Nihilism and Genre: Some Random Thoughts
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the issue of nihilism/darkness in genre fiction. This post will come off as a kind of random exploration of things swimming around in my head. Some seem to think that we live in a world that is far more nihilistic and dark than any other moment in the past. To some extent, that might be true, particularly if you pick and choose which years you use to make the comparison. But reality doesn’t hold up well to pick-and-choose methods. While the present is certainly beset with death, destruction, and violent rhetoric, the same could be said of almost every other moment in our history. The difference, perhaps, has to do with where those elements are directed. (Note: by nihilism, I am referring to the form I think most imagine when they say “nihilism.” That is that morality is not innate to human beings, but a product of our cultural constructions. In other words, morality is artificial, not natural. There are plenty of other camps of nihilism, but I make the assumption that people who name “nihilism” do so with morality in mind.) The 50s are often cited as the best years in America by cultural purists; but to make that argument, you have to ignore the rampant levels of sexism and racism, which permeated every level of contemporary 50s culture. Toss in a few wars, famines, McCarthyism, and other disturbing events and you end up with an era which looks nice for a select cast of individuals living in a select group of nations. (I make the assumption that few would say the 20s, 30s, and 40s were amazing years for everyone, what with the aftereffects of WWI, the Great Depression, WW2, and so on). If we move to the 60s, what we end up with is an era that, once more, doesn’t look that great. The Civil Rights Movement was important, but the era was home to some of the worst violent rhetoric we have ever seen, directed at one group of people for pointless reasons. Then you had the Vietnam Conflict, which bled into the 70s, and numerous other problems the world over. And let’s not forget the Apartheid government of South Africa, who were playing the racism game in a way that would make the 50s and 60s in America look like a picnic. The point is that there are always wars and conflicts. There are always battles of ideology. There is always suffering. But ultimately, the world gets slightly better every decade. Usually. There are fewer conflicts today than ever before, even if America is losing its bloody mind and tearing itself apart from the inside (a product of intolerant people driven by intolerant ideology who refuse to admit to their intolerant nature). We may be in a bit of a rut right now, but we’re all human beings…and we always come out on top. Eventually. We’re notoriously good at survival and progress, even if we’re slow as molasses at it. These developments show something unique about the human species: that our moral frameworks change and adjust over time. Men thought it moral to deny women basic American rights, but eventually changed their tune (for the most part). Whites saw blacks as inferior and wanted to exclude them from white culture, but good people rose up and fought against that racist ideology, leaving us a better world (though racism still exists). And now the tide of public opinion is changing in favor to gays and lesbians; the push against them stems from a kind of re-imagined racist ideology as anti-contamination narrative driven primarily through narrow-minded and contaminating religious interpretation. A mouthful, for sure. But things are getting better, and the people who don’t see it are either too focused on this single moment of terror or on their own ideological view of the world, in which change constitutes wickedness. What does all of this have to do with genre fiction? A few have talked about the nihilistic feel of fantasy and science fiction in recent decades. The good and evil dichotomies, we are told, have disappeared, or been complicated by the dismembering of moral objectivism/naturalism (i.e., through moral nihilism and relativism). Similarly, we are told that because fiction is a reflection of our time, genre fiction is unreasonably dark. But I don’t buy into either of these ideas. There have always been optimistic genre stories with clearly-defined sides of good and evil. True, many of those stories are found on our TV or movie screens instead of on our pages (depending on what you read), but the idea that nihilism, in its moral form, and fiction-as-reflection-of-the-present have done something negative for literature or society seems specious. When we break down the moral boundaries of our ideologies and start to look at how people are shaped by culture, I think we start to come out of the darkness of ideological purity. That is that we come to understand one another as members of the same species. Our fiction, I think, reflects this process of developmental understanding more so than it reflects the results (in its intentions, insofar as those can be determined). I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, to see stories in our near future dealing with allegories of the current forms of racism (the West vs. the Middle East). And those explorations will run the gamut of types: propaganda for, propaganda against, and deep exploration of both sides. And reading fiction that deals with these issues helps train us. Those kinds of explorations are good for us. We need them in order to progress. Because our literature and our films are gateways to developing a better world, to making us think about where we are and where we really ought to be — in the pragmatic utopianism sense. Genre fiction is a part of that process. A great and glorious process of change. I’d even argue that the nature of good and evil in fiction for young people,
Guest Post: The Polarization of Genre Fiction by David Chandler
