Hal Duncan

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

“So, fuck ’em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We’re GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker’s jackets.”

“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.”

“Destiny can sometimes be history coming back to bite you in the arse.”

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

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

“– No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café.The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw the Booker, she thinks. She’d rather have a hookah.”

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

“In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn’t matter if you’re filthy. In theory anyway.”

“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 self-serving doublethink.”

“Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing.”

“Soylent Brown? It ain’t people, but it comes from them.”

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

“For some the label sci-fi is just a shortand for science fiction, an alternative to sf gesturing at ... you know, that stuff we like.”

“All worlds of fiction are alternative realities.”

“Well, I myself, while sometimes unkempt by nights of drunkenness and debauchery, am quite convinced a man’s good character is marked by his impeccable attire.”

“See, you have the choice we didn’t. You wanna think about it though, you do, before you decide to throw your lot in with us. Cause it’s not just about living in society’s stitches, you know, the bits in between, the squats and secret places. It’s about being Fixed.”

“The spelunkers of speculative fiction mining phosphorescent filth from the bowels of the city of New Sodom, the Sci-Fi freaks scraping kipple and back from the bins of decades-old shit sandwiches out back, composting it to grow shrooms, we have built this thing to take its”