In this episode of Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons SFF criticism podcast, AJ Odasso and Electra Pritchett join Dan Hartland to talk about popular fiction. Science fiction and fantasy has a long and complex relationship with questions of popular culture. Where does this stand today?

So often ignored or derided by so-called higher culture, how should critics approach it? And where should we situate it in our readings?

AJ's review of The Vampire Lestat (prod. Jones, Moscovitch, et al.)

Electra's review of The Icarus Coda by Timothy Zahn

Transcript

Critical Friends Episode 27: Pop Fiction

Dan Hartland: Welcome to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. I’m Dan Hartland, and in this episode, I’ll be joined by one of Strange Horizons’ longest-serving reviewers, Electra Pritchett, and one of our longest-serving editors, the Poetry Department’s AJ Odasso, both of whom have just published new reviews with the magazine.

In every episode of Critical Friends, we discuss speculative fiction reviewing: what it is, why we do it, and how it’s going. The critic bell hooks once called for “intellectual work that connects with habits of being, forms of artistic expression, and aesthetics that inform daily life.” But how should we read popular fiction? And what exactly can it tell us?

Science fiction and fantasy has a long and complex relationship with questions of popular culture. Where does this stand today?

Electra and AJ discuss with me novels and TV series, movies and franchises, and we ask the question, where lies the power of popular fiction? So often ignored or derided by so-called higher culture, how should critics approach it? And where should we situate it in our readings?

We spread the net wide in this one. You can expect both Star Wars and Star Trek. We might also discuss vampires. But I began our conversation with a crucial recap.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: Previously on Critical Friends: In our last episode we had a conversation about awards and award shortlists. And one of the things that we spoke about briefly was the appearance of a book called Dungeon Crawler Carl on this year’s Clarke Award shortlist. But actually, I think one of the more interesting conversations to have about that—which is why, when your two reviews this month came in, I was like, “Aha!”—is this question of the place of popular fiction in our genre, in literary culture more broadly.

And that’s an interesting question, because of course for some people the idea of three science fiction people talking about popular fiction as if it was something else would be hilarious—because we are, to many, the definition of popular fiction, and maybe we can get into that. But it seems to me that it would be … it’s just a really great opportunity to use your reviews as kind of a jumping-off point for, “OK, so what is popular fiction?”

You know, this reaction against it that we often see, why do we see that? How useful is it? And then likewise, as we always try and do in this show, talk a little bit about how reviewers, critics, readers of any kind might be able to approach popular fiction and get a bit more out of it.

So I thought we could start with you, Electra, because you came to me with this review of the new book from Timothy Zahn. No one else asked to read this book, okay? Which I think is part of this conversation. Talk to me a bit about Timothy Zahn. I mean, you go into this in the review, but let’s go through it here, too: Your history with him, why you’re interested in reading him, the sort of stuff he does. Yeah, let’s go into it.

Electra Pritchett: I have been a Timothy Zahn fan since I was probably about nine years old, I guess, which is when I read the Heir to the Empire trilogy, having read the Star Wars novelizations when I was about seven.

And then I kind of bounced around, like, the junior Star Wars books and then I was like, “I can also read these books in the science fiction section.” So I read the Heir to the Empire ones, and those were good, and then I read the Kevin J. Anderson ones, which, like, tie into the comics. It was very confusing, and I sort of thought those books weren’t as good.

So, you know, Zahn I think remained one of the sort of better Star Wars writers. I kept reading the Star Wars books until they did the whole New Jedi Order thing, and then I was like, “I need to stop.” But in the meantime, I also started reading way more science fiction and fantasy in general, across categories.

YA didn’t really exist so much at that point. It was kind of just children’s and adults, and then YA sort of emerged during this process. So I read all of Zahn’s older ’80s standalone books, the Blackcollar series, the Cobra books. And then, yeah, as part of this, too, I think the first book in this Icarus saga, which is now … what is this, six books? That one also came out in this period, like 2000, and I read it. And I was sort of surprised to realize it was in continuity with these other books—because the protagonists were different people basically from what I remember of that first book. But I enjoyed that first book.

You know, Zahn has this kind of trademark way of withholding information from the reader. And in the review I sort of actually only talked about first-person POV, but he does it in third too, though maybe not quite as sort of ha-ha obviously. Like, Zahn was a great writer to be reading as a kid, you know, sort of in the genre. This is gonna sound … it’s maybe not gonna sound like praising him, he’s a very good writer, but, you know, like, there’s not a lot of sex.

