I must admit that the Times Literary Supplement isn’t the place I would normally look for an intelligent essay on genre fiction, which is why I had to be pointed to this piece by Locus Online. However, I’m very glad that Mark spotted it, because it is a very good read. After all, it has stuff like this:

Like Japanese soldiers fighting the Second World War long after it ended, some still draw a cordon sanitaire around “literature” to protect it from “genre”, regardless of how closely the two commingle.

Heck, it even has a link to Ansible’s web site. None of this will have gone down very well at Granta.

Despite the title of “The rise of fan fiction and comic book culture”, the article doesn’t really discuss fan fic at all. It is actually a review of two books: The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu, which is a history of anti-comics hysteria in 1950s America, and Maps and Legends, a collection of essays by Michael Chabon. Both books sound very interesting. If only I had time to read more…