18 April 2012
Their Own Genres
io9 has an interesting article called Science Fiction and Fantasy Creators Who Became Their Own Genres.
I didn't quite know what they meant until I saw a few names, and then I went, "Ohhhh..... yeah. I get it now."
The names that caught my eye were Douglas Adams, Robert Heinlein, and Joss Whedon. Whedon might be the most interesting case: His work is all over the place in terms of traditional genres (Buffy and Angel were fantasy/horror, Firefly was scifi/western, Dollhouse was near-future dystopia/philosophy, Dr. Horrible was scifi(?)/musical, and this year he has three movies coming out: meta horror movie The Cabin in the Woods, superhero blockbuster The Avengers, and a modern-setting production of Much Ado About Nothing.) But I have loved pretty much everything of his he's done. The genres may be all over the place, but the themes and the tone and the humor are always the same.
My favorite bit from the article came from the Douglas Adams section, though:
"Adams was often compared to [Kurt] Vonnegut, and indeed his dark humor often feels sort of reminiscent of Vonnegut's — but he goes much, much further into silliness and absurdism. And as with other authors on this list, when you pick up a Douglas Adams story, you know you're getting certain things, including hapless heroes, ingenious plot twists, narrative digressions and an irreverent refusal to commit to any kind of comforting sense of reality."
I didn't quite know what they meant until I saw a few names, and then I went, "Ohhhh..... yeah. I get it now."
The names that caught my eye were Douglas Adams, Robert Heinlein, and Joss Whedon. Whedon might be the most interesting case: His work is all over the place in terms of traditional genres (Buffy and Angel were fantasy/horror, Firefly was scifi/western, Dollhouse was near-future dystopia/philosophy, Dr. Horrible was scifi(?)/musical, and this year he has three movies coming out: meta horror movie The Cabin in the Woods, superhero blockbuster The Avengers, and a modern-setting production of Much Ado About Nothing.) But I have loved pretty much everything of his he's done. The genres may be all over the place, but the themes and the tone and the humor are always the same.
My favorite bit from the article came from the Douglas Adams section, though:
"Adams was often compared to [Kurt] Vonnegut, and indeed his dark humor often feels sort of reminiscent of Vonnegut's — but he goes much, much further into silliness and absurdism. And as with other authors on this list, when you pick up a Douglas Adams story, you know you're getting certain things, including hapless heroes, ingenious plot twists, narrative digressions and an irreverent refusal to commit to any kind of comforting sense of reality."
Labels: books, movies, scifi/fantasy, TV
# posted by mamurd @ 11:02 PM 