Which made him good for Star Wars, too, you know, because Lucas famously said that in Star Wars a kiss is the equivalent of a sex scene. But with Zahn, it was very sort of straightforward action in a lot of ways. And just very pacey, you know, move-it-along kind of … not necessarily thrillers, but action-packed.

So yeah, I mean, he is definitely … like, he is very popular. He’s written more than seventy novels. He won a Hugo in ’84 and was nominated again at least once else in the ’80s. and he’s won the Dragon Award five times, which is a popular vote award that’s awarded by Dragon Con in Atlanta. And three of those are for non-Star Wars work.

So he’s very clearly beloved in the genre, but just does not have, you know, the awards or the reviews to back it up. And you know, as you were sitting here saying the introduction, and mentioning Dungeon Crawler Carl, I was also sort of thinking about the sort of panic on Bluesky the past week or so about, like, do dudes read? And it’s like, well clearly dudes read Dungeon Crawler Carl! And I’m willing to bet that a lot of dudes also read Timothy Zahn. He is definitely a popular author, but not so much with the critics.

Dan Hartland: There’s a point in your review where you say how strange it is to describe Timothy Zahn as an under-read writer. But in the kind of critical circles that this podcast is supposed to interest, people don’t read him. And the publisher of Icarus Code, which you’ve just read, Baen, is not over-represented in the reviews pages of, you know, Strange Horizons, Ancillary Review, even Locus, right? So there’s something going on here, and you’ve offered a number of possible explanations in your remarks just now.

You know, is it that there’s something age-based? Is there something sort of gender-based? Is there something just about the way in which the sort of critical community—awards, reviewers, whatever it is—talk about books or look for in books, that the prose style of someone like Zahn—and not just the prose style, but the kind of way he structures a story—doesn’t tickle?

You say in the review he has this particular way of describing what a character does but not why. And that really struck me. From my reading of Heir to the Empire, there’s an awful lot of, “Luke walked across the room at a medium pace, and he picked up the lightsaber from the table,” which reads from a kind of quote-unquote literary perspective as uninterested in character … but kind of maybe isn’t?

Because one of the things I think about the Zahn Star Wars books is actually he gets the characters pretty spot on. They act in the ways that you would think they would have done from the movies. So it’s just this really interesting question of how we’re judging these books, and whether we’re judging them on the right sort of, sort of vectors. When you were reading Icarus Coda, were you conscious of that? How did you read it? Like, what were you looking for when you sat down to write a review of this book?

Electra Pritchett: I think that’s a good point, and if you ask Star Wars fans, they would say—I would say—that he had the sort of best grasp of the characters of any of the sort of … and there were other people who were maybe equally as good, but there were also a lot of people who wrote these books that we look back now and we’re like, “What the hell was happening? Like, how did that get past editorial?” So yeah, he is good at conveying character. It just does not come through psychological introspection.

And I wouldn’t say that he lacks worldbuilding either, but if you look at Ann Leckie, her books are sort of … they’re not ostentatious, but they just show a lot more of the worldbuilding, you know? They get a lot more explicitly into the alien cultures, especially in the later books.

You know, this question of series and long series: This was six books. I read the first and the last one, and I was like, “Okay.” There’s other series and those tend to be the ones I like. You can’t see on my bookshelf because it’s blurred out, but, like, I have a bunch of Michelle West books back there. You cannot read those books without having read all of the ones that came before, and that’s like several million words at this point, and, like … I like that. But, you know, telling people to jump in on her current ones, which she’s self-publishing, that’s, like, an impossible thing to say to people. So yeah, I mean, I think Zahn sort of keeps it light in a way.

And I would also say that the publisher thing is an interesting question. Like, Baen is very famously the home of people who were associated with the Sad Puppies back in the day. But like, you know, in the ’80s when Zahn got his start, that wasn’t necessarily the case. Like, they published Joanna Russ! Baen also has published people like David Weber, who—again, speaking of extremely long series that you can’t jump into!—and, and I also liked the Honor Harrington books, to a point, and after that point I was like, “I also need to stop now because can’t take it anymore.” But I still would say the first eight Honor Harrington books are, like, a great, great space opera set to read. I think you can probably stop there.

Dan Hartland: And series seem to me—you know, this sort of serial storytelling—seems to me a big part of certainly popular fiction today. Which brings us perhaps onto your review, AJ, which is of The Vampire Lestat, AMC’s new season, I guess, of Interview with the Vampire, but they’ve changed the title.

And of course, this in turn is based on a set of series of novels by Anne Rice. It is also part of a wider universe which keeps getting things added to it and subtracted from it. And you’ve become our in-house expert on this universe! And you really enjoy it, right? But at the same time, you know, it inhabits this kind of … well, maybe you tell us. Does it inhabit this kind of pop space, this schlocky space? Talk to us about it!

