By Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

First published on IROSF in Sept. 2005

There’s a constant discussion among ourselves as writers and readers of genre fiction, usually along the lines of “what is genre”, or “genre is dead”, or “they don’t write stories like they used to, by gum! You kids have all sold out to the style monkey horde.”  We are, and perhaps always have been, a schizophrenic lot when it comes to our self-definition.

One of the more measured approaches to this question is the ...