Geek Pet Peeves # 50982272071463

[areyououtthere]

Just finished reading Among Others by Jo Walton, a sweet little coming-out-as-a-geeky-intellectual story with a subtle fantasy edge. Loved the voice, loved the fact that I can now make myself an entirely new reading list from the books the protagonist, Mori, reads, loved the ambiguity of the fantasy--are the fairies Mori sees real or not? And I

Comments

[maladaptive]

There are legitimate complaints about moralizing stories-- for ex, most queer lit tends to be either erotica (okay fine) or stories about being queer, rather than being about a queer person who does stuff. But those're much smaller subsets, and there's a place for stories like that, too, within those subsets.

YA has more to it than Teenagers With Problems, so those books are okay to have. And, you know... lots and lots and LOTS of SF is the same basic Teens With Problems premise!

Though it is a very common teenage thing to sneer on things you don't like. Lord knows, I hated most YA books because why would I read about the real world when I had SF? Especially YA! Yaaaaawn, so boring, I'm gonna read about grown-ups. I thought the exact same thing. I still don't read much non-genre fic, but there's definitely a place for it. And I intend to write YA. Sooooooooo.

But the fun of being a grown-up writing teenagers is that I can put more nuance in the narrative than the teenaged protagonist might have.

[kid_prufrock]

"why would you ever read other novels, especially ones about problems, when there's SF"
isn't this OBVIOUSLY dumb, in a way that evinces a culpable laziness and lack of curiosity, even without considering the value of non-speculative middle school YA? (The person for me was Robert Cormier, FTR.)

I mean, "why would you ever listen to other music, when there's jazz?" "why would you ever watch other movies, when there's Hitchcock?" Because specialization is for insects?

[batyatoon]

I've used the term "mundanes"; I like it a lot less than I used to. I feel like it's legit for any group to have a word that means "everybody who isn't us", but -- well. It's too easy for that word to become an insult in itself.

By far most of what I read is genre -- fantasy and science fiction is the overwhelming majority (I would estimate eighty percent at the lowest), and maybe half of the remaining minority is detective fiction. But I also read a lot of children's books and YA novels, and a lot more of those -- maybe as much as forty percent -- are straight-up fiction. (With, of course, some borderline cases; how would you categorize the Pippi Longstocking books?)

I've never heard anyone ask why one would ever read other books when there's SF/F, and I am saddened to hear that anyone would ask that. It's a ridiculous question. Ask any such person to name four or five of their favorite SF/F authors, and I guarantee you that at least three (if not all!) of those authors are themselves readers of many, many other things