AJ Odasso: It’s impossible to talk about Anne Rice and genre without confronting the fact that The Vampire Chronicles did start out as a fifteen-book series. I started reading The Vampire Chronicles when I was about thirteen or fourteen.

I think at the time, the first four or five of the books were out. Alfred A. Knopf was the publisher that brought out most of the hardcover first editions in her Vampire Chronicles and Lives of the Mayfair Witches books, and then later on it was Ballantine, I think, that was doing the paperback reissues.

But my mother took one look at this and thought, “Oh, my kid reads, you know, fantasy and witchy and historical, so maybe this will be fascinating.” And she read it, hated it, because it’s not her bag at all, but she went back to the bookstore and bought all of the ones that had come before it, handed me this stack of books and says, “You’re probably gonna find these on your own anyway.” It was around the time she stopped trying to police what I was reading so strictly, and instead appeased me with books because she knew it was keeping me out of other trouble, which was great!

So I came to this series in the mid-’90s, and from that point on, at the four or five book point, I read those four or five books lying on my bedroom floor until three or four in the morning on school nights, over, like, a two-week period. So I binged the beginning of the series, and I never looked back.

I bring up the publishers, Knopf and Ballantine, as her primary ones because these are thought of as, especially Alfred A. Knopf, traditionally a high literary or just standard literary publisher—like, not even pop literature or fantasy literature or horror literature, which fantasy and horror would really have been the two genres that I remember hearing people say that Rice’s novels largely fell into. They were being published by a traditional publisher, but marketed as more traditional, standard, “this is high lit.”

So now I look at this adaptation that started coming out in 2022 on AMC with Interview with the Vampire Part 1, then two years later you got Interview with the Vampire Part 2—they covered the first book in two seasons—and now that they’ve shifted to adapting the third book, The Vampire Lestat, which is gonna sort of take up two seasons. Season 3 as The Vampire Lestat is another part one of two arc that’s going to be capped off by Season 4. They announced just a few weeks ago at San Diego Comic-Con that Season 4 will be titled Queen of the Damned, like the fourth book.

But TVL is the season where you’re starting to see people react in a more polarized manner, I think because Lestat as a narrator, his voice, is a lot more poppy and sarcastic and chaotic than Louis as our framework narrator on the first two seasons. People responded to the adaptations, IWTV Parts 1 and 2, as, like, prestige TV; high lit. But even with the warnings that were given by Rolin Jones and Hannah Moscovitch as the main writers and showrunners: They were saying, “You need to be prepared for a shift in the narrative tone.”

Because if you think about the novels, the minute we get out of Interview and hit Lestat with the third book, which is Lestat in the 1980s (although they’ve shifted the present-day parts from the novels from the ’80s and ’90s into the 2020s), he is a character who likes to assimilate as much modern slang and as many modern turns of phrase as he can. He’s silly. He’s sarcastic. His tone shifts so wildly that sometimes across one book and even across, the entire series—where he’s the first-person narrator on multiple of the books, by the time you get through all fifteen of them—sometimes he doesn’t sound like himself, is how a friend of mine put it, and I would agree with that.

He’s an experimenter. He is evolving on the language front. He speaks a handful of languages, with French being his native language and English being the one that he uses most modern day. And that’s even true for Louis and Armand and Claudia—well, not Claudia, she grew up in New Orleans speaking French and English, but my point being!—these are multilingual, extremely long-lived beings, unless something puts an end to them in the small handful of ways that you can.

And, making the choice to have a narrator as erratic as Lestat … so season three, it’s flashy. It’s covering his escapades as a rock star, which does happen in the novels as well, but the task that the writers on this show had was taking the vibe of a 1980s rock star and translating that into 2020s. And so he’s struggling to make a mark on our modern music scene when everything moves so fast, and his narration moves fast, and it’s shot in a flashier, more jarring, more brightly-colored, quicker cuts. It’s jumpier. And circling back around to the remark I made about higher polarization in the fandom reactions, it’s getting great critical acclaim, just like the first two seasons did. Critics seem to absolutely love TVL, and I think that’s fantastic for the team, because it meant they got renewed again.

But the fandom either loves it or hates it. There is very little in-between. So this has been a controversial season with a major tone shift, and for that reason—it’s taken me a while to get to this point, but—I feel that TVL marks a shift into popular fiction in this series, whereas the first two seasons were being watched and reviewed more like prestige or highlight based television.

