Un nouveau post d'Hal Duncan - The Scourge of Sci-Fi

[jerome]

Hal Duncan a mis un nouveau billet sur son blog : The Scourge of Sci-Fi

Voici le début :
"In the uptown district of Literature and the midtown district of Mainstream, so the story goes, the high-brow and the mid-brow all turn their noses up when they glance downtown, in the direction of Genre. Fairy tales for children, they sneer. On the door of the Bistro de Critique there was for a good many years a sign that read, “No Genre allowed.” The nearest they ever got to a genre label is General Fiction — a term with an empty definition if ever there was one, catch-all for a host of idioms and idiosyncracies. No, genre fiction just isn’t de rigeur there, so the story goes. So, fuck em, we say. Fuck the mundanes of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We’re Genre and proud of it.

We have plenty to be proud of. Even during the Golden Age, the boundaries were blurred as to what exactly constituted science fiction, and in the SF Café that made for a dynamic melting pot. Claiming the core of the field, those tables right in the centre of the SF Café, was that Science Fiction characterised by its futurological fantasias of space travel, robots, contact with aliens, off-world colonies. They owned the place, and with just cause. For all that this mode was born from the pulps and inherited the callow, shallow Rocket Age Romanticism, Old Man Campbell had brought something new to the table, a Rationalist bent that called for writers to level up their intellectual game. And they had, turning an idiom of Boy’s Own Adventures to more gnarly purposes — like the social commentary and critique of Pohl & Kornbluth’s 1952 satire THE SPACE MERCHANTS. Edging into this meanwhile were the visions of writers with even subtler agendas, outsiders like Orwell or insiders like Bester who saw even greater potential in this science fiction. In their disregard for, or subversive approach to, the pulp formulae, these writers sowed the seeds of at least one revolution that was to come in the shape of the New Wave. And the feminist sf of the 70s? And Cyberpunk?"

[Erion]

Y'a toujours des choses intéressantes dans les posts d'Hal Duncan (et ce post-là aurait sa place dans sense of wonder et métaphysique) mais bordel que c'est troooooop long (et pas évident à suivre, même avec un bon niveau d'anglais).

[Lensman]

J'aime aussi beaucoup les réflexion de Hal Duncan (dont l'anglais me pose parfois problème, je suis de temps à autre amené à essayer de "deviner" ce qu'il veut dire, mais d'habitude, je tombe juste, après longue vérification...). Le moins que l'on puisse dire, c'est que c'est un fan, et un beau. Sa manière de dire qu'au fond, il aime bien la sci-fi est touchante!
Oncle Joe

[dracosolis]

Hal est un chou.