{"id":1157,"date":"2015-06-30T14:18:30","date_gmt":"2015-06-30T18:18:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/?p=1157"},"modified":"2016-03-10T14:18:54","modified_gmt":"2016-03-10T19:18:54","slug":"about-genre-from-ursula-k-le-guin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/?p=1157","title":{"rendered":"About Genre, from Ursula K. Le Guin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00ab\u00a0The Obligatory Bit about Science Fiction, Fantasy and Genre<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are dozens of definitions of what \u201cscience fiction\u201d is; few are useful and none is definitive. Variations on the term, such as \u201cspeculative fiction,\u201d complicate the discussion more than they clarify it. \u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n

Genre, a concept which could have served as a useful distinction of various kinds of fiction, has been degraded into a disguise for more value-judgment. The various \u201cgenres\u201d are now mainly commercial product-labels to make life easy for lazy readers, lazy critics, and the Sales Department of publishers.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not my job as a writer to make life easy for anybody. Including myself.\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n

For a writer, there is a genuine difference between fantasy and science fiction, which has nothing to do with the commercial branding of books as \u201cgenre\u201d or the categorical imperatives of critics. The difference is in how you write it\u2014what you are doing as a writer. In fantasy you get to make it all up, even the rules of how things work, and then follow your rules absolutely. In science fiction you get to make it up, but you have to follow most of the rules of science, or at least not ignore them.\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re getting bored with this classifying, I\u2019m sorry\u2014I\u2019m doing it to show that the whole vocabulary\u2014\u201crealism\u201d \u201cscience fiction\u201d \u201cgenre fiction,\u201d and the rest of it\u2014doesn\u2019t give even a remotely adequate description of what I write, Or of what many other serious writers are writing. We need a whole new discourse on fiction.\u00a0\u2026\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n

–Ursula K. Le Guin. August 2012<\/p>\n

The Unreal and the Real \u2013 selected stories of Ursula K. Le Guin<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00ab\u00a0The Obligatory Bit about Science Fiction, Fantasy and Genre There are dozens of definitions of what \u201cscience fiction\u201d is; few are useful and none is definitive. Variations on the term, such as \u201cspeculative fiction,\u201d complicate the discussion more than they<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[588,366,587,371,365,589],"language":[7],"class_list":["post-1157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-fantasy","tag-fiction","tag-genre","tag-sci-fi","tag-science","tag-speculative","language-en_ca"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1157"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1158,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157\/revisions\/1158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1157"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ammatte.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Flanguage&post=1157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}