Dan Hartland: So that’s what struck me about your review, especially comparing your review of of TVL with Abigail Nussbaum’s review of Interview Part Two, because I agree: I remember watching the first few episodes of season one, or part one, of Interview with the Vampire, and it was like, to some extent, watching an episode of, I don’t know, something like Boardwalk Empire but with vampires, right? There was that tone.

And it’s so interesting that you talk about the multilingual nature of the characters, because it seems to me that a lot of the difference between pop and literary fiction is about diction. It’s about the words you use and the way you put them together, and it’s so fascinating to see clearly a very thought-out approach from the creators of this show to shifting vocabulary almost entirely from scene to scene.

I mean, it’s risky, though, right? Because one of the other things that you’ve spoken about, and one of the other things that Electra mentioned, was the action of fans in the pop literature space, right? So one of the issues with selling so many units—or writing to sell so many units or whatever it is—is that the people who buy those books have a lot of say potentially in where a series goes or how adaptations should be received.

So do you think, AJ, that the creators having really obviously thought this through—because it’s so coherently done, this shift—do you think they’re gonna listen, or do you think they’re gonna forge ahead and just really commit to this kind of almost schlocky thing?

AJ Odasso: The thing about Queen of the Damned as a book, as the next full novel that they’re adapting, is that they’re going to have to shift tone again.

As a core starting trilogy, Interview with the Vampire, TVL, and Queen of the Damned … in the book series even, those books could not be more different from each other tonally, on the whole. And that was the thing about Anne Rice in The Vampire Chronicles—she was intentionally such a tone-shifting chameleon from narrator to narrator and from story to story.

I think they will get away with it simply because enough of their fan base knows that things like that happen from book to book. I don’t think they will listen to the extremely negative elements in the fandom because, as usually happens in situations like this, they are extremely noisy, but I think they’re not the majority. They’re just extremely noisy—especially if you’re on platforms like X and Tumblr.

They know how they’re interpreting the books for screen. They’re capturing enough of the original spirit and flavor of them, and even they will title episodes after lines of dialogue. They will use plenty of dialogue from the books, like lifted verbatim from the page, that gets woven in, and this has happened across all three seasons so far. I think that they will change tone however they need to, depending on which of the books they’re adapting.

Electra Pritchett: The question about the book fans versus the show fans, and also this question of, like, what is popular fiction? Well, isn’t it actually romance? I was sitting here thinking about Heated Rivalry, actually, which exploded over the course of the past not-even-a-year still, and how there is this sort of cleavage between the people who were fans of the books before the adaptation was even announced—which was, like, a tiny group of people, relatively speaking, even though those books were, I think, fairly popular in the sort of hockey romance sub-genre, definitely, and romance readers more widely.

Making choices in the adaptation, they just announced that one of the new characters for season two is going to be played by a Black actor—who I believe is also queer, out queer—Justice Smith, and that has inspired a lot of discourse in the fandom. I don’t know about Interview with the Vampire, but a lot of it in Heated Rivalry is on Threads.

I think also the showrunners clearly have a vision, and I think you sort of can’t listen to the fans on some level because fans are not in the writers’ room. The fans are not on set.

AJ Odasso: And that’s the other really strange thing about this experiment that AMC has launched. They have all of the shows based on Rice’s books under an umbrella that they’re calling The Immortal Universe. The second one that they added was Mayfair Witches, which is getting a third season that comes out next year.

Mayfair has very clearly been launched as the show in the IU that I would argue falls most firmly into that border genre between popular fiction and romance fiction, because they are absolutely aiming for the slightly straighter, more romance novel-oriented audience with Mayfair Witches. When they added Talamasca, which unfortunately got canceled after only one season, they were trying to launch a show that fell more into, sort of the spy thriller genre, and I was shocked that it didn’t get at least a second season—because production value and writing and casting-wise, it was a stronger hit-the-ground-running than even Mayfair was, and yet Mayfair continues to get seasons like Interview does, and Talamasca, they just nixed it after only one.

So they’re, they’re clearly still trying to figure out what their major viewing demographics are, who, who they are, and, and what they want.

[Musical sting]

Dan Hartland: The thing we might wanna get into is: Is there a difference between popular fiction and fiction that is popular? Because obviously among the most dominant storytelling forms of the last twenty years has been the superhero film, right? And in recent years we’ve seen the superhero film do what The Immortal Universe is trying to do, which is just extrude all this product: Let’s try this idea and let’s try that idea, and let’s do this on Disney+, and let’s release this film.

