The Hive Mind on the Hidden Genre Canon

 My recent reading of Salammbo and a post about what other hidden genre gems might exist unregarded in the corpus of otherwise literary authors lead to quite a few interesting comments collected across this blog, Twitter and Facebook.

And here are those comments, roughly collected and arranged by commenter, with a few additions by me. The spirit of G+ lives on! Just not in one place.

 

Hebemachia 

“Doris Lessing's science fiction stuff (hard to find these days, unfortunately)” 

P - This seems like a prefect response. A Nobel Prize winning author that I knew literally nothing about up until this comment who wrote a sci-fi series across a gigantic scale based around concepts of Sufism.

  

Paperino Maltese 

“several novel by cormac mccarthy squarely fall into adventure genre. also chabon's gentlemen of the road is full on serialized adventure.” 

“cormac mccarthy's blood meridian (western), on the road (post-apocalyptic) and no country (pure pulp thriller) are obviously genre novels. i am not sure how out of the ordinary is that for cormac but he is certainly and somewhat arguably the greatest living american novelist. added bonus is that the blood meridian is the ultimate murder hobo novel ever.” 

P – Ok, so Chabon feels like he is on the border of the nearly bougie genre author, but his main works feel a bit late to me, or they came at the post-Gaimane inflection point where it was nearly alright to be a genre author and still win awards. 

McCarthy I regard as the premium pulp author and I have often thought that you could change his books from literature to pulp by just adding lots of punctuation and exclamation marks. 

McCarthy doesn’t quite fit perfectly the ‘hidden genre’ pattern, he is more hiding in plain sight. 

"Just thought of another one: Ernst Junger. He's almost entirely known for Storm of Steel, but he also wrote half a dozen genre novels. Check it out:"

P - Just got sucked into the Junger Wiki, another guy whose life would be a multi-series Anime with each arc in a completely different genre.

 

Phandaal 

“Salammbo's a gem, while you're at it, check out Flaubert's 'The Temptation of Saint Anthony' which also  fits.” 

P- Ok, we got another Flaubert 

 

Richard August 

“I don’t think Salammbo can be considered a hidden classic? It’s one of the most republished of his works, especially in English. I dunno that it’s that rare, especially during the 19th century when genre divisions really didn’t mean anything, and the gap between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction didn’t really exist. Which I could go on about ad nauseum.” 

P – well it was hidden to me. Ok so everyone is going to have an entirely different perception on what counts as hidden or unknown, but you can buy Madame Bovary in Waterstones and have to search for Salammbo on Amazon and even then I think its Print on Demand. Plus this is my blog so my definition of ‘hidden’ will be the one we use. 

 

BUT that aside: 

“- Melville’s early work is pretty much swashbuckling, evocative sailor fiction.”  

Melville – maybe but Moby Dick is pretty much genre already and its his most well-known work. 

 

“- John Barth’s Giles Goat-boy is a weird, epic, fantastical journey through a vast university, and very different from the more mimetic stuff he’d done before.” 

P – I know nothing about this or about John Barth! If anyone has opinions drop them in the comments! 

 

“- Maupassant wrote some great supernatural horror stories - The Horla chief among them - which are a sharp contrast with his naturalistic fiction.” 

P – that’s one for the bank. 

 

“- Orwell’s 1984 would pretty much constitute this, I think. It’s a dystopian, science fictional work against his previous work of sociographical journalism.” 

P – but hardly unknown, and Animal Farm came first! 

 

 

Thor Hansen 

“The Adventures of Haji Baba of Isfahan "

P – what the hell. Ok I know nothing about this. This one is interesting. Apparently Persians enjoyed this colonial era white guy satirising Persian ways because many of them also thought Persia was a regressive place...

 

Luka Jare 

"Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony is sais to be pretty much that also and Simplicius Simplicissimus, the german picaresque novel set in the 30 years war."

P - Simplicius Simplicissimus, unknown to me at least so that’s something, but not part of a largler body of work by a ‘literary author’. 

