Steam fogs up my windows
Nov. 7th, 2010 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I don't know if you've all been following the recent steampunk debate, but I have, and it got me thinking about my own preferred sub-genre, and its problems. Rather than focusing on negative things, however, I decided instead to post about medieval fantasy novels that Get It Right. The post is here at Wordpress. You'll find links to other people's writing about the steampunk debate at the top of my blog post.
The final word, I think, has to go to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sophiamcdougall, who designed this nifty genre-bashing flowchart. I love it!
The final word, I think, has to go to
sophiamcdougall, who designed this nifty genre-bashing flowchart. I love it!
no subject
Date: 2010-11-07 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-07 08:02 pm (UTC)I think that a lot of recent fantasy (and by 'recent' I mean the past 10 or 15 years) is written in a sort of flaily vacuum, in the sense that writers are flailing around, trying to figure out which way the fantasy wind is blowing. Someone has success with YA fantasy, and there's a stampede to out-YA each other. Someone has success with urban fantasy (in the Charles de Lint sense, not the paranormal romance sense at first) and everyone rushes to out-urban everyone else. Someone has success with steampunk...you see where I'm going with this? I think the gritty arms race is yet another manifestation of this. As with all (sub-) genres, you have to wade through a lot of garbage to get to the good stuff.