This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/mar/27/what-are-the-great-sentences-in-genre-fiction
The article has changed 3 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| What are the great sentences in genre fiction? | What are the great sentences in genre fiction? |
| (7 months later) | |
| What makes a great literary sentence? I've been thinking about this in advance of a debate I'm chairing at the Oxford literary festival this weekend on whether there is any difference between literary and genre fiction. | What makes a great literary sentence? I've been thinking about this in advance of a debate I'm chairing at the Oxford literary festival this weekend on whether there is any difference between literary and genre fiction. |
| Then, as if from the depths of my subconscious, up popped a blog from The American Scholar listing their editorial team's 10 favourite sentences. (Well, 11, actually, as they threw in Truman Capote as a bonus.) | Then, as if from the depths of my subconscious, up popped a blog from The American Scholar listing their editorial team's 10 favourite sentences. (Well, 11, actually, as they threw in Truman Capote as a bonus.) |
| As befits a scholarly outfit, the authors listed were mostly high literary standards, ranging from Jane Austen and Dickens to F Scott Fitzgerald and Toni Morrison. It was only in the comments section that the genre writers began to trickle in. | As befits a scholarly outfit, the authors listed were mostly high literary standards, ranging from Jane Austen and Dickens to F Scott Fitzgerald and Toni Morrison. It was only in the comments section that the genre writers began to trickle in. |
| William Gibson's Neuromancer made an appearance with: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." | William Gibson's Neuromancer made an appearance with: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." |
| Douglas Adams brought his inimitable humour to the show with "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't" from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Both of these are science fiction, which is interesting, because when I conducted my own watercooler conversation on the Guardian books desk about great sentences from genre fiction, it was SF examples that poured forth. | |
| Iain M Banks was nominated for "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop." (That's from Excession.) | Iain M Banks was nominated for "An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop." (That's from Excession.) |
| M John Harrison, a genre stylist if ever there was one, was also mentioned. Reviewing Harrison's novel Light back in 2002, Iain Banks picked out two gems: "She had the impatience of a 14-year-old - that life had not allowed her to remain 14, she could sometimes imply, was her special tragedy", and "Suddenly he understood this as a condition of things... there it would be, a boiling, inexplicable, vertiginous similarity in all the processes of the world, roaring silently away from you in ever-shifting repetitions, always the same, never the same thing twice." | M John Harrison, a genre stylist if ever there was one, was also mentioned. Reviewing Harrison's novel Light back in 2002, Iain Banks picked out two gems: "She had the impatience of a 14-year-old - that life had not allowed her to remain 14, she could sometimes imply, was her special tragedy", and "Suddenly he understood this as a condition of things... there it would be, a boiling, inexplicable, vertiginous similarity in all the processes of the world, roaring silently away from you in ever-shifting repetitions, always the same, never the same thing twice." |
| From spy fiction, John le Carre could not have realised how prophetic the following sentence would come to seem 40 years after publication of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: "The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal." | From spy fiction, John le Carre could not have realised how prophetic the following sentence would come to seem 40 years after publication of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: "The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal." |
| But, as with so many of the great lines from crime and thrillers, this has an aphoristic brilliance. Where, in genre fiction, is the luminescence of James Joyce's "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" (from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)? | But, as with so many of the great lines from crime and thrillers, this has an aphoristic brilliance. Where, in genre fiction, is the luminescence of James Joyce's "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" (from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)? |
| Or the existential brilliance of Samuel Beckett's "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new" (from Murphy)? | Or the existential brilliance of Samuel Beckett's "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new" (from Murphy)? |
| Is there anything to match these in genre writing? Over to you. | Is there anything to match these in genre writing? Over to you. |