I'm very surprised that it won the Tiptree - I think it's even less genre than the Separation, which I think was a bit of a cheat for the Clarke awards but feels at least arguable.
On the other hand, it does definitely expand or explore our understanding of gender. :)
Thats a bit of a tangent, but you see what I mean, I hope?
Yes ... the year that The Separation won I'd have preferred Light to take the award; and this year I'd give River of Gods the nod over Cloud Atlas for at least of the same reasons. And yet, the fact that neither Priest's book nor Mitchell's has both its feet firmly within the genre doesn't stop them being sf in my opinion. The genre is a community of people writing sf, but what people outside that community write can be sf too.
Of course Priest is a genre writer, but YKWIM. It works the other way--Pattern Recognition is ace, and interesting for how it relates to sf, but it is not itself sf, despite the fact that Gibson is a genre writer. The Baroque Cycle I'm agnostic on; I've heard that The System of the World does have significant genre elements, but I don't know the details.
Going back to the Ruff, you could say that it's a Gibson case, in that he's written emphatically genre stuff before (blurb for Sewer Gas Electric: America 2023--at the helm, the talking, holographic head of Ayn Rand in a hurricane lamp ... and Harry Gant is building a new Tower of Babel five hundred stories above the polluted streets of Manhattan!) so he's being claimed by the genre even when he's moved out of it. But I don't think that's the case.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chiming
no subject
Date: March 24th, 2005 10:13 am (UTC)From:On the other hand, it does definitely expand or explore our understanding of gender. :)
Thats a bit of a tangent, but you see what I mean, I hope?
Yes ... the year that The Separation won I'd have preferred Light to take the award; and this year I'd give River of Gods the nod over Cloud Atlas for at least of the same reasons. And yet, the fact that neither Priest's book nor Mitchell's has both its feet firmly within the genre doesn't stop them being sf in my opinion. The genre is a community of people writing sf, but what people outside that community write can be sf too.
Of course Priest is a genre writer, but YKWIM. It works the other way--Pattern Recognition is ace, and interesting for how it relates to sf, but it is not itself sf, despite the fact that Gibson is a genre writer. The Baroque Cycle I'm agnostic on; I've heard that The System of the World does have significant genre elements, but I don't know the details.
Going back to the Ruff, you could say that it's a Gibson case, in that he's written emphatically genre stuff before (blurb for Sewer Gas Electric: America 2023--at the helm, the talking, holographic head of Ayn Rand in a hurricane lamp ... and Harry Gant is building a new Tower of Babel five hundred stories above the polluted streets of Manhattan!) so he's being claimed by the genre even when he's moved out of it. But I don't think that's the case.