Notes from New Sodom

... rantings, ravings and ramblings of strange fiction writer, THE.... Sodomite Hal Duncan!!

Friday, March 21, 2008

A Link

The history of SF is a history of ambivalent deaths. The many movements within the genre—the New Wave, feminist SF, cyberpunk—are marked as both transcendent death-as-births, finally demolishing the "ghetto" walls, and as degenerescent birth-as-deaths, perverting the specificity of the genre. To be elevated above the genre is a transcendent death and the birth of Literature, but as these movements harden, coalesce, are named, they fall back as subgeneric moments of SF. They become detours on the road to the proper death of SF.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just marvelous.

3:30 am  
Blogger Swanosaurus said...

Thanks for the link, good article! Even though it is from 1994 (and it's metaphorical use of the Freudian Todestrieb might be a little questionable), it would certainly be interesting to apply it to certain ongoing debates about the New Weird, or Fabulist Fiction, or Fantastika ...

11:33 am  

Post a Comment

<< Home