"Not long ago an outlet interviewed an author whose book was marketed as a feminist retelling of The Odyssey. I adore retellings, and I’m fascinated by work that examines gender in antiquity. But I felt my hopes fall when the author readily admitted to never having read the epic, dismissing the poem as backward and boring, whereas her tale—of course—was dynamic and new. Well, I thought, that’s not a fucking retelling then, is it? Retellings can and do grapple with or criticize or slyly comment on their source texts, but buried in the premise of the genre or form is an actual, active engagement with the story being retold. This desire for genre’s trappings without any of its rhetorical commitments or risks is not unique to contemporary SFF. How often does a show marketed as a social satire lack the courage to commit to its critique, or a mystery novel make certain promises within its premise that it fails to meet (or creatively subvert)?
Caroline, you might be saying by now, who cares where a book gets shelved at Barnes and Noble or if VampyreBabe98 thinks Anne Rice is committing thought crimes from beyond the grave? And you know what, fair. There is so much to care about, and so much more pressing and dire than any of this bullshit. But I still think we need the tools of genre more than ever, and we need the varied worlds and works genre fiction offers us in all their nuance and complication. Le Guin wrote:
“To describe society since the mid twentieth century— global, multilingual, infinitely interlinked— we need the global, intuitional language of fantasy. García Márquez wrote his histories of his own nation in the fantastic images of magical realism because it was the only way he could do it.”
Fantasy, she claims in the same essay, is our first and oldest kind of fiction, and perhaps that long lineage sometimes allows us to explore in the realm of the fantastic what we cannot off the page or confined by the limits of a more realist lexicon. There are many great contemporary genre authors following in Márquez’s footsteps, writing their vital histories and futures in the only way they can, with the tools at hand. I hope when those books find their readers, we are ready for them, and we read them with the care and curiosity they deserve."
--Caroline Shea (April Newsletter: New Fiction, Imagined Languages, and Who's Afraid of Genre? (pt. 1000))
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