SR

Liked Rushdies style effusively enough to pick up a surprisingly effervescent Macmillliam Modern Novelist
on Rushd by DCRA Goonetilleke. That sounds Sinhalese and he's good. Here's what I picked up from chpt 1
in a patch where he's debating grimus' genre placement. and sc-fi is what he appears closest to, now:

'Eric S Rabkin observes: 'a good work of science fiction makes one and only one assumption about its narrative
world that violates our knowledge about our own world and then extrapolates that narrative world from that difference'.
In Grimus however there are several areas of difference. Time is arrsted. There is life in different dimensions.
There are two conflicting principles employed in the functioning of the narrative... '

Also for those with the buds for this, the form (of Grimus) fits that of Bakhtin's 'Menippean satire' - 'characteristic for
the Menippea is a wide use of inserted genres ... the inserted genres are presented at various distances from
the ultimate authorial position, that is, with varying degrees of parodying and objectification'.