{"id":1606,"date":"2011-11-29T00:20:27","date_gmt":"2011-11-28T22:20:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethingwicked.co.za\/?p=1606"},"modified":"2011-12-02T00:55:00","modified_gmt":"2011-12-01T22:55:00","slug":"writing-genre-fiction-in-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/2011\/11\/29\/writing-genre-fiction-in-south-africa\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing Genre Fiction in South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

by SL Grey
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From Issue 15 (Nov 2011)<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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A Guest Blog for the World SF Blog<\/p>\n

THE OTHER DAY AT a literary festival event (one of the rare occasions when both halves of S.L. Grey have been trundled out in public in the same room) the panel was asked whether South Africa should have its own genre imprint. The audience was made up of some of South Africa\u2019s very loyal SFFH fans, and we think they expected the answer, \u2018Yes, of course, it\u2019s a scandal that there isn\u2019t a dedicated genre imprint in South Africa.\u2019 But we and fellow panellists, Lauren Beukes and Tom Learmont, all agreed that there shouldn\u2019t be. The market in South Africa is simply too small to sustain one.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no particular reason to have a dedicated imprint selling local science fiction, fantasy and horror. There\u2019s still very little original novel-length SFFH coming out of South Africa, although it\u2019s clear from District 9<\/em> (an example of South African SFF idiosyncrasy which is reaching its retirement date) and Lauren\u2019s marvellous Moxyland<\/em> and Zoo City<\/em>, that there is a potential audience for them. There is a very loyal and fanatical SFFH fanbase in South Africa, which devours whatever SFFH it can lay its hands on, and most of this is British and American. Louis worked in a bookshop for years and remembers the round-the-corridor queues at a Terry Pratchett signing, compared with the embarrassing no-show at a signing by Graham Swift who had just that year won the Booker Prize.<\/p>\n

Zoo City<\/em> and Moxyland<\/em> were published first in South Africa by Jacana, a publisher known for choosing leftfield novels of interest to them. \u2018We publish what we like\u2019 is their tagline, more than a nod to the title of murdered struggle icon Steve Biko\u2019s posthumously collected writings, I Write what I Like<\/em>. Jacana is not making a great deal of money.<\/p>\n

It was barely a decision for us to submit The Mall<\/em> overseas and bypass South African publishing. We had written a mainstream horror novel which we wanted traditionally published rather than going the self-publishing or online routes. As far as we knew, no general trade publisher in South Africa had published a South African horror novel before and we thought very briefly about the incredulous responses we would get from local publishers, before submitting it to Corvus. We would be lucky to sell a thousand copies in South Africa, we thought, not a compelling prospect for an industry that makes most of its money on sport, current affairs, motivational and cookery books. Nonetheless, thanks to the efforts of Penguin South Africa who distribute The Mall<\/em> in South Africa, The Mall<\/em> has had wonderfully enthusiastic coverage on South African blogs, and a few South African newspaper reviews: not bad for a debut horror novel and one of the advantages of this small market which is top-heavy on writers and reviewers but a little short on readership. Understandably, most South African media\u2019s not quite sure whether space on a South African horror novel will interest its audience.<\/p>\n

Penguin South Africa has also been doing a wonderful job promoting Sarah\u2019s other alter ego, Lily Herne (with her daughter Savannah Lotz), whose Deadlands<\/em> young-adult zombie series they publish. They\u2019ve been getting her decent mainstream media coverage and great exposure in stores, complete with dump bins and posters. Their willingness to push genre fiction into the press and the shop windows is admirable. The Deadlands<\/em> experience shows that certain South African publishers like Penguin South Africa are actively looking for a commercial genre success and are willing to put some money into it. But it certainly is not enough to warrant an entire imprint. Even better that Deadlands<\/em> is a lead title on a general list, rather than being stuck in a SFFH ghetto where only dedicated fans will look.<\/p>\n

