This article represents EXACTLY what’s wrong, specifically nowadays about all genre discussions.
The most important TRUTH is how those who suffer discrimination have no restraint about becoming the discriminators without having the perception that they are moving through the same patterns.
The same patterns. There’s just repetition done by different subjects.
So Fantasy books, how they get discriminated by “serious” literature. Prejudices and everything.
But this kind of compartmentalization and affiliation is a pattern that always repeats. It is the constant across all forms of culture and all human categories. And the debate itself is ALWAYS an endless and pointless repetition. A pattern itself. It’s Internet redundant ceremony. A kind of meme itself that builds identity and gratifies those people who belong to the group.
Bakker: “Apologize for the in-group status quo.”
Basically people discriminate as a form of defense from discrimination. Us versus them. You are assailed and so answer in kind (while bathing in hypocrisy).
Hence, the “literary” branch of Fantasy builds its own self-praising group putting on the altar the China Mieville, Catherynne M Valente, Gene Wolfe. As indication of names and books that are “better” than Fantasy and because only those names have the courage of dealing with “truth” and adult literature.
The rest, as it is well known, is for kids.
Erikson: “the critics invariably practise exceptionalism: these writers are not fine representatives of their genre; by virtue of their fineness, they have left the genre.” (source)
Specifically about Truth, I gather three quotes:
Adam Roberts: Flattering the readers’ preconceptions and prejudices isn’t the same thing as telling them the truth. (source)
Glen Cook: You just write stuff the way it is instead wishful thinking. (source)
Steven Erikson: They wrote how they want it to be, not how it is. (source)