People talk about mainstream fiction and sf as though they were two quite different kinds of writing, and fantasy as well, as though it was quite different. But I think this a false distinction, that...

[Claire travels in time. And while she and Jamie do fall in love, their story is not so much the stuff of sighs and moans (well, not just that anyway) as it is a grand...

I don’t like to label films with a genre.

Nevertheless, the potential and actual importance of fantastic literature lies in such psychic links: what appears to be the result of an overweening imagination, boldly and arbitrarily defying the laws of time, space and ordered...

I’ve never really been into the sci-fi genre myself.

It should be particularly stressed that the fantastic makes no sense in an out-and-out strange world. To imagine the fantastic in it is even impossible. In a world full of marvels the extraordinary loses its...

Essentially, in the model of strange fiction based in shifts in narrative modality, we are reversing the polarity, treating those ‘contents’ (errata, nova and chimera) as the end results of a literary technique of estrangement,...

Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to...

The whole home improvement genre has evolved into a kind of a combination between shows that are looking for laughs — and they are very successful — and reality TV.

I write fiction. It may have mystery, it may have horror, it may have fantasy, it may have love, but like life, it’s all the same genre.

I think Judge Judy is, like Oprah, sort of the star of her genre.

Fantastic literature has been especially prominent in times of unrest, when the older values have been overthrown to make way for the new; it has often accompanied or predicted change, and served to shake up...

I don’t think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It’s instructive to imagine...

If Music is a Place — then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.

Fuck the epistemic modality; this is alethic modality we’re talking now, not factuality but possibility.

At this point, a few words on this term ‘horror’ are perhaps called for. Some amateurs of this kind of literature engage in endless hairsplitting disputes, centered around this word and its close companion ‘terror’,...

But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.

If there’s a zeppelin, it’s alternate history. If there’s a rocketship, it’s science fiction. If there are swords and/or horses, it’s fantasy. A book with swords and horses in it can be turned into science...

Writing historical fiction has many common traits with writing sci-fi or fantasy books. The past is another country – a very different world – and historical readers want to see, smell and touch what it...

How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?The habit of authors...

Now that I’m being very successful, publishers are trying to mainstream me, but I’m unabashedly genre. It’s what I like to read, what I like to write.

The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature is as follows: All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about...

–It’s not Sci-Fi, we insist, It’s SF.Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know.

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

Good horror offers a sense of an upended, lawless world and that’s appealing to anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider.

Science fiction, as a genre is fundamentally about ideas. It’s about asking an impossible question, “What if…?” and building a story out of the answer.Romance on the other hand, is fundamentally about relationships. The hypothetical...

I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres – the fiction has to be real inside your head.

We insist that this stuff we call science fiction is not SCI-FI. For some in the ghetto of Genre this is axiomatic, a secret truth known only to the genre kids, that there is proper...

It’s really not the genre for me, or the venue, it’s the writing.

Urban Fantasy is the orphan left on the doorstep that no-one knows what to do with.

Man, that’s a killer strategy, that is, an awesome way to persuade the incognoscenti that we’re not crazed hokum junkies, high on hackwork, trying to pimp our addled euphoria to anyone who passes. Yeah, vehement...

Sometimes people say that we’re living in the future, and time’s up for science fiction, but I think that never will be, because science fiction really isn’t about the future. It’s about change and present-day...

A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant

I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent.

We can learn so much looking outside our core field of expertise.

I likes me some ‘Shit Blows Up’ fiction, don’t get me wrong.

Most high and happy princess, we must tell you a tale of the Man in the Moon, which if it seem ridiculous for the method, or superfluous for the matter, or for the means incredible,...

Personally, I’d like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it’s going to be so overloaded with meanings it’s just gibberish skewed to...

A great artist is not one who merely fits into a genre but one who defines the genre.

Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.

Animation is a technique, not a genre.

Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you’ll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other’s work as...

the crescent sun is high, the moon low; life is not for the faint-hearted; so why the fuck should art be?

The world of technology has made it easier for people to get in touch with their modern muses regardless of the genres that they are trying to utilize and even if they create a new...

This is the fiction that I’m referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative.

Horror, let’s face it, is basically pretty dumb. You’re writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn’t care.

I write across several genres. I’m a slut for words. I can’t keep it in my literary pants.

Not writing is never an option. This is not words of advice. It’s just literally never an option!

Crime writers, I’ve noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven’t been caught yet!

Fuck, if only ‘aesthetic idiom’ didn’t sound so damn poncy.