 

Christopher Richardson 

"I don't know if "Baudolino" by Umberto Eco would count, since his ouvre is usually fairly weird, but I think critics mostly focus on "Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum" which are more prosaic. Baudolino is definitely high weird fantasy” 

P – I mean it probably doesn’t but if anyone wants to talk about Baudolino in the comments and argue over how genre it is, go for it. 

 

Barry Blatt 

“I don't know if it was really ignored, but Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker' is nothing like anything else he wrote, though It got awards from the Sc fi fans. It has an interesting post apocalyptic Kent and a culture based around Punch and Judy shows.” 

P – Riddley Walker is really good, not sure if it counts as an ‘unknown’, isn't it in one of the classic sci fi collections? Am open to arguments.

 

Zigurat Morningstar 

“Theophile Gautier's Captain Fracasse. A chivalry romance set in the 17th century. Good stuff and at time hilarious.” 

P – ok 10 points for being unknown to me, another for being from a 19thC author. Not sure how this plays out in comparison to the authors other works but interesting. There have been six films of this story! I feel like I am going to end up reading this one. 

 

Kelvin Green 

“Atwood keeps writing sci-fi but claiming she isn't.” 

P – Honestly Atwood can eat a dick. 

 

“Rushdie's Midnight's Children is basically Indian X-Men. Neither is ignored, but the fact that they are genre books is overlooked.” 

P – Ok this will likely surprise absolutely no-one reading this but on looking up Midnights Children my mind was fucking BLOWN. I had heard the name many many times but had literally no idea it has FUCKING SUPERPOWERS and was basically the fucking X-MEN. I feel like this one gets in simply because I was massively ignorant against it and it seems like a prime example of a bougie author in genre dress, or maybe visa versa. 

 

Verdancy

"Midnight's Children" is an odd one to single out for Rushdie IMO, "The Enchantress of Florence" and "Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights" are straight up fantasy novels, but Midnight's Children is despite the premise much more magical realist in it's plotting, if it counts then surely so do most of his other works.

Of course "Magic Realist stories with genre-worthy premises" could be it's own category: Terra Nostra, The House of the Spirits, Wizard of the Crow, Beloved....

Isabel Allende is a fun example as her version of Zorro is straightforwardly realist and feels all the more pulpy for it. It's like in her literary works she feels free to just give a character telekinesis and leave it at that, but in "Zorro" she feels bound by genre conventions to make sure all the spirit quests and magic potions have a mundane explanation. Possibly too recent and prominent to deserve a nomination although as said, I feel it has much more in common with sff than something like "Midnight's Children".

Iris Murdoch might deserve an anti-mention here for writing several extremely Gothic novels about evil occultists that are nevertheless firmly non-genre."

Shahar Halevy 

“The Adventures of Tintin” 

P - come on man.

Michael Weingrad 

“Blake's "The Four Zoas" is has its weird charms, and I think many of the "inverse classics" will be literally "in verse." Some of Disraeli's novels (e.g. Alroy) also occur to me, though it's not like his more successful novels are being championed by mainstream critics today.” 

P – Another mind-blown moment for me. A British Prime Minister was also a prolific, well not quite fantasy author by modern standards but a fantastic historical and mythic romance author. He wrote a shitload of these, what the hell! 

 

“For those who don't mind the slog, there is a lot of really good work by fantasy scholars and critics pushing back on the mainstream exclusion of the more fantasy-friendly work and showing how intertwined it all was and is. 

Brian Stableford had an enthusiastic entry on Flaubert back in the indispensable 1997 John Clute "Encyclopedia of Fantasy," and Stableford's many translations of French decadent, fantasy, sci-fi, and weird poetry and fiction have since expanded on that line of reading. (Paul Feval's "Vampire City" isn't canonical, but really worth a look, translated recently by Stableford.) 

Jamie Williamson offers lots of suggestions about the roots of modern fantasy in everything from the 18th century Spenser revival to 19th century Orientalist poems, in his excellent book "The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: From Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series." 

