Today's Babel Clash essay...
This talk about genres reminds me of a current persistent trend in genre fiction of which I am growing painfully weary. It’s certain to irritate some of my writers friends when I bring it up, so I hope some of them will jump up attempt to tell me how wrong I am.
I’m speaking of what I’ll call “mashup fiction.” The This sort of thing has been around for some time, but in the last few years there’s been a flowering of it in comics, fiction and cinema and I am frankly sick of it. By “mashup fiction” I mean stories whose genesis is the intentional combination of unrelated tropes, historical figures, or characters from previously published works. What some call “crossover fiction” I’ll relegate to a subcategory of this.
Read the full post at Babel Clash.
My full response will have to wait a day or two. But don't think I'm kidding when I say that I put zombie ninjas in my current story in your honor, right after reading this essay.
ReplyDeleteIn our ongoing effort to make this blog about the art and craft of writing again, in fact to make it THE place about such matters, I applaud Matt's recent essays -- even this one which is of course vile and mean and evil.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to Chris' rebuttal. Though I may rebut as a layman, having some devotion to the cross literary, cross genre mashup, Chris can speak with ecumenical certainty, dashing his mountaintop-forged stone tablets against Sturges' soft mellon.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmm...
ReplyDeleteMelon.