(no subject)

[winterbadger]

Reading a SciF/Fantasy book review, I came across this passage.

I think what gets me so about moments like this is how they involve self-realization. A paradigm shift, however slight (or major), where the characters are forced to confront something scary/extraordinary/beyond the normal, not about the world around them but about themselves.

It’s a literary trope that does exist outside the sf genre, but it’s much harder to find, and in my mind at least is rarely as viscerally satisfying.

Is it just me, or do others feel this betrays the reviewer's astounding lack of familiarity with much of mainstream literature? It seems as if just this sort of self-realisation is a terrifically common part of modern fiction, from Charles Dickens to JD Salinger to Jhumpa Lahiri.

 

Comments

[winterbadger]

OTOH, Michael Chabon gets very grumpy (and he is fairly young :-) about the "ghetto-ization" of genre fiction.

I think it was Anne McCaffrey who once said her books were science fiction because she made a point to tell the reader how her dragons had hollow bones, so of course they could fly in real life, as if that fact alone made all the difference _sigh_

OMG! Well, despite being a HUGE AMcC fan in high school (another of my many shames--I think maybe I was a gurl; I read all the angsty emo teen fiction short of Judy BLume) I am totally unsurprised by that, as I've come to feel she is just a pair of wings and a tiny gout of flame away from being all My Little Pony...