There is a pleasure in the pathless woods.

"When we are forced by illness to get close to our own decay, to our own impurities, we can begin to recontextualize mortality, impurity, and decomposition as things integral to the dynamic homeostasis of Earth’s complex biosphere. The chronically and incurably sick receive a terrifyingly intimate and accelerated version of this lesson in ecology: a lesson our capitalist throwaway culture has desperately tried to avoid. That lesson far exceeds our simplistic human dualisms of good and bad, safe and dangerous. But it does teach us.

“Thinking about the maneuvers performed by self-defined“literary” novelists to preserve their purity from genre pollution, I realized that I am in the unusual position of being able to perform the same poses and contortions, only backwards. How am I to protect my unspotted name as a science fiction writer from the scorn of those who might think I have been shamelessly performing acts of realism in public? Thus: How dare you call me a realist? My book “Searoad” has nothing to do with the commercial realism found in all the chain bookstores. I call the book “Social Reality Enhancement.” Realistic novels are for lazy-minded, semi-educated people whose atrophied imagination allows them to appreciate only the most limited and conventional subject-matter. Realistic fiction, or re-fi as its fans call it, is an outworn genre, written by unimaginative hacks who rely on mere mimesis. If they had any self-respect they’d be writing memoir, but they’re too lazy to fact-check. Of course I never read re-fi, but my children keep bringing home these garish realistic novels and talking about them, so I know that it’s an incredibly narrow genre, completely centered on one species, incredibly culture-bound, full of wornout clichés and predictable situations: the quest for the father, mother-bashing, obsessive lust, suburban guilt, and so forth. All it’s good for is being made into mass-market movies. Given its old-fashioned means and limited subject-matter, realism is quite incapable of describing the com-plexity of contemporary experience. Now, would you believe that tripe? There’s some truth in it. But it’s tripe. All judgment of literature by genre is tripe. All judgment of a category of literature as inherently superior or inferior is tripe.”