(Don’t forget to enter here for a chance to win one of three sets of David Chandler’s books.) When I was maybe ten years old I asked myself whether I preferred science fiction novels or fantasy novels. My eventual decision was that I should prefer SF, since some day I might live on the moon, while I knew I was never going to see a real dragon. Don’t judge. It was the seventies, and we had a space program back then. It was a weighty decision that took all of a lazy summer afternoon lying in a hammock in my back yard, listening to the swelling mechanical sound of the crickets all around me. When I’d made up my mind, I nodded quite seriously to myself, and got back to the important business of reading. Books were everything to me back then (they still are, but in a different way). I read everything I could get my hands on, anything remotely related to genre. I tried for a couple of days to stick to just science fiction, but by the end of that summer I had probably read all of Thomas Covenant and C.S. Lewis and re-read the Hobbit, too. You see, back then, despite my ten year old dilemma, there was no real need to make a choice. You could have your fantasy and your science fiction and Stephen King and the more promising mysteries your mom checked out of the library, too. You could have weird conspiracy books like the Illuminatus Trilogy, and bizarre hybrids like A Princess of Mars. The big distinction between “genre” and “mainstream” was the only dividing line. I had no interest in reading about alcoholic college professors contemplating their failed marriages. I wanted adventure, and flashing swords (light-sabers or cavalry sabers, it was all the same) and desperate chases across dead sea bottoms on distant planets. I wanted every story anyone wanted to tell. So why, in the 21st century, is that kind of broad reading no longer possible? Genre readers have split into camps. Science fiction fans, especially those “hard SF” types, turn up their noses at anything resembling a magic sword… though variable swords with monomolecular blades are just fine. And the devotees of Low Fantasy (who can tell you, at length, the difference between their genre and Swords and Sorcery) laugh and point fingers at those “skiffy” types who need a graphic calculator to make sense of their favorite books. Don’t even get me started on what the horror enthusiasts think of you. It isn’t very nice. But good God, why? Why, when we’re already marginalized by the mainstream, disrespected by the press, and treated like overgrown children because we enjoy the sense of wonder, do we divide ourselves even further? Why do we feel such a need to stratify our own in-group? Part of the reason is that, well, we won. Nerd Culture is suddenly cool (well, sort of) and we don’t have to hide our fandom anymore. But in the process we lost something. We used to be members of a despised but unified subculture, a secret society who shared common interests. Now we’re the same as fans of Country and Western music, or Metalheads, or Foodies. The wider culture has come to accept a little more weirdness and that’s a good thing… but it means we aren’t special anymore. It means when we run into each other in chat rooms or at conventions, we don’t automatically know we’re among the like-minded. A rabid Star Trek fan you meet online could also be your school’s head cheerleader, for goodness’ sake. So there’s no need for solidarity, and, as a result, we don’t stick together. But another part of the problem is that the subgenres have become too robust. Fandoms, like species, diverge as they evolve. There was a time when Science Fiction was about bug-eyed monsters and starships, and that made sense to someone who was into elves and dragons. As the genres grew more sophisticated, though, they became less alike. Now science fiction is about singularities and server farms, while fantasy is concerned more with Vikings and complicated magic systems. Even worse, fantasy has evolved to become more character-driven and generational, while science fiction has become the new Literature of Ideas and Naturalistic, borrowing from Post-Modernism while fantasy subsumed Magical Realism. That’s hardly something to complain about. Genre books today are a lot more sophisticated and enjoyable for a graying audience than they were thirty years ago. The genres have grown up. My father’s favorite joke used to be that the Golden Age of science fiction was thirteen. That’s not true anymore. But it does make it difficult for the subgenres to cross-pollinate. Which is, in the end, why this kind of polarization is a problem. The great genre writers of previous generations saw no real distinction between science fiction and fantasy. They were modes, tropes that you employed because they fit a given story better, but they were happy to jump from one genre to another without worrying what their fans might think. Even a great of hard sf like Larry Niven would occasionally delve into fantasy (though usually with a smirk), while an incredible fantasy writer like Glen Cook could spend decades noodling on science fiction empire stories. That just doesn’t happen anymore. Richard K. Morgan and Terry Pratchett keep trying. And they’re really good at it… but the fans greet their efforts with a polite nod and a pat on the back at best. And that really is a problem. Both science fiction and fantasy grew from the fertile soil of planetary romance (I’m simplifying history, I know, but the point is valid)—John Carter of Mars gave us both Conan the Cimmerian and Flash Gordon, and they begat all the heroes and villains we love today regardless of what side of the aisle we choose. When we specialize our interests, though, we lose that link to the past. We also lose the more
We’re Not Your Bitches — Signed, A Book Blogger