James Machin's "Weird Fiction in Britain: 1880-1939" is more academic but roots the Weird in fin-de-siecle decadent literature with some fine leads in the decadent nexus of Wilde, Huysmans, etc.” 

P – This feels like a good mission for someone with way more time and energy than me. 

 

Dan Sumption 

“Taking things to the other extreme, I recently read a play by Lord Dunsany which read more like something by Feydeau.” 

P – I mean Dunsany is Dunsany. 

 

Solomon VK

(I combined a huge number of comments by Solomon) 

“Not as pure an example as Flaubert, however: 

Evelyn Waugh sometimes has a reputation as something like a crueller Wodehouse - but it is worth noting that he was always willing to employ the unfamiliar or to write in settings outside 1930s Britain: witness the nameless future war at the conclusion of Vile Bodies, the Gothic fate of Tony Last in A Handful of Dust or the fictional nation of Neutralia in Scott-King's Modern Europe - all this neglecting anomalies like the mysterious voices in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold or the centralised dystopia of Love Among the Ruins. His novel Helena, about the mother of Constantine and the Invention (discovery) of the True Cross is another such anomaly. 

This is the same for Kingsley Amis, if somewhat less so - his genre influence is pretty obvious. Everyone thinks of Lucky Jim and forget stuff like The Alteration or Russian Hide and Seek. He also wrote a James Bond continuation (Colonel Sun) under an assumed name. 

EM Forster's The Machine Stops definitely counts. 

The Glass Bead Game definitely counts. The short stories in Hesse's Strange News from Another Star are pretty obvious bits of world-building as well. It's only the final entry of the Space Trilogy that works as modern conspiracy, no? But then I suppose the first chapter framing device of Perelandra and all the set-up business from the first act of Out of the Silent Planet offer a sketch of what it would be like. 

In any case, my instincts took me to another aspect of gaming altogether when I turned to Lewis: https://worldbuildingandwoolgathering.blogspot.com/2017/12/malacandra-trio.html 

Alternate history does seem to get them in for this - you've got Robert Harris's Fatherland and Philip Roth's Plot against America. But neither are very extensive in their world-building. 

Atwood's kind of got known for her genre material, though that's not where she started. Her book of essays In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination indicates that what she had/has an odd definition of Science Fiction vs Speculative Fiction. 

See also Laurent Binet, who went from an experimental novel about Rheinhard Heydrich, to an Umberto Eco-esque thriller about semiotics to 'What if the Incas invaded Habsburg Spain?'” 

P – bro… So much to think on. But that Incan invasion of Spain seems like one to add to the wishlist. 

 

Jeff Russell 

“A few thoughts, though I look forward to seeing what others say: 

- Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse presents an extremely compelling slice of an otherwise fairly hazy future, and works as a sci-fi novel. I haven't read Narcissus and Goldmund, but the synopsis sounds like its got some elements of a good medieval picaresque 

- Possibly overly obvious: Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. That's some gothic horror right there. 

- Maybe not as neglected, but several of Dickens's stories are pretty genre, including his best-known and seasonally appropriate, "A Christmas Carol". I also found the orphanage and street-life bits of "Oliver Twist" work rather well as inspiration for grubby city D&D 

- Doesn't *really* count, since he was well known for his genre writing, but I think Lewis's Space Trilogy knocks the socks off Narnia, and with very minor tweaking, would serve for the sinister modern conspiracy game of your choice.” 

P – I will give you Hesse, but not the rest! 

 

Noisms 

“Edmund mentioned Kingsley Amis's The Alteration above. He also wrote The Green Man, which is kind of a fantasy/horror genre story. 

HG Wells is probably the standout for The Time Machine, Dr Moreau, etc. I think I'm right in saying that later in life he was embarrassed by these genre efforts? 

Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" is probably an example of what you're talking about. I think there are also lots of Charles Dickens short stories that would fit the bill. 

Possibly Shakespeare plays, especially the lesser-known freaky weird ones like Titus Andronicus? 

A lot of Margaret Atwood's stuff would be in this category, I suppose, but she always insists she doesn't write SF and is just a bit of annoying, really. 

