Locus Roundtable: Writing Within and Without Genre
Andy Duncan
Paul G.R. provided the link to the Wikipedia article “Folksonomy,” where I found this sentence: “For content to be searchable, it should be categorised and grouped.”
If we weren’t somehow labeled — that is, “categorised and grouped” — how would new readers find us? Granted, one goal is for one’s byline to become a label of its own, a “brand,” in marketing parlance. Stephen King has become a brand; he is his own genre. I think this is what Bruce Sterling is getting at when he says his goal is to make his stories more and more “Sterlingian,” and I can identify.
But those of us with lesser fame than King still need new readers, and while “Bruce Sterling” (for example) may not universally register, “satiric sf” or “cyberpunk” or “near-future sf” or “far-future biotech fiction” might. A label says, in effect, “if you like satiric sf, you might like Bruce Sterling, too.” Angry Robot actually does this on the back cover of its books.
John Clute
I don’t think Stravinsky thought knowledge of the rules you mutate and break was inconsistent with a sense that the true creative act is a way of going naked: the more you know the rules, the better you distinguish what’s clothing from what’s raw in what you write. The supposition that we do not converse with our models, our peers, our forerunners, that we do not wrestle with various Bloomian anxieties en passant, seems to me somehow masklike.
Paul Graham Raven
Aye, ’tis a wise move on Angry Robot’s part, that. They’re a canny bunch.
I should have pointed out earlier that ‘folksonomy’ is one of that odd set of words that is a member of the class of things it describes (for which I’m certain there’s a specific noun, but I don’t know it).
But the more we discuss this matter of classification, the more it seems clear to me that there’s bound to be an underlying mathematical theory that describes exactly the problem we’re trying to describe. Does anyone have an email address for Greg Egan, at all? 🙂
Karen Burnham
It seems like every field of human endeavor has to go through a whole lot of ‘Put Specimen X in Box A’ work before we really get into the fundamental truths of the matter. I’m thinking of all the centuries that biologists spent on the “King Philip Came Over For Good Spaghetti” system before they got to evolution and DNA. Astronomers had a similar amount of scut work in the “Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me” star spectra classification system before beginning to really understand the sequence of stellar evolution. Maybe as a field of study we’re still in that pre-Darwin, pre-Hertzsprug-Russell phase of investigation?
-This argument brought to you by my having read Northrop Frye’s Introduction to Anatomy of Criticism right after Christmas.
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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.)