Penguin SA also publishes Sarah\u2019s other work, her crime novels, and this is where South Africa certainly has a burgeoning industry. Crime fiction has grown incredibly in the past decade, with writers like Margie Orford, Mike Nicol, Roger Smith and Jassy Mackenzie enjoying international publication. Crime novels by Andrew Brown and Sifiso Mzobe have won the Sunday Times Award, the country\u2019s major literary award, in recent years. Umuzi, one of the country\u2019s foremost literary imprints, part of the Random House Struik stable, publishes Nicol and Mackenzie among other crime writers when they have not considered commercial SFFH. It\u2019s an interesting and open question: what is the difference between crime and SFFH in South Africa? Why is crime readily published by South African houses and not SFFH? The same could be asked about women\u2019s commercial fiction, another genre struggling gamely for a foothold in South African publishing.<\/p>\n

The answer lies, to a great extent, in the subject matter. South African crime fiction is set squarely in South Africa and reflects and transforms South African realities in fiction\u2019s magical, cathartic and powerful way.\u00a0 A lot of the SFFH produced in South Africa is quite generic, set in fantasy neverlands or in the States or steeped in an amalgam of already-written locales and tropes.\u00a0 While some of this work still has great merit, it is South Africanness \u2013 a broad and massively disparate range of experiences \u2013 that often sets the best, most notable, of our writing apart.<\/p>\n

South African writers still suffer from \u2018cultural cringe\u2019, the idea \u2013 derived from the time when we were the pariahs of the world, caught in the past and in cultural isolation by that bizarre retrograde apartheid government \u2013 that if it\u2019s South African, it\u2019s not good enough, it embarrassingly falls short of international standards, it\u2019s not world class. So many young writers, who start out as fans of SFFH from the States and Britain, think that to write well is to emulate the styles of those international writers they admire. Many South African readers themselves still deliberately avoid South African novels because they preconceive them as heavy, guilt-ridden and boringly political, and prefer to escape into realities that aren\u2019t so close to home. This prejudice misses the fact that so much South African writing, past, current, \u2018genre\u2019 or \u2018literary\u2019, is inventive, challenging and entertaining. It\u2019s all an awful internal PR job concocted out of cultural cringe and bad choices for school setworks. It doesn\u2019t help that South African fiction, be it literary, genre or mainstream, is so often lumped together and relegated to its own \u2018SA Fiction\u2019 ghetto in many of our local chain book stores. It\u2019s as if booksellers are sending the message that South African fiction isn\u2019t worthy of rubbing shoulders with say, Steig Larsson, Stephen King or David Mitchell, or that it needs remedial attention to compete.<\/p>\n

Any writer wants to be published as widely as possible, and\u00a0 aspirant writers often think they have no chance of being published in the rest of the world if they write about South Africa. The international success of Zoo City<\/em> and the interest in The Mall<\/em> reminds us, as the canon of South Africa\u2019s literary laureates has already proven, that the opposite is true: that our exotic, unique South African setting can make our writing stand out from the crowd. Then we need to back up that slight competitive edge with top-quality writing. This is what gets South African crime writers on international shelves, and we hope it encourages South African SFFH writers to write what they like, not what they think they should write.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2011 by SL Grey
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[hana-code-insert name=’ArticleBlockOpen’ \/]<\/p>\n

SL Grey<\/h2>\n

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SL Grey<\/em> is the genderless persona of Sarah Lotz, novelist and diehard zombie fanatic, and Louis Greenberg, ex-bookseller with an MA in vampire fiction and a PhD in post-religious apocalyptic fiction. They discovered a mutual interest in horror while bunking a crime seminar in a pub and SL Grey was born.<\/p>\n

Grey\u2019s first novel, The Mall<\/strong>, has been garnering rave reviews around the world.<\/p>\n

The much-anticipated follow-up The Ward<\/strong> will be released in December 2012.<\/p>\n

[hana-code-insert name=’ArticleBlockClose’ \/]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by SL Grey
\n\"\"<\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n
\n

THE OTHER DAY AT a literary festival event (one of the rare occasions when both halves of S.L. Grey have been trundled out in public in the same room) the panel was asked whether South Africa should have its own genre imprint. The audience was made up of some of South Africa\u2019s very loyal SFFH fans, and we think they expected the answer, \u2018Yes, of course, it\u2019s a scandal that there isn\u2019t a dedicated genre imprint in South Africa.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/td>\n

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\nFrom Issue 15 (Nov 2011)<\/span><\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/td>\n\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[126,227,88],"class_list":["post-1606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-fiction","tag-issue-15","tag-non-fiction","tag-sl-grey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1606"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1610,"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions\/1610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}