Re: Is IF art? (was Re: Gareth's competition comments)


18 Oct 1995 10:20:09 -0700

london@ERE.UMontreal.CA (London David) writes:

>I don't think anyone (certainly not I) was questioning the artistic aspects
>of IF. However, the question remains: what kind of art is it? Is it Michael
>Jackson or Handel? Is it Spielberg or Ingmar Bergman? Is it Dick Francis or
>Tolstoy? (And of course there are continuous shades of grey between the
>extremes.)

I would say that those questions can't be answered, because you're
comparing a medium to a genre. That is, Spielberg and Bergman both work in
the same medium, film; but they work in different genres within that
media.

Just in case my distinction isn't clear--"prose" is a medium. "Detective
novels" and "literary novels" are two differents genres.

I know you feel we've been arguing too much over definitions, but I think
this is an important distinction. You can look at a genre and make a
reasonable statement about what the genre can and can't do--a sci-fi
novel can do X, a post-modernist novel can do Y. But I don't think you
can make the same sort of generalizations about entire media.

IF is a medium, and not a genre. There are different genres of
IF--detective IF, sci-fi IF, etc. So far, we haven't seen much, if any,
"literary IF." That doesn't mean it can't be created.

Because there just isn't that much IF in
the world, it's easy to forget that IF is a medium. In fact, you could even
make a case that all IF so far falls into one genre--say, the
"crossword-puzzle genre." That doesn't mean that IF _is_ that one genre,
only that other genres haven't been created. What I'm arguing is that
there's nothing in IF to prevent an artist from writing in the genre of
"literary IF".

New genres come and go all the time, in other media--witness the
detective novel, an invention of the last one-hundred years or so, or the
techno-thriller, an invention of the last fifty. But even with the
millions of prose writers in the world, it takes a long time for a new
genre to arise in fiction. Considering how few writers of IF we have, is
it a surprise that new genres are slow to arise?

-Jacob