Psychedelia Gothique

While sending out query letters to agents, one thing you are expected to supply is a list of books that are similar to the book you are pitching. With The Human Template , this seemed impossible. One thing my early readers consistently told me was that they had never read anything like my book before. I’m a longtime believer in the adage “There’s nothing new under the Sun,” so I didn’t buy into this notion right away. Yet, it didn’t really help me to come up with any real comparisons. When I first started sending queries, my response was usually to mention a couple of   influences - rather than similar books. One of my favourite genre-books ever is The Iron Dragon’s Daughter by Michael Swanwick. I consider it to have the best opening of any sff book I have ever read and one of my clear goals is to be as good a writer as Michael Swanwick. Rereading his Vacuum Flowers while I was working on my diptych, I was briefly pumped to feel that my book is both stylistically similar ...

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...