And it’s been too much, even for the huge audience of that dominant storytelling framework to bear. People have got tired, some of the stuff hasn’t been good enough, and I just wonder whether, a) we think there is a difference between popular fiction and fiction that is popular, but b) also, does popular fiction, do series, tend towards this kind of diminishing returns thing?

Because one of the things that you talk about there, AJ, is the fate of Talamasca compared with the fate of Mayfair Witches. And Mayfair Witches is surviving almost because it’s the flatter show, it’s the straighter show, it’s the more small-c conservative show, even, right? If you’re writing popular fiction, or fiction that is popular—that needs a large audience or is aiming for a large audience—do we tend not just towards diminishing returns, but ultimately towards a sort of reactionary sameness in this stuff?

Is that one of the problems?

This brings us back to Star Wars, which we started the conversation with, because of course one of the obvious examples of this happening is the disjuncture between Last Jedi and the final film in the series that we shall not name. Because that final in the sort of sequel trilogy completely undoes all the stuff that the fans didn’t like in Last Jedi. Is that what we’re looking at in this sort of push/pull between market and form and fan? Do we wind up with diminishing returns?

AJ Odasso: There’s certainly some anxiety in IWTV fandom based on having been burned by things like Marvel that got too big and too sprawling and have essentially been collapsing under their own weight. Granted, I think that panic is somewhat premature when it’s applied to Immortal Universe, because so far we’ve only had three shows! Only one of those three has been canceled!

They’ve learned a lesson early on, or we can hope they’ve learned a lesson early on, perhaps about a sub-genre that’s not gonna work for them, because there’s already enough of that spy thriller genre built right into Interview and TVL and Mayfair, because the Talamasca is present as an organization in both of those first two shows.

I think AMC has been measured in its expansion so far. So the reactionary impulse is certainly present in the viewership, but I don’t think that one show being canceled after one season, as disappointed as I am personally, spells doom for that endeavor, and I feel they will move forward. I hope they will move forward judiciously.

And my hope for the fandom is that they won’t let those fears that they carry from franchises where the overexpansion did happen, like with Marvel and arguably some strands of Star Wars … I hope that people won’t let that panic get so full-blown that they don’t give anything else new in the IU a chance.

Electra Pritchett: You know, I was just remembering how I pitched reviewing Star Trek: Prodigy season one to you, and you were like, “Oh, we don’t do that popular stuff.” And then it got cancelled like a week later! And they had to go on this long campaign to find season two a home, which eventually came on Netflix, and now it’s been yanked from Netflix, and you can’t … like, I have it on Blu-ray, but I don’t think it’s streaming anywhere—even though if, if you ask me, it’s by far the best show of the new Trek, uh, and I would say, like, top two overall probably.

I think Star Wars is an interesting question. I don’t think you can separate what happens with the last movie and the sequels from Carrie Fisher’s death. You know, if you read the Duel of the Fates screenplay that’s floating around on the internet, it was the Leia movie, and that was the plan, and then she died.

And also I was thinking about Star Trek, as well: I think the reactionary impulse is alive and well in Strange New Worlds, much like with Enterprise before it at the end of an era. But I don’t think you can … as much as a certain conservative segment of the fandom would like to argue otherwise, I don’t think you can separate Starfleet Academy being cancelled from this prospective Paramount/Warner Brothers merger that might or might not be happening.

So I think there’s that, you know, non-story-level question to keep in mind, even as we talk about over-expansion. You know, I think both Marvel and Star Wars—not Star Trek so much, but definitely those two—they did try to do different genres within their sort of overall category, which is an interesting idea and some of them I think definitely worked better than others.

But, you know, right now perhaps at least the superheroes are reconsolidating. Spider-Man: Brand New Day has already made a billion dollars, and it’s gotten amazing reviews. I still haven’t seen it. But that’s, like, a part-Marvel property, and Spider-Man will presumably be back in Endgame along with … not Endgame! Doomsday, right! Everybody will be in Doomsday, including like all of the X-Men. Apparently it’s Patrick Stewart’s last movie.

Maybe, who knows, that will be a critical and popular success and, you know, six months from now we’d be having a different conversation about whether these franchises are exhausted.

It’s a good question about sort of being measured versus being overambitious. I, I would, I think you would definitely say that both Star Wars and Marvel were overambitious, and I think they thought the money was infinite at a certain point. And I think, you know, even for things as popular as those two, that is not true.

Dan Hartland: You mentioned quite rightly that I was like, “Well, we don’t really have the space for the Prodigy review.” And that’s something that we’re always doing at SH, which is balancing should we cover this stuff that’s getting a lot of coverage elsewhere? You know, for example, the latest Marvel movie, whatever it is: We’ve covered some MCU stuff, and then not a lot of it. Should we cover this, because it’s getting more than enough notice elsewhere, or should we leave space for the stuff that otherwise won’t get noticed?

