>Kevin wrote:
>
><<And here's a suggested topic:
>
>Who are the hot writers who can take us into the next
millenium, maybe
>offer something new to the genre?>>
>
>I think Jack O'Connell definitely falls into this
category. His books
>inhabit a world that are so hyper-real they verge on
surreal. Few, if
If Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy is correct, Western Civilization
is over.
It's been over for years, it just doesn't know it yet.
Finito. Kaput.
Gone. Western Civilization is like the cancer victim
resorting to
Laetrile, a hopeless hope, as one last desperate measure. The
beginning
of noir was perhaps the beginning of the end.
Sure, the (American) economy is booming and crime rates are
falling, but
at what price? 1.8 million people in jail in the US because
people won't
behave anymore, a kind of slow-motion burgeoning police
state, where
lies are king and the head honcho may be one of history's
most adept and
well-loved liars. Hey, man, you've got to find your own
truth. What's
true for you may not be true for *anyone* else.
We have seen the utter dissolution of left-wing rationalism
in our
lifetimes with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.
Perhaps the
only place where it's still believed is in the academy.
Right-wing
rationalism is on life support, relying on a
Clinton-like
"triangulation" of fence-posts anchored in water.
When (some form of) rationalism is abandoned, the only course
left is
irrationalism: magic, superstition, mindless horror,
hyper-realism,
surrealism, chemicalism, tribalism, amorality,
pornography.
Classic noir is dependent on a culture that was, I think,
shocked by the
writings of Hammett and Chandler as "edgy," which today
seem
commonplace. Marlowe's amorality is run-of-the-mill,
perhaps
prototypical of the man-in-the-street today. The evildoers
are blase.
That crap wouldn't even make the papers. We need something
more shocking
to get our nuts off. And so hardboiled (not noir) will have a
future --
because you can always boil things a little longer.
So the body count or the weirdness factor has to ratchet
upwards an
order of magnitude for people to be surprised and
"entertained" by the
text. Stephen King (any book), Thomas Harris (Hannibal
Lecter), and Bret
Easton ("American Psycho") may be the new
traditionalists.
Look for writers combining SF and/or the horror genres with
mysteries
for the future of hardboiled writing.
Not that it's completely apropos my garbled thesis, you may
nonetheless
find the following interesting: "So is science fiction a
genre or just a
market?"
http://cnn.com/books/news/9905/26/salon.scifi/
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