August 2011

Follow science fiction long enough and you’ll notice a trend:  most people, by default, associate the various generic traditions of SF with aesthetic or visual qualities.  We see a spaceship or a robot or an alien species or a ray gun or whatever and immediately think “this is clearly science fiction.”  In many respects, this is how fantasy with spaceships comes to be placed within the genre, despite lacking all the formal qualities of SF.  No subgenre suffers this fate more so than cyberpunk. I’ve often wondered why cyberpunk gets dumbed down so excessively.  Much of the genre’s history (where it came from, what its authors were responding to, and so on) is not exactly hidden from the public eye.  Yet we can talk about the formation of SF in the early 1900s and its immediate precursors in the late 1800s more accurately than we can the formation of cyberpunk — this despite having far less information about those periods than we do about the late 70s and the 80s (that’s not to say we don’t have a lot about the early 1900s and late 1800s).  The latest example of this dumbing down hails from two episodes of Writing Excuses (w/ Brandon Sanderson, Dan Well, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Taylor).  The first episode is an attempt on their part to define cyberpunk, while the second is an exercise in constructing a cyberpunk tale.   It’s the first I have issues with, since the hosts spend so much of their time applying aesthetic and visual objects to the genre or otherwise dumb down the heavily political momentum that made cyberpunk possible.  The hosts also apply a number of stories to their definition, many of which are falsely associated with cyberpunk precisely because they only bear visual resemblance to the subgenre.  Blade Runner, for example, is, at best, a proto-cyberpunk story (which one of the hosts, I think, points out), in part because the only things that tie it to cyberpunk are the environment and occasional bits of machinery, all of which are, once again, falsely associated with cyberpunk.  While cyberpunk is a very visual medium, it’s not the surface level of the subgenre that matters, but what lies beneath.  Any story can contain noir elements, hackers, evil corporations, and so on.  But just as having a spaceship does not make a story science fiction, so too do the surface level visuals not make something cyberpunk.  Akira is a cyberpunk movie; The Matrix is not.  Neuromancer is cyberpunk; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is not. The only thing the folks on Writing Excuses got right was the fact that cyberpunk is a near future genre (post-cyberpunk is not, since it tends to transplant the formal qualities of cyberpunk into broader spaces of engagement, such as other planets, space stations, and so on).  But they missed the crucial point that makes cyberpunk such a valid form of literature:  we live in a cyberpunk world.  Africa is cyberpunk with its manipulations of technology, its relationship to global capitalism, and its complex and troubled social conditions (and the interactions between all of these elements).  Many parts of the western world are cyberpunk too.  All you have to do is look around you to see cyberpunk in action. But you also have to be careful with such real world associations, because so much of what is problematic about defining cyberpunk can be unfairly applied to the now.  Cell phones and text messaging and phone hacking aren’t cyberpunk activities.  Anonymous is not a cyberpunk group.  It’s the “punk” that really matters to the “cyberpunk” label.  And if you don’t know what a “punk” is, then you really can’t talk about the “cyber” part… (For the record, I’ve written a bunch of stuff on the “punk” in cyberpunk and the formal qualities of the genre:  here, here, here, here, and here.)

One of the things I wanted to talk about in yesterday’s post on why the best fiction fits somewhere was my personal take on dividing books by generic category (in bookshops and elsewhere).  But then I thought:  why not offer my brief take and then see what you all think about the issue in general.  And that’s what I’m going to do. What do you think about the way in which books are divided in most bookstores?  Do you like that there is a YA section, a science fiction and fantasy section, a general fiction section, a mystery section, and so on?  Do you find them useful as a book shopper?  Do you find them inadequate?  Let me know in the comments. As for me, I find the categories in bookstores useful, but inadequate.  One of the things I think publishers should do is label books by their most obvious categories, which bookstores would then use to place books which clearly cross generic lines in multiple places.  I don’t see the point in saying a book like 1984 by George Orwell or Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell or July’s People by Nadine Gordimer (etc. etc. etc.) shouldn’t be placed in both the general/literary fiction section and the science fiction section.  Likewise, a book like Farthing by Jo Walton (and the other books in her series) should be in the SF/F section and the mystery section; the fact that it’s not is a failure to recognize how it plays with the alternate history and mystery genres so effectively. Cross-pollination is crucial to the success of literature.  I think people who love SF/F would also love David Mitchell or Nadine Gordimer, or Murikami and Ishiguro, or Rushdie and Ghosh, or Jackson and Winterson.  Books that cross genres should be in both places so that people with particular reading tastes can find them.  I don’t generally go to the “general fiction” section in the bookstore, in part because it’s impossible for me to find anything at all that I would want to read in there.  General fiction is the most disorganized “genre” bookstores have.  But if you had put Cloud Atlas in the SF/F section, I might have picked it up well before I realized academics were talking about it.  I might have recommended it to all my friends. But that’s my take.  I like the idea of cross-pollination because it opens up the reading circles of, well, readers.  And that’s a good thing. Now it’s your turn!

