone write it, they look on you as if crawled out of the gutter, a peasant among the aristocrats (for some reason, mystery writers get a pass...)
When did this division occur, and why? True, a lot of fantasy is just mindless escapism, but that's true of a lot of stuff considered highbrow. And authors like George R.R. Martin or Scott Bakker turn out thoughtful and highly observant work on the human condition...which just so happens to be set in worlds where magic and dragons exist. Yet the literary establishment derides it as trash.
When you get down to it, literary fiction is basically just another genre, with its own themes, character types, and it's own audience. So I ask, why doesn't fantasy fiction get the respect of the critics?
And is that necessarily a bad thing?"
Here's the link. Follow to see the responses...very cool.
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