So for example, we recently did an episode on queer science fiction, and a lot of those books are getting published in very small presses to, you know, not a lot of notice. Do we leave space for those things? Because in theory, that’s where some of the more, quote-unquote, radical stuff is happening, some of the more sort of interesting stuff. Or do we take that space up with something from a popular fiction thing which will get a lot of views, but may be less interesting for all of the kind of reasons of pressure that we’re talking about.

And I suppose that brings us back to, in a way, what’s going on there? Because, tell me why I’m wrong, right? So, clearly I have some bias against covering popular fiction, right? Which I shouldn’t, right? Because critics can do stuff with it. Why should we be covering this stuff? Why should we be reviewing this stuff?

AJ Odasso: Because there is often genre content in it, because it often straddles the boundaries and borderlines of several different genres at once, like the IU does. In addition to the nostalgia factor of someone who grew up reading The Vampire Chronicles, I am riveted by IU so far, both its successes and its failure in Talamasca, because it’s so boldly and even kind of playfully trying to see what genre slots and what target audiences it can capture across the shows that they add to it.

But then also within each one of those shows individually, you will get a couple of major genres being blended and maybe even sometimes vying for dominance. I am fascinated by IU as a multi-genre project. Anne herself was so genre-diverse in her books, and the fact that the executive production team and showrunning teams and writing teams on IU have embraced that and said, “Let’s reflect the diversity of everything that Anne Rice’s writing was across her various series, and let’s see what we can make work.”

Electra Pritchett: Yeah, I mean, I’m not gonna sit here and say, like, “Oh, we should review every Star Wars and every MCU." Like, we don’t need that, I would say. I mean, having been associated with Strange Horizons for a long time, I would not want it to do that. I do think, though, that there are these weirder properties within these franchises.

You know, not having been a fan of the Anne Rice books, but certainly I’ve been a big fan of the TV series putting all of the queerness sort of front and center. That is radical, even now—perhaps especially now. And Heat of Rivalry too, for that matter: The Amazons of the world are sort of green-lighting all these hockey romances, and it’s like, “no, people didn’t respond to the hockey!” Like, they responded to the queer romance, and you’re not going there, so you don’t get it.

[Musical sting]

Electra Pritchett: Leigh Bardugo is another person who sells a bajillion books. A lot of people would say that they love her stuff. I really like her books. But she sort of got too popular too quickly maybe, you know? And now is sort of in an echelon beyond getting reviewed.

Or Jeff VanderMeer, another person who started out in genre and is now definitely transcended into another sort of tier above us all.

Dan Hartland: What I was talking about earlier, is popular fiction the same as fiction is, that is popular? Like, he’s sold a lot of books and, you know, he’s had his Netflix movie and all of that stuff. But he’s not popular fiction, right, is he? Because his prose style is kind of what one would ordinarily peg as a literary prose style, right?

Electra Pritchett: Yeah. I mean, I would agree. I think he has written himself into literary … at least sort of, like, the uneasy boundary between literary and … half the time he’s climate fiction now, I think, and I don’t think he’d necessarily disagree with that.

But if you read his earlier stuff, like the Ambergris books, those are much more sort of legible within genre. He a very interesting case, you know? He definitely … they give him book deals like he sells in the millions. And presumably he does, because of all the translations and everything.

And then of course, literary fiction, they like to present themselves as the be-all-and-end-all. But, again, by sales numbers, I think most of it is probably, like … doesn’t, doesn’t hold a candle to, of course, romance novels or perhaps even a Dungeon Crawler Carl, given that there’s, like, what, nine of those books? But people at my work are like, “Oh, I love those books. You should read them.” And I’m like, “OK.”

AJ Odasso: Stop me if this is a tangent, but the weird, the uncanny, the undead—especially since the onset of the pandemic—I feel has seen such a resurgence. I mean, we’ve had things like the Locked Tomb books, we have reinterpretations of Frankenstein hitting the big screen in The Bride and Guillermo del Toro’s recent Frankenstein.

Pandemics and hive minds: Like, Pluribus on Apple TV has me riveted. I say maybe this is a tangent because I would not class all of these things instinctively in popular fiction, and yet we are in a space with fiction right now where the weird, like all of the stuff IU is doing, is some of the most bonkers television I’ve seen anywhere in an extremely long time. And AMC has sort of made a name for itself having shows like that as far back as The Walking Dead, and they acquired and now have that very short-lived but beautiful queer zombie show from the UK, In the Flesh, is now available on AMC. They have that whole strand of their programming. You can sort by horror, and they do many horror documentaries through different lenses and sub-topics.

