So, PNH at Making Light had a link to Charles Stross's tongue in cheek manifesto on the The New Eclectics, which is in and of itself a smart piece of work critiquing the whole manifesto thing and carrying a lot of water in very light bucket. In turn, the Stross piece seems to have been generated by a comment thread on Elizabeth Bear's lj which came out of a very brief post and link to an incredibly smart piece by Richard Morgan on the wasted energy involved in F&SF genre feuds.
All very fun and very smart and part of why I try not to get involved in comparisons of the relative merits of genres and sub-genres. I do do it occasionally, but I invariably regret it.
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The senselessness -- the sheer irrelevance -- of inter- and intragenre feuding, as well as more generally the aggressive, reverse-snobbish policing of the borders of the sf/fantasy ghetto, was driven home to me recently as I watched the faces of some writer friends (fiction writers, and avid readers since childhood of sf and fantasy, but not sf/fantasy genre insiders) when I tried briefly to explain the virulence of our various turf wars and identity politics: first mildly quizzical, then bemused, and very quickly blank with boredom.
Two words say it succinctly: small change.
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