Slumming in the SFF alleyways

SPEAKING VOLUMES

The last straw dropped heavily on the back of this particular camel when I realised that the literary novel I was reading "" written by an up-and-coming, frighteningly bright, heavily hyped author "" had devoted five pages (counted them) to a description of the wealth-induced ennui of a failed dancer.

On the table nearby, a stack of books of the kind a reviewer is not supposed to admit to enjoying sent out seductive lures.

One was adorned with a picture of a dragon, one with the standard curlicues that say, Here Be Fantasy, and one with the design of an amulet.

The jacket designers weren't going to make it easy for highbrow types who find it hard to admit that they've been slumming "" here, they were saying unabashedly, is Booker-shunned, critically ignored SF and SFF.

Not SF that aspired to literary heights; not fantasy that was masquerading as a new, deeply academic study of Ovid's Metamorphoses in disguise.

No, this was the real thing, pure genre fiction, extending a hand, beckoning with a finger, saying, be honest: wouldn't you rather read us than the tediously boring, critically applauded garbage you're stuck with?

I would. And I did. And several days later, emerging from pleasant visions of prophecies and imps and dragon's eggs, I caught myself wondering, not for the first time, why genre fiction isn't given the three rousing cheers it's so clearly entitled to.

In the rarefied world of High Literature, where the presiding deities are Amis, Naipaul, Sebald and others of that ilk, the doors are barred to the likes of Jonathan Stroud, Christopher Paolini and Samit Basu.

They're writers with a small w, not Writers with the capital letter breathed in tones of hushed reverence. Well, perhaps it's time they crashed the party.

Paolini was barely 15, a serious fantasy buff chafing at the lack of the kind of books in the genre he really wanted to read, when the first germ of an idea settled in his brain.

You must understand that Paolini is a one-off in the world of American letters. To begin with, he's not of legal drinking age yet "" he just turned 20 a few months ago.

He grew up in rural Montana, where his parents attended to his education rather than send him to the local school.

Interviewers say he's the kind of writer who has an insatiably curious, well-stocked mind; he can discuss the finer points of the Iliad versus the Aeneid with the same enthusiasm that he reserves for his newest buy, a replica Viking sword.

He finally finished Eragon, a tale of a farm boy turned hero and a female dragon coming into her own, when he was almost 18 years old.

The book rests on an old premise, but what makes it work is the clarity of Paolini's vision and his close working knowledge of nature.

As he said in an interview, one of the areas where he thinks he has an edge is with small details: moss feels like mouse fur to the touch, and that's how he describes it.

The maps of Alagaesia, the land where his fantasy was based, are based on his own illustrations; and before he wrote the first volume of his trilogy, he made sure that he knew the world he was creating in its entirety. (He's researching dwarf culture for volume two and three, in considerable detail!)

Paolini didn't have an easy start. His family threw their support behind him, but at one stage he was hawking books at local gigs, happy to spend eight hours in a medieval jester's costume making his pitch, and happier to have sold 40 copies at the end of that stint.

Then, in one of those twists that sounds like a publicist's dream come true, Carl Hiaasen's stepson bought a copy of Eragon while on holiday.

Hiaasen asked why he was so riveted, read the book himself and was so impressed that he recommended Paolini to his own publishers at Knopf.

The big book deal came through; the book shot up the bestseller charts in short order; and now Paolini's feet are firmly set on the rungs of the ladder to superstardom.

Samit Basu's The Simoquin Prophecies has been pitched by Penguin as India's first science fiction-fantasy novel of note, and it doesn't disappoint.

Basu wrote the novel in his early twenties "" he's 23 now "" though if you're looking for how the man's brain works, you'd do well to turn to an earlier short story that won an award in an online writing competition.

The premise of "The Plasmoids" is diabolically simple: what if science fiction was actually created by aliens delicately infiltrating the human creative consciousness as a way of sending out messages in a bottle?

There's a wicked twist to the tale, which reads slickly enough for you to forgive Basu for being so obviously pleased with his own cleverness.

The Simoquin Prophecies isn't straight fantasy so much as a fusion between classic adventure and a wicked, tongue-in-cheek dig at the genre itself.

It's what you'd expect from a writer whose first line is: "In a hole in the ground there lived a rabbit", and if you're wondering why that sounds familiar, go brush up on your Tolkien again.

Basu sets the pace from the word go; it's a no-holds-barred ride through Fantasyland, where the man in the driver's seat has a nice line in clever asides.

Jonathan Stroud, in comparison to these two precocious talents, seems positively over the hill at 33, which is when he published The Amulet of Samarkand.

I'm not sure if it's age that counts or Stroud's previous experience in children's publishing, but while Amulet is every bit as gripping as Eragon or Simoquin, it's far ahead of them in terms of elegant writing.

His imps and djinns are slick, corporate figures whose brand of smooth evil has rarely been bettered in a while "" they make Rowling's panting, heavily confessional Voldemort look like the cariacature he is. Watch out for his footnotes, too; they pack a considerable bite.

Perhaps you're wondering by now why an apparently respectable columnist would be so enthusiastic about djinns and trolls, dragons and amulets.

The latest literary sensation's new book has just been delivered to my doorstep; his idea of style is to create sentences that go on for paragraphs, and he wants to engage seriously with the dichotomies of modern civilisation via the mechanism of an aimless dialogue between an estranged couple which will, and this is a technical tour de force, run for three chapters.

You know what? I'm going to file his magnum opus in the dustbin, and look for something more to my taste. Something with elves and hags and nishibhoots and quests in it sounds just perfect right now.

nilroy@lycos.com