There's also Kazuo Ishiguro.” 

P – most of those are too well known and I am not letting Atwood in on principal but Rappaccini's Daughter does sound interesting. 

 

Thekelvingreen 

“Atwood was my first thought too. "Proper" novelist, doesn't write genre, pops out a couple of (definitely not) sci-fi books, and sneaks a pretty good Conan type pastiche into another. But definitely doesn't do genre.” 

P- No Atwood! Banned! 

 

Marten31 

“Stephen King's Eyes of the Dragon comes to mind, although he isn't the non-genre-type anyways. 

Hans-Christian Andersen's The Galoshes of Fortune may count: Not the usual dark fairytale but a story with time travel and an actual alien civilization on the moon. 

For me it is quite strange to see Wells mentioned in the comments so often - to me (as a German perhaps) he was always a scifi-auhor first (and the better compared to Verne, whose characters were always crap, and Lovecraft, who assumed that encountering a non-human-centred universe must surely drive anyone mad).” 

P – King, Andersen, Welles, all too well known as genre writers. 

 

Maxcan 

“I recently read Infinite Jest and people don't talk enough about how much campy scifi is going on behind the scenes in the plot and worldbuilding of that book. We had a whole conversation about it a while back on my server.” 

P – I have not read it! 

 

Alec Semicognito 

“The works of French author Michel Houellebecq. It's not D&D, but it is mostly science fiction extrapolating from current society. His mind-bending cynicism and despair, plus his bizarre real-life personality, tend to overshadow the sci-fi elements on the public mind. 

P -  I don’t want to read Houellebecq, he seems like too much of a cunt even for me, plus in the words of Alan Partridge; “(S)hes boring and racist, I can tolerate one of those but not both at the same time." 

 

Also Atomic Aztex, by Sesshu Foster. It's a political novel, alternating (I think) chapters about Latin-Americans working in a shitty meat-packing plant with chapters where the Aztecs are destroying the Nazis in WWII.” 

P – what the hell is this another French Mesoamerican alternate history thing? Its odd that has come up twice. (My mistake, it is American not french HOWEVER, Roger left this comment below;)

Roger G-S

"You think two Romance-language alt-Aztec novels is too many? (there was only one but that was my error) In 1968 the Catalan author Avel.li Artis-Gener wrote Paraules d'Opoton el Vell (Words of the Elder Opoton) about a reverse expedition from the Aztec Empire to Iberia. There's a Mexican translation into Spanish but sadly none into English."

P - Thank you Roger! So now there are three alternate-mesoamerica novels, one in French by Laurent Binet, one in American by Sesshu Foster and now this Spanish one by Avel.li Artis-Gener.

"Also, I was late to the party but would nominate Jack London, best known for his gritty Yukon tales. As a socialist he penned the usual sort of futuristic-utopian novel of class struggle, The Iron Heel, but I'm not talking about that one. I'm talking about his post-apocalyptic SF novel The Scarlet Plague, from 1912. The scenario surely must have inspired Edward Abbey to write the thematically very similar Earth Abides (although Abbey is more on the side of the plague than London was), which in turn spawned a host of best-selling works in the genre."

https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/21970

 

Montefeltro 

“I'd add The Hopkins Manuscript by RC Sheriff. He's mainly known for his play Journey's End - pretty much the archetype of a Very Serious WW1 Story - but also produced this 1930s apocalyptic sci-fi novel about the moon slowly crashing into the Earth. I'm not sure if I can wholeheartedly recommend it; the first third is a bit dull (basically the protagonist endlessly changing his mind about whether or not to worry about the impending threat) and the last section is mostly strained political allegory (a bit like the early chapters of Last and First Men, before Stapledon really cranks the oracular weirdness into gear). Nonetheless, in the middle section there's a pretty fine description of early 20th Century rural England coming to terms with imminent planetary destruction: defiant midnight cricket matches played under a moon that blots out the sky, and that sort of thing. Might be worth a look.” 

P – That does sound worth a look. 

