Psychedelia Gothique

Harlan Ellison famously denied being a science fiction writer and apparently even walked off radio and tv shows when he was introduced as one. At the time it didn’t make sense to me. He was a frequent guest at SF conventions, had won tons of SF awards, 95 per cent of his work contained SF or fantasy elements and appeared in science fiction magazines and anthologies. Over the years, his stance started making more and more sense. I began to see the disadvantages of being put into a narrow box.   It’s less a case of allowing yourself to be put there – than it is of being put there with or without your approval or cooperation – subject to all the unfair preconceptions of the reading public. If you ask the person on the street for their perception of Science Fiction – even in our world where comic book movies rule the box office and everyone is familiar and somewhat tolerant of Star Wars and Star Trek – is that science fiction is formulaic space opera filled with thin characters ...

The Tradition of the Genre Ghetto As much as I’ve always wanted the respect that “literary” writers get, I’ve always lived on the outskirts. Denying that I was a genre writer was pointless. But from the 70s through the 90s it was a bit like saying I grew up in a trailer park. Admitting I wrote horror painted a picture of a trailer so far out in the sticks that you can only get there when the ground is frozen. In the literary world, genre has always been a dirty word. It has a recognized place in children’s lit and YA, but we were always expected to outgrow fantasy-adventure stories before we started university. Adult fantasy, horror, and science fiction (and even romance) was the sort of stuff we were expected to be embarrassed about, like watching porn or wearing adult diapers.   Since I was a kid, genre books aways occupied shelves on the outer perimeter or at the very back of book stores, hidden away from the traffic lanes. The Coming of the Paradigm Shift But re...