{"id":121,"date":"2011-07-21T21:46:20","date_gmt":"2011-07-22T01:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=121"},"modified":"2011-07-21T21:46:38","modified_gmt":"2011-07-22T01:46:38","slug":"china-mieville-and-lit-ra-chur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/?p=121","title":{"rendered":"China Mi\u00e9ville and Lit’ ri ‘cha"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ursula Le Guin has written and interesting review <\/a>of China Mi\u00e9ville’s latest book in The Guardian.\u00a0 I was amused by the section where she writes<\/p>\n

“Some authors fill a novel with futuristic scenery and jargon and then strenuously, even stertorously, deny that it’s science fiction. No, no, they don’t write that nasty stuff, never touch it. They write literature<\/em>. Though curiously familiar with the tropes and conventions of the despised genre, they so blithely ignore the meaning of terms, they reinvent the wheel with such cries\u00a0of self-admiration, that their endeavours seem a doomed effort to prove that one can write a novel without learning how.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(she isn’t referring to China, there, by the way).\u00a0 More amusing, though, was the speed with which the comments on the article went straight to arguing about whether Mi\u00e9ville thinks he is a “literary” author or not.\u00a0 The whole argument of literary versus genre strikes me as a bit odd.\u00a0 I can understand differentiating for marketing purposes, but the way some others cling to a very fuzzy distinction strikes me as a bit desperate at times.<\/p>\n

I like taxonomies as much as the next person and more than most, but they don’t always work.\u00a0 More importantly, why bother?\u00a0 If you need to figure out where to shelve it, I suppose, but otherwise, it’s just a filtering mechanism<\/a> at best, and a really crude one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ursula Le Guin has written and interesting review of China Mi\u00e9ville’s latest book in The Guardian.\u00a0 I was amused by the section where she writes “Some authors fill a novel with futuristic scenery and jargon and then strenuously, even stertorously, deny that it’s science fiction. No, no, they don’t write that nasty stuff, never touch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-writing-things"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluecandlesociety.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}