I Still Haven't Made It Through Under the Dome

And Steven King's time-travel novel is announced.  It will be interesting to see how he handles the themes.

What is intriguing to me is how many people think that writing outside one's home genre is something readily done.  I encounter it time and again.

"I plan to write an SF novel."

"Oh, have you read much SF."

"No, but I watch movies and TV."

It might not occur to such a one, but that acquaintance is insufficient to sustain a literary work with the specific conventions of a genre.  Many think that they will be ground-breaking and convention shattering, but to shatter conventions, one must know what the conventions are.

All this really has nothing to do with Mr. King's book--it just occurs to me as a result of a conversation that occurred this weekend.

Comments

  1. FredMarch 7, 2011 at 10:52 AM

    Stephen,

    A classic example of that is Caleb Carr. I read several of his mysteries a number of years ago. I thought they were quite good, so when he came out with an SF novel, I was interested.

    It was terrible; it sounded so old-fashioned and so badly written that it would not even have been a decent read in the 1930's when writers were first beginning to develop SF as a genre.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were sp...
Read more

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make. I think we can take...
Read more