In the last three weeks I’ve noticed a number of different kinds of discussions about the issue of categories for fiction.  One of the lesser known instances was Paul Jessup’s public announcement that he was leaving genre fiction.  It’s not clear why he made the announcement, except some vague claim about the stifling-ness and argumentative nature of genre fiction (which, I might add, is no less existent in non-genre circles), but I found myself amused by his unwillingness to talk about it in any form.  The result of Jessup’s rejection of genre is Coffinmouth, a magazine headed by Jessup which explicitly rejects category fiction (science fiction, fantasy, etc.) in exchange for things that are, apparently, non-categorical. Readers of this blog will likely notice the irony of the concept of non-categorical fiction, which is, in and of itself, a category.  Fiction can’t avoid categories.  It’s impossible.  This is in part because human beings are, by default, differentiators.  We look for differences, put things in mental boxes, and use those boxes to identify things, compare them to other things, and so on.  This is why so many early scientists spent so much time trying to come up with systems of categorization and why scientists today still argue about where to place species, old and new, in the animal kingdom.  It’s the same logic that explains why babies can differentiate skin color at an early age, which is one of the early simple identifying markers their undeveloped brains can easily comprehend (among others, obviously).  I made the mistake in assuming Jessup would have some interest in the problem of category and received a fair deal of shortened Twitter snark for my troubles. The newer instance, which is where I take the title for this post, is an article by Howard Jacobson in The Independent called “The best fiction doesn’t need a label.”  Jacobson starts by talking about the Man Booker Prize, which has a long history of pissing off genre fiction people for its failure to acknowledge SF/F texts, and soon starts talking about the conflict between genre and literary fiction.  He makes a number of mistakes, of course, but has the grace to acknowledge he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to genre, which throws into question almost everything else he says, most notably this gem: But there is something contradictory in the proposition that “genre fiction” is likely to provide that rejuvenation when you consider that what makes genre fiction genre fiction is its formal predictability, that it answers, genre by genre, to specific expectations, gives its readers exactly what they have come to love and hope for more of – often the same hero, working in the same city, and suffering the same flutterings of existential despair. The problem with people who don’t know anything about genre fiction going off and talking about it is that they reduce genre to its tropes — that is to the elements most commonly associated in visual terms with a particular genre, such as spaceships, quest narratives, noir detectives, and so on.  I won’t deny that a great deal of genre fiction does little more than present adventure stories, but I also refuse to suggest that these kinds of stories don’t have literary value.  They have different value, not less.  But much of the best science fiction isn’t about the tropes or its “formal predictability” or its “expectations.”  In fact, most science fiction, even among the adventure stories, are, on a deeper level, different kinds of approaches to contemporary problems.  One doesn’t read The Forever War and say it is little more than a novel about space battles.  To do so is to completely ignore what Joe Haldeman was doing when he wrote the book.  Likewise, to say that Ragamuffin by Tobias S. Buckell is little more than a Space Opera a la Star Wars or that Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson is about Caribbean myths is nothing short of a vile literary neutering of their literary potential. This is the problem with genre:  the people who talk about it who aren’t “in it” simply know nothing about it.  What they know is surface level.  It’s no different than someone who reads genre fiction waltzing up to a “literary novel” and saying “well, this is a book about nothing” (or something like that).  Hemingway, to take an old-time, canonical example, is what we might call a “literary author.”  Yet his work is remarkably poignant for its time.  The Sun Also Rises is not a book about people going to bullfights and experiencing nothing; it’s a book which attempts to capture the angst and bitterness of an entire generation.  That makes it a brilliant book that can’t be reduced to its “generic predictions and expectations” (yes, “literary fiction” has such things too). I also take issue with Jacobson’s application of a mindset to genre proponents: It will be argued that the best exponents of this or that genre escape the confines of their chosen form and turn it into something else. They write more adventurously than do many non-alternative novelists, their fans insist, comparing their prose to that of Melville or Dickens. In this recommendation I detect a certain irony, for its logic is that the more accomplished the genre writer is, the less of a genre writer he becomes. Fine by me, ironical or not. And this should really be the end of the matter. Yes, the best writers must find ways to overleap the expectations of their genre, if they have one, because those expectations are themselves debilitating. Actually, the best examples of a genre utilize the confines of their chosen form to tell a story.  That’s all.  There’s no escape from a generic form.  Once you’ve written something within it, you’re in it.  Experimentation, escape, and manipulation are not isolated to texts which somehow try to escape the generic traditions (an impossible task).   Rather, the most successful texts do something with generic forms that other texts simply don’t do