Fantasy and genre

I'm currently finishing off China Mieville's novel Perdido Street Station, which I first tried to read two or three years ago. I remember bouncing off the first five pages, confused and unable to find my bearings, and feeling generally repelled by the whole thing, but this time I've devoured it in less than a week. It was far less forbidding than I thought it was going to be, more generous and fast-paced, and wearing its pulp heritage proudly. My experience of it perfectly illustrates the old truism that what you bring to a novel is as important in its reception as what the writer brings to the page. Something that can seem annoying or rebarbative one moment can, with a little internal adjustment, seem thrilling and transgressive the next. I think I'll write something at length about Mieville in the future, [I can't find any way on Blogger to add the acute over the first 'e' in his name, sorry], once I've had a chance to read a few more of novels. I've got Kraken up next. I can't think of a writer who's made me look askance at the page more often since I read William Burroughs as a teenager.

Perdido Street Station comes during a summer of reading fantasy for me, in part because I've finished the draft of a novel and wanted something more escapist to read (and I don't mean that pejoratively), and partly because I'm gearing up to have another crack at writing a fantasy novel of my own. When I signed with my agent, about three years ago, this was always part of our plan; that I would write 'proper' books as my main focus, and draw on my Black Library/Warhammer experience to write fantasy novels as a sideline. It's a genre I broadly enjoy, although I'm quite picky about what I read in it. I have an essay in Dan Coxon's upcoming anthology Writing the Magic exploring my experience writing for Black Library, and my sometimes conflicted thoughts about fantasy more generally. Last year I finished the first part in a putative trilogy, a more traditional low-fantasy affair, but so far it hasn't picked up any interest from publishers. Assuming the book isn't incredibly boring or just total garbage, I suspect this is in part because of the market, which at the moment seems more focused on chasing formerly self-published Romantasy from American writers, in search of the next Sarah J. Maas or Rebecca Yarros (which is fair enough; they've sold millions). Publishing more widely is a deeply conservative business, and trends will be flogged to death before the next one emerges for a similar course of greedy flagellation. But then, every book a publisher pays to have published is a gamble, and might make nothing at all.

Quite apart from this, a lot of the discourse surrounding fantasy, and genre more broadly, can be depressing. I'm occasional lurker on the Fantasy sub-Reddit, and I've found it surprising how much of the conversation turns around the concept of 'tropes'. People will ask for recommendations based on a  set of their favourite tropes, like they're choosing a sandwich filling. 'Enemies to friends', 'enemies to lovers', 'found family', 'cosy', 'chosen one', 'magic school'. The idea not just that genre fiction can be broken down to these tropes, but that it should be, is deeply strange to me. It's an approach to fiction that feels one step removed from what our AI overlords are going to foist on us before too long; that you can dial up any type of novel you want to read and have it delivered within seconds by ChatGPT, or the soulless entity of your choice. In a genre that already suffers  disproportionately under Sturgeon's Law (that 90% of anything is crap), I don't think this attitude is doing much to improve it.

But then that's only Reddit, and shouldn't really be taken as a representative sample of anything other than people who spend far too much of their time online. It does look like there's plenty of good stuff out there; I want to read Simon Jimenez's The Spear Cuts Through Water, a load of Jeff Vandermeer and M. John Harrison, Sofia Samatar, Pierce Brown. There's more than enough to keep me occupied as I plan my next assault on the bastion of fantasy.