Like I said above, it would be an interesting exercise to go through an article with you word by word and sentence by sentence, but that would also be a months-long process. It wouldn’t be THAT interesting, for either of us.

I suppose it’s unfair to accuse you of deliberately trying to obfuscate. But you have adopted a style of writing that has that effect, and I firmly do not believe that there’s anything inherent to the ideas you’re trying to convey that requires such a style of writing. I think, rather, that your writing is simply bad, awful, wrong, and not fit for public consumption.

But I’m sure it’s far beyond my meager powers of persuasion to convince you of that. I’ll just have to renew my resolve to avoid reading your articles.

If a commenter points out something specific that is unclear, I am always willing to elaborate on it further. The goal here is not to obfuscate the topic but to consider other angles of inquiry. The objective is not to inhibit understanding but to consider different approaches to understanding ideas and issues. Sometimes the idea work, sometimes they don’t. It’s an ongoing effort to think more deeply and hopefully with more sophistication about fantastic literature.

It would be an interesting exercise to go over one of these articles with Stevens word by word and sentence by sentence: “How do you justify the use of this word? And this phrase? Isn’t this convoluted sentence really just making this simple point? So why didn’t you word it that way?” and so on.

To an extent, one can forgive Stevens’ on the basis that this sort of horrible writing is encouraged in literary theory and related fields. But only to an extent. Contrary to the opinion of many, literary theory is a real field of study that has meaningful things to say. It isn’t just a puffed-up meringue of highfalutin words that mean little or nothing. And that’s exactly what Stevens’ articles are.

Must… stop… reading… Stevens…

I also agree that more people DO like SF, but in other forms. There have been a few books written about SF film that I think might hold some useful information about this. They are also on my list to look at. Genre is not just about the literature itself, and it may be that differently skilled or invested readers engage and use genre in different ways. SO much to look at!

While I am fairly sympathetic to Barnes’ overall conclusions, I’d like to caution about basing them too heavily on his magazine reader “research”. A near-century of media research teaches us that media consumption is contextual, depending on location, time, the medium in question, etc. In other words, consuming a magazine (or even a local magazine in particular) is a completely different behavioral activity than consuming a book (regardless of its genre). Which means that the cognitive strategies used for one may not translate to the other. I don’t read brochures, for example, with the same level of attention that I read books. That being said, I think Barnes’ conclusions about the weaknesses inherent in the ideas of reading protocols are pretty accurate.

Which brings me back to the concept of “casual fantastika readers” or readers Who Don’t Get It. Often, many of these same readers will happily consume speculative content in non-written media: how many people who “don’t read/like to read science fiction” saw Inception? How many saw Avatar? It strikes me that today’s audience has the “SF modules” in place: they know how to decode fantastic content because they already do so across multiple media. But why does their enjoyment of/willingness to engage these “SF modules” vary across media? Is the process by which we decode written fantastika more cumbersome than that of audio/visual fantastika? Is the experience really that different across different media? And if the broader community has such “SF modules”, how does that affect our conception of the field and the audience? How does it affect creators/community-members’ relationship with that audience?

I would not give a first time reader of genre Greg Egan or (most) Gene Wolfe, for example.

I think of Fantastika as a pool with gradations, and certain authors or books are closer or further from the shallow end of that fantastika, depending less or more on readers being already immersed in the pool to appreciate the book on a fantastika level.

And I see this John not only in terms of being familiar with the tropes and furniture of fantastika, but also the ongoing conversation between works of the genre–for example, Doctorow’s LITTLE BROTHER.