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Anonymous asked you: Hello! It was me who asked the fantasy question. Thank you so much for taking your time and I love it when you ramble; so that was awesomesauce. That last para made my heart sing. It’s definitely frustrating since it’s harder to verbally convince someone than showing them an articulate piece of writing. I wish we could ask Neil Gaiman for a pithy comeback for cases where it’s not possible to carry on a long and nuanced argument. (argh sorry, too long - have to break it up into parts)
…I guess it’s technically a dystopia but there are too many similarities between sci-fi and fantasy that makes a world that uses magic no less valid than a world that uses a fantastically imagined science, is there? Anyways, sorry for the awkwardly long response (in 3 parts coz there’s a word limit on asks & gosh I hope I’m not creeping you out), I know you have better things to do than chat with random anonymous people.
And I’m guessing tumblr ate one of those three messages, because I only got two :( First things first, though: you’re DEFINITELY not creeping me out, there’s nothing to be sorry about, and no, I don’t actually have better things to do :P I always enjoy talking about these things.
I wish we could ask Neil Gaiman for a comeback too! Although judging from stuff he’s said in interviews, I’m guessing his attitude to genre snobbery these days pretty much amounts to shrugging and moving on :P
The message tumblr ate surely had more about the book you’re talking about, but from what I can gather (and I’m so sorry if I got it wrong), it’s one of those books that are difficult to classify because they blur the line between different genres? When I saw Patrick Ness at the Edinburgh Book Festival he said something really interesting about this - basically, that genres are useful for readers, publishers, booksellers and librarians, who often use classifications to navigate the hundreds of thousands of books out there and to know that if they like X, maybe Y and Z and W are worth trying as well. However, genres are NOT sets of rules that authors should blindly follow - they’re not even something authors should be worried about at all when they’re writing. If a book combines, say, elements of sci-fi and fantasy and is therefore difficult to classify, that’s the publisher’s marketing department’s problem, not the writer’s. Of course, it becomes the writer’s problem when the publishers go, “Sorry, we’re not buying this book because we can’t pigeonhole it and sell it easily”, which unfortunately does happen. But even then, that shouldn’t limit how imaginative people are when they’re writing, because if it does then books suffer. Magic, fantastically imagined science and a mix of both are all perfectly valid choices as long as there’s internal consistency in the novel. As a reader, that’s all I care about. Where the book gets placed at the bookshop is not my concern, and it tells me nothing about its content or quality.
Sorry again that I missed part of your message - silly tumblr :\
