An Addendum: Categorizing Fiction
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!
SandF Podcast #4.8 (Interview w/ Philippa Ballantine) is Live!
The newest episode of The Skiffy and Fanty Show is up. Jen and I are really getting into our interviews these days, and we’re loving it. This week we talk to Philippa Ballantine, who started her young, vibrant life back when podcasting was still the semi-new kid on the block. Now she’s one of those evil published authors with multiple books to her name. This is a good thing, because the world has needed a Kiwi takeover since, well, forever. Oh! And there’s something very special in episode 4.8. Something involving music, a classic 80s SF/F flick, and Jen singing. Don’t miss it! I hope you all enjoy the interview. Thanks for listening!
Categorizing Fiction: The Best Fiction Always Fits Somewhere
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
Question: What do you want to read about on WISB?
I’d really like to know what kinds of things you enjoy about WISB (when it’s in full swing, of course) and what kind of stuff I don’t do that you’d be interested in. I was thinking, for example, of blogging about my first teaching experience in literature, since I taught a lot of stuff outside of my field. But would you all be interested in such things? Let me know! Feedback is always much loved around here. Anywho! P.S.: If there’s anything you dislike, let me know that too.
Homophobia: A Straight Male’s Experience
(I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to write a post on my personal experiences with homophobia. And so…here it is. Don’t expect too many of these kinds of posts, though. I want to get back to books and science fiction and fantasy and other such things.) I’ve made fun of gay people in my life. True, much of the fun-making was done when I was an ignorant, culturally-conditioned young person who didn’t understand that, well, gay people are just people. But I don’t think that excuses me in full. I contributed to homophobic bigotry in my youth. I still sometimes say things like “that’s gay” or “you’re gay,” though I have thankfully removed the word “faggot” from my vocabulary (except when I jokingly call someone a “faggot” and then remind them that it means a “cigarette”). Change didn’t really come for me until my mother came out to us (my sister, my brother, and myself). I don’t really remember that moment, to be honest, but I recall kind of shrugging about it (internally more than externally). My mother is gay. So what? And then the gay rights movement got in full swing. Maybe it had always been in full swing and we just hadn’t noticed it in the small town of Placerville, California (where we all eventually moved a year or so after my mother “came out”). I don’t know. But once I knew that my mother was gay, I also knew that a lot of the things I had done in my younger years (and was still doing at that time) were, at the very least, problematic (and, at the worst, offensive). I never hurt any gay people physically, because I have never been one for violence, but I know I hurt many people, gay or otherwise, by calling them names (I say “gay or otherwise” because I don’t know if any of the people I called “faggot” or “gay” were gay — they were usually those on the lower end of the social scale from where I stood, which was pretty damn low on that scale in the first place). And when my mother said she was gay and started bringing around other gay people, male and female, it brought home not only the need for personal reflection, which I was pretty poor at in my high school years, but also the bigotry and hatred so many gay people experience day in and day out. It started with a group whose name I have thankfully forgotten who used to park what they called “Truth Trucks” by the side of the highway (Placerville has three stoplights on H50, which is a fairly major highway in the Foothills above the Central Valley). The group would sit out there on the side of the road waving their signs, which are variations on things like this: But standing on the side of the road wasn’t enough for these people. They also stood outside elementary schools handing out pamphlets to little kids, inside of which were various explanations for why Jesus hates homosexuals, what will happen to people who support them (or are them), and so forth. Shortly after, the city passed a non-binding resolution to make Placerville a “No Hate Zone.” I say non-binding because they could not actually enforce the “zone” because that would be a violation of the 1st Amendment. But it set a tone for the debate in El Dorado County and had an impact on California’s fight for equality, however small. That’s when things got nasty. The “Truth Trucks” people didn’t like the “No Hate Zone” resolution, and they set out in full force to protest the passage. And so did we — my mother and siblings and a good chunk of the gay people in the county. We stood out there on the side of the road cheering for honks from cars. And we tried to ignore when the “Truth Trucks” people yelled at us or people in cars screamed obscenities or threw half-empty cups of soda at friends and supporters. When the skinheads showed up (no joke), things didn’t get much better. There were debates, screams, condemnations, and violent rhetoric, along with large influx of police officers (who, thankfully, acted as one would expect them to act — like they deserved the badges on their belts). I learned some time later that my brother was told he would burn in hell because our mother was gay (at a protest I couldn’t attend). Someone I worked with told me he didn’t want gay people teaching his kids because he didn’t want them to turn out queer (I got really upset and told him off; he apologized later for upsetting me, which was nice, but that didn’t really fix the issue). I know worse things were said to my mother, who attended many Gay Pride events in her slightly younger years, and participated in a few protests. When the protests “ended,” the “Truth Trucks” people didn’t. I had to drive past the “Truth Trucks” almost every single day for work. On MLK Day, they would hold up signs saying he didn’t support gay rights (when in fact he did, to a certain degree, having retracted earlier comments he made about gay people in his life; but using his words is really unfair, considering they are nearly 50 years old). Then I moved out of Placerville and things improved, in large part because Santa Cruz is where the Hippy Revolution went to be immortal. There were protesters in town, but I never saw them. Rather, I was surrounded, for the most part, by people who supported gay rights. It was a town where marching for what was right occurred frequently. And it continued: friends of mine were called names, and only by then did I understand the impact those words had on gay people (I had no gay friends when I was younger, but after my mother came out, I met more gay people and befriended
Promo Bit: Department of Time Travel (A Kickstarter Project)
The fine folks behind Department of Time Travel asked if I could spread the word about their fundraising attempts. They want to product a 50-minute film and need to raise $15,000 to do it. Here’s the description: Time travel has been theorized by authors and scientists since before time travel was even possible. Now, with the emerging business of chronosportation, the cosmos are all aflutter with chrononauts. Many of these travelers are simply peaceful tourists but there are others who intend to use the delinearization of time as a method for devious purposes. Cue the DOTT : the American Department Of Time Travel with operations and offices all across the cosmos and chronos. One of the offices is right here in your time and they’re looking to hire a new agent for operations! Characterized as The Office meets Dr. Who meet The X-Files, DOTT promises to be a new and exciting addition to the science fiction genre. But, DOTT is not JUST another science fiction show. It promises to get back to the majesty of shows like Star Trek, that not only entertained but highlighted and addressed many of the social and political issues of it’s day. A trait lost with many modern scifi series and films that attempt to wow their audiences with special effects and neat gadgets, but sadly fall short of a good story. With your donation, a fifty minute long episode of DOTT will be shot. Donations will pay for Actors, Crew, Props and Rentals. DOTT will not only entertain, but it will make a difference. How will your donation make a difference? Sounds cool, doesn’t it? If you’d like to support them with a donation, see their Kickstarter page. There are fifteen days left as of this post! P.S.: There are all kinds of cool incentives, by the way. If I had $10 I’d swing for one of those DOTT badges… P.S.S.: Here’s a video thing related to DOTT (after the fold):