Locus Roundtable: Writing Within and Without Genre
Russell Letson
Everybody has been so relentlessly sensible and comprehensive that I’d better wedge something in here before I’m limited to me-tooisms. Or maybe I already am.
Even if I weren’t a reviewer and former English teacher, I’d be a labeler–I’m hopelessly analytical, a compulsive taxonomist, a parser of elements, a dropper-into-pigeonholes, and a deviser of names for the items so analyzed, catagorized, parsed, and pigeonholed.
Consensus labels are helpful for readers, writers, and (godknows) reviewers; and the last group can play the game by either extending and refining the consensus labels or by creating nonce terms that describe the kinds of clever variations on themes that writers come up with. For example, I called Susan Matthews’ Colony Fleet a melodrama of manners, “in which behavior and folkways are examined in the context of stressful and dangerous environments.” In retrospect, I think it’s a useful characterization that might be applied to, say, the work of Patrick O’Brian–it says pretty much the same thing as “Jane Austen meets C.S. Forester.” It’s not a term that’s going to make the textbooks, but it certainly describes a repeating phenomemon.
What are now called “mash-ups” (itself a literary-category label) are nothing new–Charles Stross’s Cthulhu-meets-James-Bond tales of the Laundry can trace their ancestry back to Campbell’s Unknown Worlds fantasies, which themselves pointedly installed science-fictional (and other generic) machinery in the chassis of classic supernatural fiction. That’s the way “genre” works: collections of protocols, subassemblies, atmospherics, plot devices, presentational conventions, and other component parts can be configured and reconfigured to suit the artist’s taste, ingenuity, vision, or perception of market opportunity. The result may fit into an existing family of products or require a new name to identify its function, appeal, and target audience. Think about “paranormal romance” or “historical mystery” or “recipe cozy” (I just made that one up) or any of the innumerable ways of arranging and packaging the elements of Story.
I remember a Marty Feldman skit in which a funny little man comes to a ticket agency looking for a show to attend. “Do you have anything with giraffes?” he asks. After a series of similarly oddball specifications, he settles for one that has “naked ladies playing football.” Audiences can have very particular, not to say fetishistic tastes, and working artists clearly are not above taking notice.
I live with a writer, so I get to watch stories germinate and grow. Sometimes the seed sprouts almost on its own and she just waters and pulls weeds and does a little pruning. Other times she is is looking to grow a particular species and exerts a different kind of control. It seems to work the same way in music, though in ensemble playing one tends to start with an established something–a form or a particular tune–before taking off for parts unknown. But even a gifted solo improviser will not generally produce music that doesn’t belong to some family that can be named.
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A stimulating discussion. I’m most in agreement with John Kessel, which may be understandable. What hasn’t been discussed here, however, is that identifying the genre is essential for a reader if he/she is to read it properly: each genre (and the original use of the term applied very broadly to fiction, drama, poetry, etc., and SF, Western, Detective,..are sub-genres at best, or categories) has its own reading protocols and if the reader applies the wrong protocols the reading goes awry. See Thurber’s “The Macbeth Murder Case.” So a writer who wants a reader to arrive at a particular reading response can hardly avoid dealing with a reader’s expectations.
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As a writer (vs. the reviewer/critic that Paul W. distinguishes) I think any time I hit upon an idea for a story, that idea arrives with suggestions of the genre territory it’ll occupy fully intact. What I can and can’t do with it is dependent, among other things, upon the scope of my familiarity with that territory–the better handle I have on it, the more knowledgeable I am about what’s been done already, the more things I can do, and the more things I can upend. (See Terry’s McMurtry quote.) I suppose I stand between Mssrs. Witcover and Kessel in that I think I’m very conscious of the genre the story is aiming at, but that this pointed direction came already embedded within/implied by the idea. I’m not spending much time ruminating upon it. To me that’s all the more reason to be aware of the things that aren’t of that territory, because they offer elements I might want to draw upon that would make the story different, richer, unique. Like hauling some Franz Kafka or Bruno Schulz into my very in-genre fantasy story. And the debate will rage on anyway as to whether the resultant story belongs in “this” category or “that” category. Which is all just fine by me.
I don’t like the term “Speculative Fiction” – it sounds so undecided, like we have no idea what we are writing or reading. However, I don’t have any problem with genre labels. I read in a variety of genres, and I don’t feel there is anything wrong in dividing a story in Sci-fi/Fantasy/Horror etc. When I am writing, I know what genre I am writing. It’s not a conscious decision to write in particular genre, but each story, just happens to be the right one for one genre more than all the rest.
It sounds like a round defeat for “speculative fiction” as a prissy umbrella term. I recently read some interesting things along these lines (folks should check out Cheryl’s link there as well) from Robert VS Redick:
http://suvudu.com/2010/03/when-the-pizza-wakes-ending-the-genre-vs-literary-fiction-battle-once-and-for-all-by-robert-v-s-redick.html
Still as a publisher (of “speculative fiction” until I can afford tattoo removal…) a useful umbrella term would be nice. This discussion wasn’t about such a thing directly, but it did touch on some options: “the fantastic”, “fantastica”, “science fiction, fantasy, horror, and slipstream, and …” none of which are particularly appealing.
The “what to call this whole umbrella of genre fiction” went a bit outside of the original question, but I found that very interesting.
Recently, Orson Scott Card, in an interview with John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley on io9’s Geeks Guide to the Galaxy, made the case that fantasy is now properly a subset of science fiction, because modern fantasists are just as rigorous in their world-building:
http://io9.com/#!5746150/orson-scott-card-writes-humans-in-episode-29-of-the-geeks-guide-to-the-galaxy
And even more recently, Scalzi says: To engage in further nitpicking, everything you can possibly label as “science fiction” is in fact just a subset of a larger genre, which is correctly called “fantasy.” This is because science fiction — along with supernatural horror, alternate history, superhero lit, and the elves-and-orcs swashbuckling typically labeled “fantasy” — is fundamentally fantastic. Which is to say, it involves imaginative conceptualizing, does not restrain itself according what is currently known, and speculates about the nature of worlds and conditions that do not exist in reality. It may gall science-fiction fans to think of their genre as a subset of fantasy, but it is, so calling a film “science fantasy” is in most ways redundant.
http://www.filmcritic.com/features/2011/02/science-fiction-vs-science-fantasy/
It sounds like a round defeat for “speculative fiction” as a prissy umbrella term. I recently read some interesting things along these lines (folks should check out Cheryl’s link there as well) from Robert VS Redick:
http://suvudu.com/2010/03/when-the-pizza-wakes-ending-the-genre-vs-literary-fiction-battle-once-and-for-all-by-robert-v-s-redick.html
Still as a publisher (of “speculative fiction” until I can afford tattoo removal…) a useful umbrella term would be nice. This discussion wasn’t about such a thing directly, but it did touch on some options: “the fantastic”, “fantastica”, “science fiction, fantasy, horror, and slipstream, and …” none of which are particularly appealing.
So I agree with Cheryl Morgan: AAAAGGGGHHHHH!!!
I do like that the banner ad I see when visiting the roundtable is for Expanded Horizons: speculative fiction for the rest of us.
Just a quote note: I didn’t complain that Horton said I wrote slipstream, I complained that there was no such thing as slipstream. So far as I can tell, it really means stuff that obviously betrays influences other than the textual hardcore of SF or fantasy influences, which one would hope wouldn’t need another whole subgenre for itself. (Writers should read far more widely than they write, even if they write in several genre traditions.)