But I agree about the name. There was a minor literary scandal some years ago when a prize for new Irish writers was given to one Nina Fitzpatrick, author of a hilarious book called Fables of the Irish Intelligentsia.

<Dom: <I've been busy, I think you'll be pleased to hear, writing reams of stuff that bears no relation to any known genre. Which means, if nothing else, I'll have trouble getting anyone to pay me for it.>>

In fact I could name dozens of writers who genre-hopped, or bent the 'rules' (which can be made manifest in innumerable ways -- bookshop display conventions like fiction/nonfiction, or publishers' and librarians' categories - based, like dictionaries, on existing praxis and thus inherently biased towards conservatism - or market demands and/or somebody's perception thereof - or more academic subdivisions, eg PoMo and its idiot bustard offspring ... and so on and on).

It's not the point, somehow. Neither is smartness, which isn't *quite* as exotic as I sometimes make it out to be. What is? I dunno. But most writers tend to just get on with the business of writing stuff that is publishable and answers their own questions about life, the multiverse, and all.

This can involve compromises, such as writing genre fiction when one had aspirations to be literary. I've known novelists to give it up after three or four books, believing that they were in line for neither riches nor critical kudos nor street cred, never mind the entire package.

It's another of those just-too-big-captain zones: gravity alone will crush a visitor like a bug. I'll try to put together an essay or something, if only to discover what I think.

I've never seen a writing-related rule or maxim that hasn't been broken by somebody. Rather like chess in that regard.

And writers whom one thinks of as famous or otherwise established can have difficulty selling their pet project to the industry. Like the movie biz.

Heh... okay.

Well, in a sense, most fiction mixes with non-fiction. If the writers actually know anything about their subject(s), that is. :s

< Well, at least I've now learned Auel's gender ... ;} >

I sed she was <American>, dinni? :p

The oddity is that the thing is found at opposite ends of the writing continuum, in mass-market bestsellers as well as rarefied and exotic experimental work.

One reason, however, for its appearance at the populist end is that some writers simply aren't very good at covering up their research work. Or they hire somebody else to do the digging, and to present them with a set of easy-to-digest simplifications. Actually reading stuff in the form of primary research -- even 'Art History for Dummies' and 'A Beginner's Guide to Angelology' -- being beneath the dignity of a major historical figure like Dan Brown. Whom I may return to when I've reloaded.

Here, in a sense, we're talking about a trick that fiction is very good at (though, naturally, the skill level of different practitioners varies widely). It's essentially the novel or story's capacity to incorporate information from some external source -- leading to the gun/machinery fetish of Clancy-style thriller writers, the lifestyle and brand-name indicators common in the chick-lit genre, or any of the innumerable ways that writers try to embed fiction in a 'real world' grounded on facts.

At a more literary level, novelists have found ways to use a range of stylistic registers and voices from outside the routine world of fiction -- examples include Joyce, who used the language of newspaper journalism, advertising, and ancient mythology in Ulysses.

This brings us to the 'encyclopedic fiction' concept -- a term used by the critic Edward Mendelson in the 1970s. His main examples were Melville (Moby Dick), Joyce (Ulysses) and Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow). He also went back to earlier centuries to cite pre-novelistic literary encyclopedias such as Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, and Paradise Lost.

I have no problem with his basic description of the encyclopedic genre -- basically great wodges of information about whales or rocketry worked into novel form (or into epic poetry etc, if you include the older cases). But his idea has dated badly, partly because actual non-fiction encyclopedias have mutated so much in the age of Wiki.

Another problem is that Mendelson suggested that encyclopedic fictions get written at a point in history where a society is defining or redefining itself, and the Enc Fics participate in this by summarizing the common knowledge of the culture. In the past, these cultures tended to be national ones -- England in Canterbury Tales, the USA in Moby Dick, Ireland (or arguably post-imperial Europe) in Ulysses.

I tried to argue in my MA thesis that Gravity's Rainbow could be seen as the founding mythology of the information age. But it's a dubious idea, and I soon stopped agreeing with it. In any case, Neal Stephenson, in Cryptonomicon, has since made a more thorough job of it.

I haven't even got around to outlining the more experimental varieties of fact/fiction splicing (including an old 1990 collaboration between McCarthy and Domdaniel, where one did the fiction and the other did the facts). Nor have I fully explained why Dan Brown is the worst writer ever to draw breath.

He checked his pulse. It seemed in order. Then he remembered how Dick, in his later writing, had explained how androids might simulate human behavior so well that they themselves might not know they were androids.

But that's just crazy, thought Pinguid. Surely there were obvious ways of finding out. He quickly lowered his trousers ... and saw the serial number engraved on his

Hee hee hee... this does not seem to bode well for Brown. Heh. :D

Thanks for the essay. Makes very enjoyable reading. :)

I got sucked into re-reading Orson Scott Card's brilliant 'Ender's Game' today... and should be "up" in a few hours because my new IPhone is due to arrive. This will free me from depending on being able to figure out the management's user passwords for my daily br...oadband (that is, net access) at work, which should go a long way toward restoring a passable facsimile of sanity.