I’ve always had a soft spot for good genre parody, regardless of genre, and The Unfeasibly Tall Greek Billionaire’s Blackmailed Martyr-Complex Secretary Mistress Bride is pretty damn hilarious. You can read the first chapter in HTML, or the whole thing at Scribd.

I finished Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union today. I liked it, although I think it overdid it perhaps a little with its sheer Jewishness—it takes place in an entirely Jewish state, one whose inhabitants are all highly aware of their Jewishness in ways I’ve never encountered in real life. It’s not quite caricature, and it’s definitely a loving portrait in many ways, but it felt like Chabon figured out how to convey “a Jewish atmosphere”, and conveys it, and then hires a trucking company to keep on conveying it from his mind to yours, while you’re trying to follow the plot. I suddenly wonder if At Swim-Two-Birds strikes the non-Irish in a similar way, given that it’s steeped (very steeped) in Irishness. In any case, Chabon’s novel is a good one, and a good read, but my question is: is it science fiction?
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Some time ago I came across an essay online that contained a number of pithy definitions of fiction genres, addressing each in terms of what overriding question it was trying to answer. I liked the definitions, but now cannot remember any of them except the science-fiction one, which is sad because it’s the common one of “what does it mean to be human?”. I really want to find this again to see what the others were (detective fiction might have been “what does it mean to be just?”), and I can only remember that I liked the others and that I felt they were insightful and useful. If by bizarre chance anyone reading this knows that page or those definitions, please leave that information in a comment! Other comments on genre definitions are also welcome.