Locus Roundtable: Writing Within and Without Genre
Andy Duncan
Cecelia wrote: “As a writer though you aren’t just trying to fit into a megatext. You’re trying to do something original. The concept of genre interferes with this.”
The adverb “just” is crucial here. Even when writers are trying to do something original, they’re often trying to simultaneously engage with a megatext. Peter Straub had written ghost stories before he wrote Ghost Story, but one difference between that novel and the earlier If You Could See Me Now is that Ghost Story, as the title announces, is trying to be the ghost story to end all ghost stories, to find originality in its outrageous fulfillment of every imaginable trope of the megatext. Peter Prescott realized this in his influential full-page review in Newsweek, the review that sent me to the library looking for Straub’s book, back in 1979; the headline was “All but the Clanking Chains.”
Bruce Sterling, whom I invoked earlier, likes to say that genre “is a nearly unalloyed good.” I think this is partially what he means, that it gives us such a wonderful racquetball court where we can bounce our ideas around.
Cecelia Holland
Yes, I certainly bow to this.
Paul Witcover
I am in complete and enthusiastic agreement here. Genre is one of many tools a writer has at his/her disposal. One of its many uses is to provide the box we try to think outside of.
Cheryl Morgan
There are several different issues involved here.
From an academic view, categorization terms are used as a means of explaining, defining and understanding. Many of us have an academic bent and want clarity and precision. We like our critical terms to Mean Something. That’s entirely understandable, but very difficult when dealing with slippery customers like creative writers.
Then we have the marketing issues, which those of us at the business end have to be aware of. Marketers only value categories as ways of getting people to buy more of something. I don’t think we need to go there, beyond noting that it is inevitable and likely to be wholly lacking in rigor.
But it is the social use of categories that is causing all of the fuss. In communities category terms are generally used as a means of exclusion. They define who is “one of us” and who is not. When someone says that they “hate” a term, it is only a small step from there to that term being defined as “offensive”, and from there to going back through already published material and excising every occurrence of it.
In the social arena (and fandom is very much such a place) I prefer to use umbrella terms where possible. The point of an umbrella term is not that it “means something”, but rather that it can mean a whole variety of disparate things, and therefore acts to unite a community rather than to divide it. But finding an umbrella terms for what we do is hard.
SpecFic, for example, is held up by some as being exclusive of fantasy, because it abbreviates to SF. It is held by others as being a term designed to placate outsiders, and therefore insulting to us as an oppressed minority. (A classic example of this is the use of the term Welsh for a cultural group, because it is actually an English word meaning “foreigners”). Because there are plenty of people with reasons to “hate” SpecFic, it isn’t useful as an umbrella term.
Fantastika has a similar problem, in that people will claim that it promotes fantasy to the exclusion of science fiction.
I’d love to find a useable umbrella term. If nothing else it would mean less typing when I’m trying to be inclusive. But I have this awful feeling that I’m going to have to resort to an equivalent of the ever-expanding alphabet soup of the queer community. We’ll have to talk about SFFHAH. And then the fantasy crowd will insist we replace F with EFUFHFPR. And so on.
Or, to use some different letters, AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!
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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.)