Quotes From "Rhapsody: Notes On Strange Fictions" By Hal Duncan

Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing. Hal Duncan

I likes me some ‘Shit Blows Up’ fiction, don’t get me wrong. Hal Duncan

So, fuck ’em, we say. Fuck the mundane of Mainstream, the elitists of Literature. We’re GENRE FICTION and proud of it, proud to wear that brand painted on the backs of our biker’s jackets. Hal Duncan

—It’s not Sci-Fi, we insist, It’s SF.Every time you say that a Venusian Slime Boy dies, you know. Hal Duncan

The crescent sun is high, the moon low; life is not for the faint-hearted; so why the fuck should art be? Hal Duncan

This is the fiction that I’m referring to as rhapsody, this stitching of mimetic representation, oneiric imagery, ludic rules, allegoric morals, satiric critique and diegetic story into complex quiltings of narrative. Hal Duncan

— No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café.The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw the Booker, she thinks. She’d rather have a hookah. Hal Duncan

Fuck the epistemic modality; this is alethic modality we’re talking now, not factuality but possibility. Hal Duncan

Soylent Brown? It ain’t people, but it comes from them. Hal Duncan

The spelunkers of speculative fiction mining phosphorescent filth from the bowels of the city of New Sodom, the Sci-Fi freaks scraping kipple and back from the bins of decades-old shit sandwiches out back, composting it to grow shrooms, we have built this thing to take its Hal Duncan

In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn’t matter if you’re filthy. In theory anyway. Hal Duncan

All worlds of fiction are alternative realities. Hal Duncan

Personally, I’d like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it’s going to be so overloaded with meanings it’s just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink. Hal Duncan

Fuck, if only ‘aesthetic idiom’ didn’t sound so damn poncy. Hal Duncan

For some the label sci-fi is just a shortand for science fiction, an alternative to sf gesturing at ... you know, that stuff we like. Hal Duncan

All prejudice presents itself as piety, propriety. Hal Duncan