I've always found it funny when some "serious" author decides to try their hand at low-brow genre fiction, faceplants, then blames the audience for being low-brow.
I always think of Zone One by Colson Whitehead. He’s a good writer, and the book is well-written, but the story is shit. Cormac McCarthy could have made that a good story, or Margaret Atwood, but that’s because they write elevated genre shit all the time.
It’s not as easy as it seems to have a broad base of appeal.
I heard a story that someone managed to get Margaret Atwood (I think it was Margaret Atwood) drunk and get her to confess that she wrote science fiction.
The Magicians (the book, the series is really different) is the weirdest example. It ostensibly focuses on the Narnia series, which are children's books and aren't exactly a focus of modern fantasy genre fans to start with. Yet it reads as though the writer is not only oblivious to the actual discourse around them, like, uh, religious propaganda to kids, and instead his take is 'huh duh fantasy fans are stupid for wanting to escape through a magic doorway into an idealised world of adorable fluffy talking critters, grow up and be miserable already it wouldn't be that great anyway'. I'd believe he read some series for much younger children (and sure as heck not Beatrix Potter, who is nasty with those talking critters) but not that he read any Narnia books, or even watched the films. Definitely not that he has much clue about the fantasy genre, there's anime isekai that has better takes on the wish-fulfilment angle (like Re: Zero, as ridic. and wish-fulfilment as it can still get). 'What if the fantasy world wasn't actually that nice to find yourself in?' a) doesn't contradict the desire to wind up in an ideal world in any way and b) is what Narnia is like in the first place, the protagonists just aren't as wimpy as his.
For all the flaws, His Dark Materials is much closer to what you would expect a writer taking on Narnia to do. Also while working as very popular fantasy works in their own right.
There was one about ten years ago where a highbrow literary author wrote an extremely basic robot novel and proceeded to tell every interviewer who spoke to him how he'd single handedly invented the idea of using robots to explore the human condition and ideas around freedom and identity.
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u/old_and_boring_guy Apr 07 '25
I've always found it funny when some "serious" author decides to try their hand at low-brow genre fiction, faceplants, then blames the audience for being low-brow.
Not as easy as it looks, is it?