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Cryptofiction. It Lives.
March 4, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Pardon me if my personal obsessions tend to float onto the screen via this blog, but what are blogs good for if bloggers can’t indulge in self-involved logorrhea from time to time? If it wasn’t already quite clear, I am interested in cryptozoology and the book I am struggling to complete happens to relate to this subject so I do a lot of interweb research on it. Research that then tends to bubble up on this bookish blog. Luckily, there is a long history of cryptids in literature, so I am not completely off task here. (I’ll keep linking vocabularly words in this post until I feel justified.) Hell, there’s even a word for it now, even though the genre is as old as Dracula: Cryptofiction.
Here’s a new book about werewolves that I am dying to read: Sharp Teeth By Toby Barlow
Even kids want to read about cryptids, see here.
Here are more examples of modern cryptofiction that may inspire you to go book shopping:
No Return, by Pete Travers: 
A life is tragically lost in the rugged backwoods of Idaho. But what does one do when the only eyewitness is a creature that is not supposed to exist? A legend comes alive from the Old West.
Cryptid: The Lost Legacy of Lewis & Clark by Eric Penz.
The author of Cryptid, above, wrote a nifty little piece about the genre:
Cryptofiction, A New Genre on the Horizon?
by Eric Penz
A generation ago literature we label today as science fiction was simply fiction. Science fiction as a genre had not yet been born. Then seemingly over night “science fiction†burst onto the scene.
Literature may be experiencing a similar phenomenon today. Just as science fiction’s roots can be traced back to the generation prior to its acceptance, as far back as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a new genre may have roots nearly as old, dating back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World and the original King Kong. Both of these titles were not considered separate from the rest of fiction in their day, but today they could be labeled within a new genre with strong ties to science fiction. Cryptofiction.
Just as science seemed to have burst into the public’s consciousness at about the same time as the birth of science fiction, a new field of science is spawning a new genre of science fiction. Cryptozoology is a branch of science that studies cryptids, or unknown and as yet undiscovered species of animals. Not yet widely accepted by mainstream science, cryptozoology is nevertheless a self-styled and self-labeled field of study with a growing audience. The same can be said for cryptofiction…
For the complete article, please click here.
(The book biz is still up a creek, so I ask you all to please go out and buy a book this weekend, preferably from a local ma & pa bookseller. It does not have to be about cryptozoology.)