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Genre Fiction Quotes

Browse 9 quotes about Genre Fiction.

Genre Fiction Quotes

“This, I think, should answer why I have more often than not written stories which, for a convenient label, are called science fiction. There are few literary fields, it seems to me, that deal so strikingly with themes that concern us all today; there are few more exciting genres; there are none fresher or so full of continually renewed and renewable concepts. It is, after all, the fiction of ideas, the fiction where philosophy can be tinkered with, torn apart, and put back together again, it is the fiction of sociology and psychology and history compounded and squared by time. It is the fiction where you may set up and knock down your own political and religious and moral states. It can be a high form of Swiss watch-making. It can be poetry. It has resulted in some of the greatest writing in our past, from Plato and Lucian to Sir Thomas More and François Rabelais and on down through Jonathan Swift and Johannes Kepler to Poe and Edward Bellamy and George Orwell....”

WritingIdeasPhilosophyHistoryPsychologyBooksScience FictionSociologyGenresGenre Fiction
Book:Fahrenheit 451
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“A writer sets out to write science fiction but isn’t familiar with the genre, hasn’t read what’s been written. This is a fairly common situation, because science fiction is known to sell well but, as a subliterary genre, is not supposed to be worth study—what’s to learn? It doesn’t occur to the novice that a genre is a genre because it has a field and focus of its own; its appropriate and particular tools, rules, and techniques for handling the material; its traditions; and its experienced, appreciative readers—that it is, in fact, a literature. Ignoring all this, our novice is just about to reinvent the wheel, the space ship, the space alien, and the mad scientist, with cries of innocent wonder. The cries will not be echoed by the readers. Readers familiar with that genre have met the space ship, the alien, and the mad scientist before. They know more about them than the writer does. In the same way, critics who set out to talk about a fantasy novel without having read any fantasy since they were eight, and in ignorance of the history and extensive theory of fantasy literature, will make fools of themselves because they don’t know how to read the book. They have no contextual information to tell them what its tradition is, where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to do, what it does. This was liberally proved when the first Harry Potter book came out and a lot of literary reviewers ran around shrieking about the incredible originality of the book. This originality was an artifact of the reviewers’ blank ignorance of its genres (children’s fantasy and the British boarding-school story), plus the fact that they hadn’t read a fantasy since they were eight. It was pitiful. It was like watching some TV gourmet chef eat a piece of buttered toast and squeal, “But this is delicious! Unheard of! Where has it been all my life?”

WritingReadingFantasyScience FictionCriticsGenreGenre Fiction
Author:Ursula K. Le Guin
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“...I’ve never understood the logic that says a work doesn’t need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I’ve also never understood the logic of excusing a work from the need to tell a story worth telling about people worth knowing simply because the author writes pretty language or has some insights to offer.”

StoryWriters On WritingWriting CraftGenre BendingGenre FictionGenre ConventionsGenre ConstraintsGingernuts Of Horror InterviewWriting Genre
Author:Glen Hirshberg
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“There was a dreadful logic here - so obvious he had overlooked it. The real need was for a different kind of book altogether, a book for the times. Very well then, he would explore that infernal map, transcribe its morbid cartography; record the tale of a realm that was at once a city and Hell and himself. In this way Owen Maddock turned his back on the light and sought out the oracles that lurk in darkness. A feverish energy possessed him. He laboured as never before upon his given work. Now he would strive to be obscure, to lead his readers by crooked paths, baffle them with indecipherable mysteries. There would no delicacy of style, only 'thunder at midnight'. Little by little there rose up before his inner eye a new vision to replace that of the White Road that had led him nowhere: a Kingdom of Darkness, a crepuscular domain of monstrous cults that chanted, to the tolling of iron bells and the beating of brazen gongs, unpronounceable demonic litanies. He must familiarise himself with every aspect of this world, its endless roll-calls of Hell, the spells by which the doors of the pit might be opened. He must cast in awful detail the laws by which tortures were administered. He would write for days in a frenzy, his mind ranging on raven's wings through skies black as pitch. "The White Road”

Horror FictionGenre FictionSupernatural Fiction
Book:The White Road
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“At this point, a few words on this term 'horror' are perhaps called for. Some amateurs of this kind of literature engage in endless hairsplitting disputes, centered around this word and its close companion 'terror', as to which' stories may so be categorized and which may not, and whether or not descriptions such as weird or fantasy or macabre are preferable. The designation 'horror', with its connotations of revulsion, satisfies me no more than it does the purists but I believe that it is the only term which embraces all the stories in this collection and which succinctly suggests to the majority of readers what is in store for them. Horror then, in this instance, covers tales of the Supernatural and of physical terror, of ghosts and necromancy and of inhuman violence and all the dark corners and crevices of human belief and behavior that lie in between. ("An Age In Horror" - introduction)”

HorrorTerrorGenreGenre FictionGenre Constraints
Book:Reign of Terror: Great Victorian Horror Stories
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