Shadows of the Apt

I’ve already gone on about the tyranny of the Mainstream State, that exiles all those that fail to conform to its rigorous aesthetic to the gulag of genre fiction. However, like all good despotic regimes, “mainstream fiction” is based on hypocrisy and lies. (1)
 
There are two ways of looking at this:
 
First, the scholarly:
 
Where did “fiction” start? The […]

There is a key division in fantasy (1) writing to do with the scale and scope of the world that the author is intent on creating. This is not just about the size of the map, but more to do with what happens just beyond the map’s edge, off the page. What happens? Well, in some […]

The fantasy genre is one of the most divided genres in the aforementioned police state of genre fiction (1). I’m not talking about science fiction here, or perhaps I am. It’s harder to draw that boundary than you think. After all, there is the distinct old-school “hard” science fiction, where the point of the story is […]

There is an ugly phrase in our world: a world redolent of prejudice and hate, a phrase implicit in the discrimination against dozens of minorities, a phrase of evil.
 
This phrase is… genre fiction.
 
Once upon a time there was a happy, free land of infinite size called “Fictionia” and all sorts of things lived there in equality, liberty and fraternity (1). Then […]

As in the late Robert Jordan (1).
 
I never actually read any Jordan. He was always so ferociously ubiquitous. By the time I became aware of the phenomenon that was Robert Jordan, everyone around me was reading book 6 or 7 of The Wheel of Time and the utter weight of literature placed an effective barrier to my ever […]

Well, not Redwall, obviously, and as previously stated, but it put me in mind of a peculiarity of terminology that’s come up.
 
So, not the book yet, despite repeated promises. Something’s been bugging me, so to speak…
 
For those that aren’t aware of it, the Redwall series, which to my debit I have not read, concerns the adventures of, I think, a mouse, […]

Actually, before all that, what was that about insects?
 
After promising some manner of insectery, which in itself is a monstrous and unwieldly neologism (1), I appear to have failed to deliver. The thronging hordes in their millions of species have been conspicuously absent. Even the affectation “the insect man” is currently unsubstantiated.(2) Why, then, “theinsectman”?(6)
 
Insects and their […]