genre n.

This professor was ultimately equally contemptuous of the subject matter for my short stories and the kind of magazines and books I tended to cart along to class, SF and mystery magazines in particular. One day he said to me, ‘David, you seem to have some talent—but why don’t read better literature?’ (sic) Actually, I read much fine material outside of my indulgences in genre even then.

Yet in the millennial twilight, I feel inclined to celebrate the literary traditions of genre if only for a final time, to mention that the two most prominent contributors to the field during the first part of the century, George Orwell and H. G. Wells, were considered literary writers, and to mention further Thomas Disch’s 334, Samuel Delany’s Nevèrÿon, Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, the idiosyncratic work of Brian Aldiss and Keith Roberts, Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, Walter Tevis’s The Man Who Fell to Earth and Mockingbird, Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed—a list that could go on and on of books that nourished and craftsmen who inspired.

Yes, it’s quite true that the expectations of genre weight it a bit in one way, toward one interpretation, but my steadfast refusal to admit that they're actually real—even at the end, when he’s ready to make this momentous decision, he’s still not sure whether there actually are time travellers there, or he’s just making the whole thing up—makes it as ambiguous as possible, given the fact that it was going to have to appear in a genre magazine if it appeared anywhere at all.

But matters grow yet more complex, in the work of these writers and others, as the borders of genre themselves begin to dissolve, along with the borders between genre fiction and literary fiction.

Go into any chain or mall book emporium today and you'll still see the Immortals improbably dominating the sad remnants of the defrocked ‘horror’ section—King, Straub, Rice, Koontz, Barker, who had all evaded the sandtraps of genre by becoming sui generis, more literary, beach reads, or modern fabulists.

The writing collective known as the Ratbastards steps forth once again with Rabid Transit: A Mischief of Rats (Velocity Press, chapbook, $5.00, 50 pages, ISBN unavailable). Deemed in a cover blurb to consist of "interstitial fiction" (the newest synonym for "slipstream"), this five-story project does indeed navigate the borderland between genre and mainstream.

I am genre, through and through, and this is where I shall remain.