EITHER-OR/NEITHER-NOR

No, this isn't a grammar lesson. It's more a kind of prolonged sigh at a kind of attitude in genre circles that wants everything to be black-and-white. This is particularly silly in a profession that is by definition subjective.

The attitude is this: if you publish an experimental fantasy anthology, you must hate pulp fiction. If you publish a novel that's "New Weird," for example, you must dislike "Old Weird."

This attitude isn't new. When I put out the first Leviathan in 1994, some people saw it as an attack on traditional fantasy and SF. All I thought I was doing was creating a niche for unclassifiable stuff that couldn't find a home otherwise. I might as well have called the series "Refugees".

Of course, if you're passionate about the books you help create, your words in support of those books can seem like an unofficial manifesto. I understand that.

But lately I've seen too many instances of people saying "Jeff hates X, Y, and Z" with no evidence whatsoever to back it up. Even more ironically, I've seen people say China Mieville hates pulp fiction when, in fact, the opposite is true. China loves a lot of pulp fiction. Heck, he even wrote an introduction to a Lovecraft book.

One reason the pirates anthology has been a joy to edit is that it has allowed Ann and me to indulge in our love for more traditional fiction. For example, Garth Nix story we've taken contains more than a nod and a wink to Howard and to Leiber, which is great. Yes, that's right naysayers--I like a lot of Howard and I love Leiber. I have problems with about half of Lovecraft's output, but love some of his work.

The reality of creativity in the service of producing books is often the same as the reality of the marketplace: focus and niche are very important. To be too diaphanous and various is to accomplish less. Not to mention that refugee quality. If you see cool stuff being left by the wayside because no one else is willing to publish it, publishing it does not mean you're in opposition to the status quo. It just means you like other stuff as well.

For pleasure, I read everything from noir mysteries to tea-cosey mysteries to westerns to space opera to horror novel to lit. mainstream to gonzo to...whatever. I like anything that isn't a fifth generation generic copy of something else.

So, in short, there's no either-or about it. I remember walking around the Associated Writers Program conference book fair in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago and thinking to myself, "If genre traditionalists who refer to the 'literary mainstream' could see this display of vitality and diversity, would they ever use the term again?" It really was amazing--so many different voices and so many different views of the imagination. And it's the same in SF/F. So many voices, so many views, and the majority of them interest the hell out of me.

If, as an editor or writer, I sometimes have to be more specific, more focused, then that's just part of the creative process. The absence of something does not necessarily mean that the excluded thing is disliked. This kind of inference is the result of shoddy thinking.

Jeff