Dear Mr. Morrow and Publishers Thinking of Doing the Following: Book bloggers read and review books for the love. We are not paid. At best, some of us will sell a review here or there, or we might earn a little cash from advertising. But almost all of us do this because we love books, and we do it knowing the only form of compensation is the thrill of getting a new book in the mail. But this is not a job. We are not employees on the tab or paid under the table. Free books does not equal compensation, in part because free books is an unequal relation of value. You give us a book, but we have to read and review it, which means the value of the book in relation to the time spent working on it averages out to less than minimum wage. Effectively, if free books constitute compensation, then those of us who blog about books are making less than someone who works at Taco Bell. The point is: this is not a job. We do this for the love. Most of us will never have jobs at magazines as reviewers. Most of us will never get beyond sharing our love of books with people who share our interests. That’s just the way it is. In other words: we are not your bitches. While you might think your new policies are about efficiency, what they tell the rest of us is that you do not value what we do. As @MotherReader has already pointed out: “Can you imagine them sending this to Horn Book or the NY Times?” Exactly. The language of the letter is a double bitch slap to the face: first, you tell us that what we do is a job, despite the fact that we are not paid for it, and then you treat us as less worthy of the kind of attention afforded to a place whose job it is to review books. Don’t get me wrong. I completely understand why publishers want to streamline the process, and I sympathize with it. But turning book blogging into a “play by the rules” game is far from streamlining anything. Instead of treating us like review slaves, you might consider asking book bloggers for their opinions. Surveys are a wonderful thing, and book bloggers are usually quite happy to offer their thoughts on a range of topics related to — you guessed it — books. Just don’t treat us like we’re your bitches. Because we’re not. We’re lovers of books who enjoy sharing our love with others. Slapping us in the face with these kinds of policies, written with such words, is not a great way to keep us interested in talking about your books. As Larry of OF Blog says: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.” Signed, A Book Blogger ——————————————————– Thoughts from others: Larry at OF Blog; LA Times Blogs.
How Barnes & Noble Can Lose Me as a Nook Customer
A long, long time ago (in a galaxy far away), I bought a B&N Nook. Why? Because I liked: the design (the first Nooks were beautiful) the touchscreen at the bottom, which makes navigating the device easy and searching for books more interesting than other eReaders (it lets you browse by the covers) having a physical bookstore to go to, since I still buy hard copies the various in-store bonuses (reading anything in the store for free, free food, etc.) freedom from Amazon (I’m not a fan of Amazon’s attempt to strangle publishers, just as I am not a fan of publishers strangling writers) freedom from a single store (the ePub format lets me buy books from all over the place; that doesn’t mean I go elsewhere to get them — just that I can) Most of these things are still true. I love my Nook and the freedom it grants me, and I still love going to an actual B&N store. And I also love reading on the Nook. It’s a wonderful device and the reading options are fantastic (adjusting font, etc.). So what have I got to bitch about? A few things, really: Weak Browsing First, B&N’s bookstore is annoyingly limited on the Nook. When you want to look for books in a specific genre, the best you can do is go to a specific subgenre (Ebooks –> Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror –> Fantasy Fiction). From there, you cannot adjust the search so it will show new releases, bestsellers, reader review averages, etc. These subgenres might be also useful if every publisher and self-publisher didn’t mark their books with every single subgenre reasonably applicable to the book. But they do, which means the same books show up everywhere. Likewise, you cannot search by publisher, adjust the ebook cost (i.e., looking for science fiction books on sale), and just about anything else you’d expect to do in a bookstore. Granted, you can do most of these things on the B&N website, but I can’t use the website when I’m out and about and in the mood for a new book. One of the other annoying things, which is as true of other devices as the Nook, is the complete inability to filter out all the self-published garbage being thrust into the ebook market. Don’t get me wrong: some of the SPed books are probably really good. And I may even read some of them. But ebook stores are flooded with $2.99 and $0.99 books, which makes it difficult to find anything when you also don’t have the ability to filter books out (such as looking only at an average of customer reviews). What you end up with in the store are ten pages mixed with cheap SPed books and all the major titles in a particular genre. I should note that I’m not a typical book browser. Most readers probably won’t be bothered by the Nook browser. It’s simple, intuitive, and clear. Likewise, it makes it easy for you to see the bestsellers in general, which many readers use to find books anyway (New York Times Bestseller, B&N’s list, etc.). But for those of us who do want a better browsing experience, we’re S.O.L. B&N can fix most of these things with a software update. Infrequent Advertisement of Deals My Twitter feed is flooded with Kindle deals. Every day, it seems like dozens of traditionally published SF/F books are being temporarily marked down to $2.99 (which I assume are being advertised by Amazon). The best the Nook has to offer is a section called “Steals ‘n’ Deals.” The problem? The section is limited to roughly 10 pages of books from a variety of genres. You cannot browse for the deals specific to fantasy. Lovely. But the deals they have are also not the same as deals elsewhere. Right now, the first page of “Steals ‘n’ Deals” has 4 books priced at $2.99 or less. The other 6? $3.99 – $4.98. Those are nice deals, I suppose, but where are all the $2.99 sales? I don’t know. Maybe they exist, but since the browser is limited, they’re impossible to find. Half of this could be solved by a software update, and half of it could be solved by offering customers more sales options. Which leads me to: Coupons: Not for Nook Products If you subscribe to B&N’s email list, you’ll occasionally receive coupons and other deals. But every single one of these sales are not available for Nook users. You cannot take 30% off of an ebook. You can’t get a buy-one-get-one. Why? Because B&N seems to think Nook products should be excluded. At what point does this make any sense? The Nook is tied to the B&N store, which means that B&N must want us to buy books through them, rather than some other store. But since the ePub format makes it easy to buy books elsewhere, there’s less incentive to buy from B&N than from a store which offers more sales and deals (and such stores exist). If you want us to stay around, then you can’t exclude us from your deals! Those of us who own Nooks bought them in part so we could keep buying books from B&N…but online. Amazon understands this — perhaps because they are an online store, and so everything they do revolves around online sales. It’s Not All Bad Don’t get me wrong. The Nook is a wonderful device. It’s beautiful and I love using it. But it’s not going to last forever. Eventually, it’ll break, and I’ll have to find another device to use. My next eReader may or may not be a B&N product. That all depends on how much attention they put into incorporating their products into their stores. I certainly won’t move to their competitor — Amazon — but in the next few years, there are going to be a lot of different eReaders to choose from. ———————————————————– Do you own an eReader? If so, what complaints
Science Fiction = Naturally Optimistic
Nothing I will say here should be misconstrued as “original thought.” Rather, these are the things that spring to mind when I read posts like this one by Bryan Thomas Schmidt on how science fiction lacks optimism and hope. But before getting into the reasons why SF is naturally optimistic, I want to explain where I am coming from. In a general sense, the world today appears to be in a worse position than it was at the height of the Cold War (a culturally relative position, to be sure). We still live in a time where nuclear weapons are a legitimate threat, but also in a time where economic-, environment-, and resource-based threats are immediate and unavoidable. When you break down the troubling world in which we live on the individual level, what you get is an existence which is, in and of itself, perpetually tenuous. In the United States (where most SF is published), these facts are incontrovertible, and have been for the last 30-40 years, when sweeping reforms to our country reached the tipping point as politicians and corporations sought to deregulate and otherwise neuter the social safety nets put into place from WW2 to the end of the Vietnam War. It’s from this position, then, that I arrive at the central rationale for considering SF as inherently optimistic. For me, waking up is the most optimistic thing about life. Because at the end of the day, I am still alive. I could be dead or dying. I could be suffering endlessly. I could be in a million other possible situations that would make waking up anything but a blessing. But I’m not. I awake, crawl out of bed, and go about my life — which may or may not be as great as I would like (or as great as it should be), but is at least marked by that most wonderful of optimistic realities. Life. And that’s where we have to start. Because SF, at its heart, is almost always about humanity in a state of persistent existence. SF isn’t just set in the future; it is set in a future in which we still exist. If you can’t find optimism in that, then you have not only lost touch with what is wonderful about life itself, but also with why SF is a grand genre. While it’s true that SF has grown less adventurous in terms of its narratives (that is that much SF, though not all, avoids the adventurous nature of the pulps and the Golden Age in exchange for a more well-rounded and “real” approach to the world — SF = always about the present), it has done so without losing the inherent optimism of its makers. Yet throughout all of those dystopias and (allegedly) negative narratives, we find heroes and natural optimism. The world is always getting better in SF, even when the story we’re presented appears to show us moving backwards. We’re not only still around, but we’re creating spaceships, building new civilizations, surviving plagues and other ills, and otherwise doing what humans have done best since the first humans left the African plains tens of thousands of years ago. Surviving. And in the middle of it all, we find heroes, who may be just like us, just like we want to be, or something else entirely. But they are heroes nonetheless, doing the job of solving problems, defeating “enemies,” etc. And if you can’t find optimism in that — in reading about man confronting new problems in the future, whether on Earth or in space, whether in a dystopian landscape or a relative utopia — then perhaps the problem isn’t that SF appears to be less optimistic; rather, perhaps the problem is that we’ve forgotten what it means to be surprised when we see people just like us in stories set so far ahead. I don’t think the sensawunda died. I think we killed it by making SF into something it could never be.
