| Description |
Addiction and recovery texts can be delineated into several categories: self-help books, that propose methods for recovery; medical and psychological texts that outline the science of addiction, cultural and literary reviews, which examine the real-life social and political histories of substance abuse and drug policy; memoirs, often autobiographical, that detail an individual's journey through addiction and recovery, Other miscellaneous text forms, such as recovery websites, billboards, laws and policy, documentaries and films, self-help lines, pamphlets and brochures, and commercials could loosely fall into the aforementioned categories. The purpose of delineation is to define where my novel, A Gospel of Rage, lies in the context of genre. As a science-fiction novel grounded in medical and psychological science, it fulfils a new and unique role that draws from each of the delineated categories. It acts as a selfhelp novel, proposing methods of recovery. Its voice is first-person past tense-personal and grounded in reflective memory-often introspective, and focusing on one character's journey through addiction, drawing from the memoir form, although character thinking and motivation are described in the context of practical science-it is not autobiographical. It critiques current ineffective political policy and societal views, such as the link between substance use and creativity, or the increasing criminalization of addicted individuals, drawing from practical science to support its critique, but, at its, core, it is science fiction. In effect, it seeks to both educate and entertain and to be both accurate and fictional, blurring the lines between practical science, memoir, self-help, social criticism, and pure fiction. |
