transportation

"In The Land Across, veteran science fiction master Gene Wolfe comes down to earth and gives us the story of a travel writer stuck in limbo in just such a strange land. The writer, named Grafton, has it in mind to write the first travel book about an unnamed Eastern European nation that he thinks of as 'the land across the mountains.' (Other western travelers have apparently visited the region, but few have returned.) Grafton finds that he can't get there by air: flights get mysteriously cancelled or diverted to Turkey. Determined to become the first travel writer to publish a book about the place, he takes a train across the border. He's immediately arrested — the authorities take his passport and deliver him to a house in a nearby suburban neighborhood where, as the odd custom of the odd country would have it, he becomes the prisoner of the owner. […]

     Life in this nation, as it emerges in these pages, appears to have more affinity with Kafka country than any other. Grafton's internment, his efforts to buy a place to live on his own, his relations with the wife of his "jailor," his encounters with the JAKA, the secret police, his liaison with a JAKA agent, and the local manifestations of a darkly supernatural strain of events: all this makes for a novel that's an amalgam of real and super-real forces, a supposedly realistic novel that gives off the feel of a closely viewed dream.”
— Alan Cheuse, NPR Books
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Buy all of Gene Wolfe’s books here…

"... the ironic female gaze"

From: random geeking

"The Bible was written by a woman. Not all of it, just the good bits. Those fantastic old stories, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, were written by a woman living in Jerusalem 3,000 years ago as works of literature, only later co-opted to the service of religious dogma. So argues Harold Bloom in his treatise on the bible as literature, The Book of J.

     Bloom places the mysterious 'J author' at the pinnacle of the literary canon alongside Homer and Shakespeare. Seen through the ironic female gaze, God becomes less the ultimate patriarch than a petulant child sulking and raging his way through history. The Bible, with its cornucopia of talking snakes, burning bushes, seven-headed dragons, apocalyptic floods, parting seas, epic battles, tribal sagas, prophecies, miracles and magic is arguably the greatest fantasy story ever written.
     So if this most timeworn of texts was written by a woman, where in God's name are the women in today's modern myth-making?
     Everywhere, actually. Science fiction – our modern version of those ancient mythic stories – was invented by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in Frankenstein; or, A Modern Prometheus."
— Damien Walter, The Guardian
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Hybridization

"[…] We are sitting at a coffee shop in Austin, Texas; I am asking [Robert Jackson] Bennett questions about his latest novel, American Elsewhere, which was featured on 'most highly anticipated' lists around the Internet at the end of 2012. He tells me that although Mr. Shivers was shelved under horror and won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel in that genre, the horror community disowned it. 'They were like "no, this is not horror. You’re wrong,’'' Bennett says. 'That’s always been kind of a struggle for me, in that the folks who really like my books are frequently not the genre hard-core people. It’s usually folks who read a wide variety of stuff, that tend to fall into mainstream. And a lot of the fantasy that I like isn’t hardcore fantasy — it’s stuff that mainstream, non-geek people would love to read just as much.' He sighs. 'But then again no one really knows what the hell they’re talking about when they talk about this stuff. It’s all made up.'

     If something is identifiable as 'genre fiction,' it should be easy to identify what genre it’s in. After all, to classify something as belonging to a genre is to say that it is part of an easily recognizable group formed around shared traits. Over the past forty years, genre-bending has become increasingly common, as mainstream and 'literary' authors lift plots and themes from fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and horror.

   In 1989, SF author Bruce Sterling invented the term 'slipstream' to describe fiction by mainstream authors such as Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, and J.M. Coetzee that slipped beyond the margins of realism without being classifiable as fantasy or science fiction."
— Amy Gentry, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Buy all of Robert Jackson Bennett's books here...