 

Alea iactanda est 

“Simone de Beauvoir's Tous les hommes sont mortels (All Men are Mortal). It's about a guy that stops aging in the 13th century and how he lives until the present day. It's the book that 1000 Year Old Vampire aspires to be, and White Wolf's Vampire could never possibly pull off.” 

P – There is a film of this one too! Also why are the French so fucking depressed? 

“I found Fouqué's Der Zauberring (The Magic Ring) endlessly inspiring for RPG stuff. It's vast and gloomy and epic. 

Also, wait until you've finished the Flaubert, then check out Philippe Druillet's comics adaptation.” 

P – Well I have it. 

 

Hyrieus 

“Pale Fire by Nabokov might fit the bill here.” 

P – pffft, not realllly. 

 

Chryphex 

“First thing that comes to mind is John Steinbeck's retelling of Le Morte d'Arthur” 

P – I mean that’s just straight up genre, it has a wizard in it. It does win points for being by Steinbeck though. 

 

PrinceofNothing 

“You will probably already know of it but Simplicius Simpliccimus comes to mind, but fails on a technicality that it is the authors most popular work. Same goes for Xenophon's The Persian Expedition. 

Michael Crichton's Eaters of the Dead is terrific S&S and was made into the 13th Warrior, but this is not a literary author. 

No I think I shall recommend On to the Alamo by Richard Penn Smith for Appendix N status and slyly make my escape.” 

P – what the actual fuck. From the Wikipedia;  “In 1836, a sensation was created by a new book titled "Col. Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas: wherein is contained a full account of his journey from Tennessee to the Red River and Natchitoches, and thence across Texas to San Antonio; including many hair-breadth escapes; together with a topographical, historical, and political view of Texas ... Written by Himself". It was published by "T.K. and P.G. Collins" (actually Carey and Hart, who had published some of Crockett's authentic, though heavily edited, writings). They falsely claimed that it was Crockett’s journal, which had been taken from the Alamo by Mexican General Manuel Fernández Castrillón and later recovered at the Battle of San Jacinto, where the General was killed. It became a huge best-seller. For over a century the book had a profound influence on the public's view of the Texas Revolution and Davy Crockett's career, despite the fact that the author's true identity had been revealed in 1884.”

So its a pseudohistory that many people thought was an actual history to the extent that it influenced real history. 

Matt Halton

"Victor Hugo deserves a mention here. The Hunchback Of Notre Dame is just a detailed look at medieval Paris with evil priests, deformed guys living in cathedrals, a secret kingdom of beggars, etc. The Man Who Laughs has a brotherhood of child kidnappers who make freaks, a travelling carnival with a tame wolf, shipwrecks, evil pervert duchesses, a girl who's blind because her eyes were frozen. Even Les Miserables has a massive amount about the sewer labyrinth under the city. I just started reading Toilers Of The Sea but there's already wizards and I think an octopus fight later"

I *suppose* we can let Hugo in.

Morgan

"Jun'ichirō Tanizaki is mostly known (in the West at least) for writing well-respected literary novels exploring how modernisation affected traditional Japansese society, and for 'In Praise of Shadows', his collection of essays on classical Japanese aesthetics. He also wrote a story called 'Jinemenso' ('Tumor with a Human Face'), which I'm pretty sure kicked off the 'haunted/cursed film' subgenre."

P - I think we talked about his artistic pooping habits on here a while ago...

faoladh

"I suppose I understand, but I'm still surprised that Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings, about people, magic, and gods in ancient Egypt, doesn't get a mention here.

While he is after all a genre writer, Louis L'Amour is mostly known for his westerns, and perhaps to a lesser extent for his two-fisted pulp adventures in the South Pacific. However, he has also dipped his toe into more fantastic waters with Haunted Mesa, about gateways in the modern American Southwest to an extra-planar world that is inhabited by magical Navajos, and The Walking Drum, a high medieval picaresque starring a hero whose family maintains an explicitly Druidic heritage, including the magical abilities that heritage might supply. Sadly, the latter book was not very successful, so L'Amour never followed it up with the promised, or at least implied, sequels."