This week, we have the first of two articles about mythpunk: an interview with Catherynne M Valente, coiner of the term. Next week we'll have a full round-table discussion, and between now and then I'm going to post a few of my own thoughts here.

An initial angle of attack occurred to me after listening to the most recent episode of the always enjoyable Coode Street Podcast. Jonathan Strahan and Gary K Wolfe were discussing the proliferation of sf terminology, and specifically of labels for the edge-of-genre indefinable stuff that's been so prominent over the last decade or so. Wolfe noted that he liked "slippage" as a description of the experience of reading such stories—as a reader-focused terms—as opposed to other proposed terms such as slipstream, or interstitial, which felt to him more like terms for writers or publishers.

So, I wondered, which is mythpunk?

Superficially, it's a term for writers; as Valente says in the interview, she coined it jokingly, but as a description of a real Thing to describe

. . . a weird kind of trend among a certain kind of writer these days--often young, often female (though not always), almost always small press, something that were we older, and male, and middle-press, might be called a movement. Fantasy writers who were over Tolkien by roughly second grade, and start instead in folklore and myth and from there layer in postmodern fantastic techniques: urban fantasy, confessional poetry, non-linear storytelling, linguistic calisthenics, worldbuilding, academic fantasy, etc.

I'd easily name Sonya Taaffe, Dora Goss, Holly Phillips and myself in this group, and call us the spiritual children of Greer Gilman, and I might add in Yoon Ha Lee, Erzebet YellowBoy, Jeanelle Ferreira and Vera Nazarian if they wouldn't be upset by inclusion. [. . . ] it's just that 20th century fantasy started from Tolkien and saw him as the source himself, not as one branch on the tree. We tend to start in myth

That is, to provide an identity for what she and others were writing. (I wouldn't necessarily call this a movement, although some writers do seem to be producing mythpunk works self-consciously.) I can imagine it as a term for publishers quite easily—as Kameron Hurley is finding, -punk suffixes have a way of sticking in our genre—although to date I can't recall seeing it on any books. (Although there are mentions of the idea of a mythpunk anthology floating around out there, and it got a mention in a Guardian blog.) I do agree with Valente, and others, that there is something real at the root of the term, although perhaps the true test will be when people start coming up with alternatives.

So the interesting question, I think, is to what extent it's a term for readers (or for that most idiosyncratic subset of readers, critics). Before I get into how it works for me, however, this seems like a good point to open the floor: have you ever read anything that left you feeling mythpunked? If so, what?