On its surface, Animal Farm feels rather silly – the idea of animals, led by hyper-intelligent pigs, taking over a farm from humans who are entirely impotent to reclaim the small territory, is difficult to take seriously at times – but the reader must recall that Animal Farm is not so much a traditional novel as we think of the form as it is a fairy tale or a fable.
A Not Unactive Post About George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”
Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" is among my most oft-cited pieces on language and writing, and its lessons and criticisms are as valid today as they were in 1946.
Genre Jargon
Speculative fiction, broadly, includes the stories that are typically classified as science fiction and fantasy, but if you've written in the genre realm for long, you may have noticed that the terminology employed by libraries and other sources to classify genre fiction is somewhat limited. Maybe we genre writers aren't as "serious" as the "real" authors, but that hasn't stopped us from developing our own terminology to help describe our works. Since I think that many of these terms would be useful for both readers and writers to know, I've sought to describe some of them below.
