Hi. I have problems understanding what genre fiction is and why is bad. Please enlight me

>Children of Hurin
>Not The Hobbit

Is this bait, or, are you really this stupid?

lol Dick ain't deliberate. He was a very messy writer. cool ideas though.

When the alt universe helps raising up situations that would less likely happen in a "normal" narrative framework (like dystopic stuff or shit), it's cool.
When it doesn't, all of the alt universe that supports the story only intends to flash the reader for the sake of exotism, which is a really cheap and, once some kind of cannon is established, predictable way of tryna grab attention to a story that isn't really worthy on its own so it gotta be ornamented with orcs and elves and knights and jetpacks and aliens n shit. It stops being literature and becomes pornographic entertainment.

Idiocy.

why tho

It's stuff that basically is just there for entertainment. Genre Fiction strings together tropes and cliches in a way that is recognizable and largely predictable, but nonetheless entertaining if you're not used to the tropes. Literary fiction, on the other hand, is trying to get you to learn and think about new things in new ways. By nature, the ideas in literary fiction require more complex treatment then just stringing together tropes, and often they have to subvert tropes or ignore them altogether.

There are probably other ways to define it, but the tropes approach is probably the easiest to understand.

Because he's also a science fiction/fantastical writer. The list has Borges, Chesterton, Lewis and Little Prince, so it's obvously a bit wider than the regular fantasysf chart.
It's his best work m8, what seems to be the problem?

OP here, I think I understand better now. Is Asimov genre fiction?

No When the Edelweiss
Flowers Flourish?

Genre fiction doesn't exist tho, in the way Veeky Forums uses it.
He would fit the definition for some, but not for others.

Genre fiction would be stories written to intentionally include the tropes and conventions of the genre. So a romance always includes X and a western always includes Y. Detective stories are predictably like Z and scifi/fantasy is typically like ABC. There's nothing inherently wrong with it and there's plenty of pleasure to be had if you happen to enjoy one genre or another. There can be craft to genre writing, if the author is able to weave the conventions into a story in a fresh or unexpected manner, but one more often expects an uninteresting and mechanical catalog of plot events that are entirely predictable. But again, to each his own. I love Wodehouse's Jeeves books, though they are genre fiction by these standards.

They get a bad rap here because the pretentious /litshits typically buy fully into a high/low division of writing, and genre usually is considered low. It's insincere, inauthentic, it means an author has sold out, it's plot rather than character or prose, etc. The high and lofty abstractions that we associate with the power of literature (it enlightens, it expands, it informs, it transports, it moves, etc.) is not applied to genre because it typically lacks the artistry and craft of "high" lit.

The main point of contention I have with the distinction has to do with pleasure. Speaking as a pretty pretentious shit (one who does, in spite of himself, mind what he reads in public so as not to be seen reading something too shit or common) I would rather follow the pleasure principle in the novels that I read, than some sense of high/low writing. Plenty of "important" literature leafes me flat and bored, and I typically don't hesitate to put down or get rid of a book that I don't enjoy. Similarly, I do enjoy some pulpy 'genre' books and will happily read them.

"Genre" can be useful as a description of style or content, but not as a judgment or pejorative.

Could be, in that some of his books follow recognizable conventions, but his writing also helped to forge some of the conventions. And the quality of his writing and ideas rise above that of plenty of other writers in the "genre".

I concede PKD was haphazard, which is down to his method of writing in intensive splurges. He apparently did not use editors with the exception of The Man In The High Castle, and A Scanner Darkly; something he mentions in an audio interview I heard on youtube recently. So you have a point that he is a less deliberative writer than most.

But even in his potboilers and pulpier books, Dick is writing about the real and unreal through a lens of philosophy (mostly Jung) and religious mysticism (Gnosticism) and this intertextuality is his chief literary component. And then there is the dialogue, which is his strongest point, IMO.

Some genre fiction really is good though.

Like Neuromancer.

Neuromancer is the one science fiction classic that is actually pretty shit.

lol

Genre fiction isn't "bad," it's just that most genre fiction focuses on description, either of an environment, or a system, or of action scenes

Genre fiction usually has very little characterization and zero philosophy, and very little literary applicability. They just describe things happening

Works like PKD's and Aasimov's I would say fit more into "Fiction" than "Science Fiction," much like Jules Verne or HG Wells do. PKD, Aasimov, Clarke, Vonnegut and Ellison definitely do carry literary merit. Star Wars books do not