As a reaction to conditions of pandemic and environmental collapse and economic woes, governments that are mask-off fascist, if we wanna be frank about it, worldwide: This kind of fiction about the weird and the uncanny and marginalized populations refusing to stay dead. I wrote a whole column about this last month for Pride Month for Lit Talk, which is, like, the online social media presence and blog and podcast arm of Bond and Grace Publishing. I am just so invested in it.

Like, whether these things with which I’ve been personally preoccupied as a writer and editor and critic are popular fiction, they are nonetheless popular right now at this point in time, as they tend to be when social and economic and environmental conditions become what they are. I think that’s such an important point.

Dan Hartland: I mean, you know, one of the buzziest theatrical releases this year has been Backrooms, right? Which is exactly what you’re talking about there, AJ. And that, I would say, is definitely popular fiction, and yet it’s popular fiction that is weird.

Something that both of you have said as well, and maybe we do need to think about briefly, is the interaction with young adult fiction. So the reviews that we’re talking about here of the Zahn and the IU, you began your relationships with these texts when you were very young and imprinted upon them, right? The death of the mass market paperback, all of that stuff, has led to some of what would once have been marketed as popular fiction being marketed as, quote-unquote, young adult—or at the very least, some of the things that popular fiction once gave us are now given to us by young adult.

You know, Electra, you mentioned Leigh Bardugo. AJ you mentioned The Locked Tomb. Both series by both of those authors can be read in a YA space. Is that something that’s happening? Is it just a coincidence? Do you have any views on that?

AJ Odasso: That’s a good question. Yeah. I don’t read as much YA as I used to. The height of my reading YA was probably when I was in high school and in college. I was going on this bender of reading a lot of the really classic ones that were winning major book awards and medals when I was in elementary school that I didn’t maybe get to when I was in elementary school.

I feel like it’s hard for me to talk about YA sometimes without people looking at me funny because my mind still goes back to books like, Lynne Reid Banks’ Indian in the Cupboard series, and books like those ghost stories by Richard Peck—Ghosts I Have Been, The Ghosts Belong to Me—novels like Jacob Have I Loved, Bridge to Terabithia, The Westing Game, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler: All of these classic YA books that I think if you held them up today alongside YA lit, they look more straight-up adult or just straight-up literary. So I’m maybe not the best person to ask about that. When it comes to young adult fiction—my brain is stuck, a couple, several decades ago.

Electra Pritchett: See, I would call all of those books children’s books, just because YA as a category didn’t exist then. And I mean, even though Jacob Have I Loved—which I hated, had to read for school and I hated it!—does follow the main character until she’s an adult, I would still say all of those would be children’s.

But that’s an ... it’s a … you know, YA is sort of so vexed and vexing. I feel like it’s been this kind of lightning rod for controversy and criticism since maybe it got big—which I would say, early 2010s, which I think we can really attribute to Suzanne Collins and a couple other people sort of really pushing the category into popular, mainstream popularity.

And Leigh Bardugo’s an interesting case because, the Shadow and Bone books, those were YA. It’s pretty well accepted in the fandom that the Six of Crows duology was originally written as adult and then she was asked to age them down so they could be marketed as YA—whether that’s actually true or not, but again, it’s definitely accepted—and I think if you read the books, you can sort of tell, or at least nothing in the narrative contradicts that theory.

Whereas now I feel like, you know, her Hell Bent series, or whatever it’s called, which concludes this fall, that’s about a college student. And you know, it’s definitely marketed as adult, but I’m sure a lot of her readers who started out younger are now older and have followed her into those books and, and they’re very good. Stephen King spontaneously said he liked the first one, and he was right.

But yeah, I feel like I have read a lot of YA, maybe less so now. Probably that was just because I was in this position of knowing a lot of YA authors, whereas now I think most of them will, will tell you it’s gotten a lot harder to sell a YA book.

Another thing I think that has happened, and you mentioned the death of the mass market paperback—which I don’t really mourn personally, as a long-term information retention technology, I don’t think they were that great; but they were very nice to be able to spin in a wheel at the drugstore, but the drugstores aren’t there anymore either—but just the missing middle, you know? The midlist is sort of dying, too, which I think is kind of connected to all of this in some ways.

