As I motored south on the way home from MileHiCon 41 in Denver, I found myself thinking long and hard about the place of my work in the fantasy genre. These reflections were timely, as I was simultaneously reviewing the whats and whys of my coming trip to San Jose for World Fantasy Con this weekend. My fiction cycle, The Hidden Lands of Nod, has been compared to works by J. R. R. Tolkien and Terry Pratchett, and aptly so. While neither of these authors has been a major influence on my work, other fantasists certainly have. However (you knew there was a “however” coming), under today’s category-driven marketing regime, the fantasy label has probably ghettoized my books in an unfortunate and unrepresentative way. A careful reading of the extant novels of my cycle—Prelude to a Change of Mind, Entranscing and Sleeper Awakes—will reveal that, magical little people notwithstanding, the more prominent antecedents to my fiction are, on the one hand, magical realists like Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges or Laura Esquivel, and on the other, novelists of the absurd like John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller. My single greatest literary influence, Doris Lessing, has straddled all these generic realms, and those of the psychological novel and social realism as well. Occasionally, she has even managed to do so all within the same book. As I prepare to travel to World Fantasy Con with hopes of making professional connections and enlarging my presence as an author, I find myself wondering if I do my fiction (and my art) a disservice by continuing to operate within the compartmentalization of genre identity. Is there some way I can suppress the fantasy label and step forward as a magical realist and a novelist of the absurd? Or, for that matter, as an ironist, a surrealist, a Taoist and a writer of extremely peculiar westerns? Any and all of these labels have as much relevance to my work as does the label, fantasy. My questions are genuine. No conclusions have yet formed, except this: identifying The Hidden Lands of Nod exclusively as fantasy has probably isolated it from the larger part of its potential readership. Reaching these readers will require a new tack for my literary ship. What exactly that may be still eludes me. Suggestions are welcome.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Borges, Doris Lessing, Entranscing, García Márquez, John Barth, Joseph Heller, Laura Esquivel, MileHiCon, Prelude to a Change of Mind, Pynchon, Sleeper Awakes, The Hidden Lands of Nod, Vonnegut, absurd, fantasy, magical realist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.