Ambition in genre writing is often a perilous thing. The undiscriminating taste of genre readers (actually a highly discriminating taste, but a taste that discriminates only its kind of book from all others, aesthetic quality aside) and the invisibility of genre writing to all other readers are only aspects of the problem. Central is the question of whether the forms and constraints of any of the modern genres—horror, say, or SF, romance, sword-and-sorcery, or the Western—are worth struggling with, worth the effort of transforming. What readership will witness your labours or be able to understand what you have done?
Posted 992 days ago.