So, you know, publishers want something that will become super popular, and if you’re not that out of the gate, then you’re kind of screwed. I mentioned The Hunger Games, and there’s another movie of those coming out soon too. and I have to admit, I have not kept up with the books, but people have told me that she’s sort of only gotten more explicit about, “This is fascism. You must resist,” which, like, good for her!

I guess one thing I would say, too, just in general that I’ve been thinking is: You know, we’ve been talking about the fandom, but for anything that gets this popular, there’s the people who watch it or read it once, and they’re like, “I like it. I would watch or read more,” and they sort of go about their lives. And then there’s the people who are very dedicated and who become the fans.

And I personally am certainly positioned in that latter category of people for most things. But yeah, like, I feel like that’s sort of another thing too, is with all of these hugely popular properties is, they do have this huge population of people who … they liked it, they would see or watch more, but they are not sort of passionately arguing about it on the internet, unlike the rest of us.

Dan Hartland: And maybe that’s one of the things that popular fiction is. It’s a house for both of those kinds of reader: For the casual reader who can be, “You know, I liked that. I enjoyed that thing. I read that book on the beach because that’s where I read my one book a year, and it was good,” and also the people that I think we’ve represented quite well in this conversation, who are really passionate about it and really love it.

Because one of the things about the conversation we’ve just had about YA is it just demonstrates, doesn’t it, how arbitrary and shifting some of these boundaries are. Is that YA, or is it children’s, or is it popular fiction, or is it this? Well, maybe it’s all of those things, because one of the things that AJ said about the IU which really struck me is: It’s a place for generic play.

This is one of the reasons we would come to popular fiction, because it’s a place where we can have fun.

Electra Pritchett: Dungeon Crawler Carl being on the Clarke Award shortlist is still very funny to me. And maybe the Hugos are actually populist. Like, maybe the Hugos are the populist awards. But Dungeon Crawler Carl is not on the Hugo shortlist. Perhaps it will be for next year. Who can say?

AJ Odasso: I also enjoy seeing the breakdown, just the complete and utter breakdown, of genre boundaries.

Electra Pritchett: These boundaries can be really sort of arbitrary, as you say—you know, in terms of, like, the ones that have sort of critical chops. Maybe that’s the conclusion here.

[Musical outro]

AJ Odasso: On differences in opinion from librarian to librarian about where these genre borderlines lie: those books that I was mentioning from, like, a couple decades ago, several decades ago, my childhood and teen years, my school librarians were calling those young adult. They would not have called those children’s books at all.

Electra Pritchett: Wow. Your school librarians were, like, so forward-thinking then!

Dan Hartland: They were!

Electra Pritchett: Yeah! [laughter]

[Musical outro]

Dan Hartland: Thanks for listening to Critical Friends, the Strange Horizons criticism podcast. Our music is “Dial-Up” by Lost Cosmonauts. You can and should listen to more of their music at grandvalise.bandcamp.com.

Given the topic under discussion this episode, I wanted to flag a few threads from the Sequential Scholars account on Bluesky, which has been analyzing the graphic novel adaptation of Dungeon Crawler Carl. One of them cites Hans Robert Jauss’ theory of a work’s horizon of expectation—in broad terms, the set of assumptions in which a text is embedded and which it influences. This is certainly another good way to approach pop culture. Worth thinking about. Although, in that spirit, we should acknowledge Jauss’ documented involvement in Nazi war crimes.

Moving on from preemptive feedback, our last episode on awards also occasioned commentary. Kev McVeigh got in touch with a really interesting reflection on the influence or otherwise of awards. Why, he asked, is the contemporary work of a writer like Pat Murphy, who won multiple major awards in the 1980s, so rarely reviewed today?

One answer, of course, is gender, but we also wondered whether awards alone in fact don’t offer much in terms of longevity in, quote-unquote, the canon. Other factors exist. By contrast, though, Rachel Cordasco noticed that the persistent under-recognition of SF in translation may be down to it not having its own awards category, though of course this is changing in, for example, the BSFA and Locus Awards.

Yet certainly many correspondents were honest about how awards led their reading. Tufty McTavish confessed in response to the episode that he is one of those—like me or Abigail, but maybe unlike Amritesh—who is rather intrigued by awards shortlists. As did Ed Morland, who called this enthusiasm a “tragic middlebrow tendency,” which actually gives me an idea for changing the name of this podcast.

Finally, a note from Nic Clarke, herself a former Clarke judge, to sober us all up. Never underestimate, she cautioned, the role of finding works that none of the judges actively hate in arriving at shortlists and even winners. Sometimes even literary politics is personal.

Thanks as always, gang. See you in a month for the next episode of Tragic Middlebrow Tendency. Set your clocks.