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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wayside" data-source="post: 2290433" data-attributes="member: 8394">I'm still not clear what you're saying then. Do you agree with Celebrim, while not taking his position--hence being in no place to defend it? Or do you think SF and F (I'm just going to go with the capitals from now on, typing them out is getting tiresome) employ some procedure, whether speculation about identity or metaphorical representation of power or something else, without being about this procedure? If the former, what is your actual position (or tendency--you may, like me, not have an actual position here, rather a goal)? If the latter, I would say that a particular SF or F story need not itself be about the procedures it employs, but that SF and F in a general sense, if those procedures are their distinguishing characteristics, are most definitely about them.Call me crazy, but this doesn't sound like F to me. It has magic and all, but it honestly doesn't strike me as F, I suppose in the same way Star Wars doesn't strike barsoomcore as being SF despite its trappings.That sounds rather cliche, certainly, but it doesn't sound comparable to Sadism as a genre. I'm thinking of de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden, de Lautréamont's Maldoror. It sounds to me like there may be some similar imagery in the Kushiel books, but, first, I don't accept that imagery = genre, and second, even if it did, unless the Kushiel books involve sex with goats and more unutterable depravities, I don't think the imagery, whatever similarities it might have, would be comparable. In fact I would go so far as to say that genuine Sadist literature need not have anything to do with sex or the idea of pleasure as some kind of ego-satisfaction.Nono, of course not, and naturally neither have I. In fact one of the things I've found most interesting about this discussion so far is hearing from you about these various series of SF and F books I'm unfamiliar with, all of which I've been checking out and reading bits from.Now this is an odd thing to say. Have you read the Wake? (And if you haven't, let me just say, I don't think it's worth the trouble, personally, and if you ever do decide to read it, join a reading group: even Joyce all-stars like Fritz Senn read it in groups.)  I examined a few numbers of the series but wasn't able to find anything comparable. Stream of consciousness is hardly Joyce's invention, though because of parts of Ulysses, especially "Penelope," and of course the Wake, it's sometimes called "Joycean," like the technique of the central intelligence, free indirect discourse and so on. Let's call these Postmodern Fiction (Joyce is often called a modernist but I find it more accurate to say he's at the beginning of postmodernism). In terms of pure narrative I doubt any SF or F would "work" built around Joyce. Stylistically, I think it's possible, though, at least initially, the SF and F crowds wouldn't know what to do with it. As a genre, let's group Ulysses with Flaubert's Parrot (it isn't detective fiction, I don't know where that angle comes from; it's actually more about desire than anything else), and maybe Blanchot in a general sense, though I think any SF or F written like that wouldn't scan. Rilke, I don't know where the comparison with Vonnegut or Dick comes from, since I do have some experience with these guys. In terms of style there's nothing, in terms of plot there's nothing. I was thinking of the Notebooks in a Seinfeld way I guess, since it's a book in which nothing happens.I was thinking more of how Mann uses a famous German philosopher's descent into madness for Lewerkühn, and also his use of Schönberg's musical innovations as the sort of genius worth selling one's soul for. I didn't mean the actual Faustus narrative at all (I really should've been clear on what exactly I had in mind when typing these questions out, sorry about that). I have yet to see any SF or F touch the kunstlerroman genre.Let's also toss tragedy in here. Dune relies heavily on tragic elements, to the point where, at least in the first few books, I don't even think of it as SF (with God Emperor I'm not sure what I'd call it). The science there is more like a convenient plot device, and unlike Star Wars, the societal models and general layout of Dune favor F over SF. But I don't think of it as F either, no more than I do the Hipollytus (someone mentioned Racine's Phedre as being in the F/power camp earlier).</blockquote>

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