“They don’t particularly dislike John Wayne movies, those readers, but they’re not fans of them, so why should they bother with that Combat Fiction section? If they want popcorn fiction, they’ll go to the movies. If such a book gets reviewed, it’s in the Combat Fiction magazines. It may be hailed as a classic by the patrons of the Combat Fiction Bar and Grill, but when they try to persuade the incognoscenti of its value they’re met with arched eyebrows of doubt. Today, in the Bistro de Critique,... a sceptical friend lowers the copy of Neuromancer he happens to be reading. (He sighs. He’s only just finished arguing with a Crime Fiction fan that Neuromancer is not, as they were insisting, “really Crime Fiction” simply because it has criminals in it. In this fold, it should be noted, where the strange is a third mask between tragedy and comedy, where García-Márquezian magical realism has its mainstream bedfellow in Orwellian speculative realism, there is no question of a novum or chimera rendering a work “genre fiction.”MoreLessRead More Read Less
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