August 2010

While I was at Barnes & Noble yesterday, I noticed that there was a table for the reading list for Alachua county’s public schools.  I’m usually quite curious about what teenagers and kids are reading in school, largely because I think schools should spend more time fostering a love of reading than forcing students to learn about books they’ll never read again and that will likely ruin them as readers.  I’ll be honest in saying that I expected the table to contain no genre titles except those that have been on reading lists for decades (1984 by George Orwell, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley).  Boy was I surprised.  Yes, a number of staples appear on the list of forty-eight books, but also a whole lot of newer titles.  Of those forty-eight, nine are either science fiction, fantasy, or related in some way to either genre.  Those titles are: World War Z by Max Brooks Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz Alas Babylon by Pat Frank Watership Down by Richard Adams Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess Most of the books on the list are older books, and a good number are considered by many in the SF/F world to be classics, but the inclusion of World War Z, The Lovely Bones, and The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao is really interesting.  All are books released in the last ten years and each has either been released as a film or pegged for a film release (other titles on the list have also been turned into movies, obviously).  Set alongside older “classics,” they suggest that, perhaps, the schools in this county are acknowledging the cultural importance of genre titles.  Let’s face it, at least half of the nine books listed above are obviously genre books.  Unlike with 1984 or Brave New World, nobody with any sense can argue that World War Z or Ender’s Game are not science fiction, or that Alice in Wonderland is not a fantasy.  And if you look at The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Wao, you’re hit in the face with explicit science fiction and fantasy references. I don’t know if it’s fair to read anything into it.  I haven’t been to high school or middle school in almost a decade now, so it’s entirely possible that I’m simply out of touch.  Still, that’s pretty cool that they get to read those books, don’t you think?  We never got to read anything quite so exciting when I was in school… (Note:  There were also a lot of newer non-genre titles on the list, but I didn’t write them down due to a lack of time.)

Adam Callaway has been talking about New Weird and Scifi Strange lately in response to Jason Sanford’s recent fictive table of contents for an anthology of Scifi Strange stories.  One of the things that I find most interesting about discussions of genres, specifically subgenres, is how often readers and writers quickly dismantle the genre by spreading it thin.  While I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, it does have a tendency to destroy genres or reduce them to vague descriptions and definitions.  Two primary examples of this are science fiction (in general) and cyberpunk.  The former has always been too large to accommodate everyone with a definition, resulting in the continued debate over what defines science fiction (conventional wisdom would suggest that the assumed, but unofficial definition, is a catch-all for pretty much anything that resembles science fiction, but isn’t necessarily of that category).  The latter is an obvious result of the dispersion of crucial generic themes (in the literary sense) into aesthetic elements (i.e. the reduction of cyberpunk to stories with cyberpunk furniture, such as computer hacking, cyberspace, and so on).  I’ve discussed the “what it is” aspect of cyberpunk before, which you can start reading about here (it begins with the general issue of the “punk” suffix and develops into a detailed explanation of cyberpunk after a couple of posts), so I won’t tread into that field again. The problem now, I think, is that the same thing that happened to cyberpunk could happen to New Weird and, to a lesser extent, Scifi Strange.  The former was an “established” subgenre from the early 2000s (the quotes are intentional, since there are still some debate over it, as there always is in issues of genre) and the latter developed out of an association with New Weird, though any actual connection is thin at best.  I think it’s important to establish from the start a foundation for defining texts, not necessarily for the economic purposes, but for the purpose of maintaining some semblance of order and the potential for explanation, while also allowing for the presence of outliers and cross-genre affairs (New Weird being a cross-genre-genre). For these posts (yes, there will be more than one), I want to address Callaway’s views on New Weird and Scifi Strange; particularly, I want to critique his definitional elements and his ideas about these two genres.  My hope is to open up the dialogue on New Weird, Scifi Strange, and, more generally, genre studies. Now for part one: I.  Horror:  Placing New Weird in the Aesthetic Moment Callaway begins his discussion by suggesting that New Weird has more in common with horror than science fiction.  Knowing Callaway personally, this is a very curious position for him to take, particularly since he takes the word “science” in SF quite seriously.  To suggest that New Weird is built in this way is ignoring a crucial element of almost all New Weird stories:  the science-ing of fantasy.  As a prime example of this, we can look to Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, considered to be the principal text of the New Weird genre.  The story is set in a world population by fantastic creatures and magic, to a certain degree, but it is also a world in which scientists are actively engaged in the understanding of their world in a way that reflects the approaches of scientists in the late 1800s and early 1900s, with a moderate dose of pseudoscience.  There is a deliberate attempt on Miéville’s part to evoke the past without compromising the fantastic, meaning that the stories feel real because of its adherence to a proto-scientific vision.  That Callaway has neglected to take this into account in his post is odd.  I wouldn’t say that science is a constitutive element of New Weird, but it certainly is an important one to acknowledge. More importantly, New Weird has been rightly suggested as a response, critique, or attack on Tolkien-derivative fantasy, something that should perhaps be obvious when one reads Miéville or Jeff VanderMeer, both authors who I would consider to be foundational writers in the two schools of New Weird (British and American).  What New Weird texts tend to do is diverge significantly from what many would call the “epic narrative” (chosen ones, impending societal collapse by a generic evil, massive wars, excessive or lightly-controlled magic attached to heroes, generic and otherwise, and a host of derivative figures who we have seen before, such as the bearded wizard, and so on).  They approach fantasy from an altogether unusual angle that suggests that there might very well be an appropriate divergent path from Tolkien’s masterpiece (The Lord of the Rings); i.e. that one can design worlds with as much detail and precision, but with an eye on modern concerns and alternative originary points (Tolkien and Tolkien-derivative works look toward medieval England, while Miéville and VanderMeer draw heavily from the present and earlier periods in colonial-era England or America). The idea that New Weird is defined by the aesthetics of the horror genre (or, perhaps, the gothic genre, since that seems to apply more effectively here), then, is suspect.  Horror elements absolutely exist in New Weird texts, but they are superficial to the science and the critical response the texts evoke.  In fact, I would argue that much of what Callaway perceives as aesthetic elements of horror are not actually horror elements at all, but representations of the grotesque, which does not belong to horror (though it is often found there).  Taken further, I see New Weird as imagining the grotesque within the aesthetic scope of “beauty.” Miéville is a master of this aesthetic.  Perdido Street Station combines grotesque imagery with narrative in a way that recreates the grotesque as an almost appealing object.  Isaac and Lin, for example, are two individuals who are, by most modern accounts, disgusting (Issac an overweight, “juicy” human, and Lin a parasite-infested woman with a large insect head instead of a human one); yet, as their relationship is made clear to the reader, they