The Mumpsimus

I probably achieve utter absurdity with my new Strange Horizons column, "A Story About Plot" , wherein, like an awkward and amateur trapeze artist who has decided the key to success is to not believe in gravity, I try to link John Grisham , Nora Roberts , Aristotle , Shklovsky , and Peter Straub . The whole thing is, I expect, more a sign of my inevitable insanity than anything else.

I don't have time or desire to expose all the errors and bad assumptions in Lev Grossman's essay "Good Novels Don't Have to be Hard" , but thankfully I don't have to: Andrew Seal has already shown how wrong Grossman is about so much . Grossman's essay reminds me of a lot of things I've read in science fiction fanzines and blogs over the years where people want to justify their taste and pleasures against armies of straw people marching through an alternate literary history. But I don't really feel any malice toward SF fans and amateur critics who are passionate about what they spend most of their time reading; that they don't have a nuanced understanding of Modernism is really not a big deal. That a man who has a degree from Harvard in literature and did work toward a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale, has written for Lingua Franca, the Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, Salon and the New York Times , and has been...