English: The Non-essential Fun Degree?
The basis for this post comes from a troll who left a frothy list of accusations and assumptions about what I know, and, most importantly, what I do. As trolls are wont to do, much of what was said can be waved off as pish posh and poppycock, but it’s the attack on the English degree that, I think, stems from a much larger misunderstanding of the field. I’d like to address those misunderstandings here. What We (Don’t) Do There are a lot of myths about English majors, some of them perpetuated by films and others by people who really don’t know anything about the state of the field today. But it would be more efficient to deal with what English majors do rather than refuting the long list of things that they don’t. English is an interdisciplinary field. That means that rather than only studying literature and literary criticism, English majors also study sociology, history, science, economics, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, and dozens of other fields — depending, of course, on individual study interests. My research, for example, requires me to be familiar with at least half of the disciplines already lists, as studying empire demands knowledge from a variety of directions. While it is true that English majors are not trained in most of these fields (in the proper sense of the term “trained”), they are also not lazy wanderers. They take interdisciplinarity seriously because they understand the value of research in other disciplines. And those disciplines bleed into one another — research from one field becomes important to another, and vice versa. In fact, much of what English majors are concerned with are the ways language has been used in the past, how it is used now, and how it will be used in the future. Recall that language has and will continue to be used for everything from propaganda to public outreach to exploration of the self. There are infinite numbers of uses for the written word, and studying such uses (what it means, what it does, how it influences the formation of nations or groups or our conception of self, etc.) is the domain of English majors. And those things are important, not least of all because understanding where we come from and how we go to where we are today will help us, as a species or culture or nation, to figure out where we are going (or how we can get somewhere else). Likewise, English majors are concerned with processes of thinking. At the same time that we teach “stuffy literature classes,” we are also attempting to foster independent thought through an almost scientific process. Learning literature is not about figuring out what hidden meanings Shakespeare put into his work, but about making hypotheses, finding evidence, and using that evidence to support an argument — rinse and repeat. And because the field is interdisciplinary, that often means examining literature in a wide range of social, political, or philosophical contexts. Not So Non-Essential As I’ve argued before (on Google+ somewhere), English is not a non-essential degree program. In fact, without English majors, civilization cannot function.* English majors teach the language to children or people in businesses in other countries. They teach adults who went to underfunded schools and were left behind, or adults who made poor choices and want to get back on their feet. They teach people to write, to read, to comprehend, and to argue. English majors are journalists — who bring the world to our doorstep — and authors — who teach us something about ourselves. They are technical writers, social workers, lawyers or legal assistants, copywriters, editors, grant writers, PR specialists, administrative assistants, etc.** They work for the various departments of the government, non-profits, schools, and businesses in a variety of fields for which their degrees qualified them. Basically, English majors are essential to the fabric of the nation, much like many other majors. Because English degrees generally require immersion in a variety of disciplines, those who acquire those degrees are not only uniquely trained for non-academic jobs, but are also uniquely trained to teach the next generation of thinkers to think from a variety of avenues. It’s not all about stuffy, ancient literature in these parts. What Others Think (Updated Periodically) Kea Worthen English majors are important because it teaches a type of observation and thinking skill set that many other disciplines don’t allow. I mean, we call ourselves English majors, but we really should be in the school of Interdisciplinary Studies. I have never met an English major that just studies English. We look at sociology, culture, gender, history, religion, etc…And we think about things in terms of what happened in the past, what happens in the present, and what will happen in the future. That is, I think, the main problem with society. Too many people have tunnel vision. And that tunnel vision limits so many possibilities. English majors are trained to look at those other possibilities–even if those possibilities makes us uncomfortable sometimes. But it is about self-improvement. And having a thought process that is not prearranged by an ideological apparatus. Sure, we suffer under our own ideologies, but at least we are cognizant of it. I think that is why the English major is so important. Because we learn to observe and think about what we are observing. That is, to me, an important thing. Paul Genesse English majors are some of my best friends. A number of them are also excellent teachers. Getting an English degree is not the best move if you want to assure yourself a high-paying job, but most English majors are very resourceful people. Jennifer Bagley Kea stole my answer! So I will just concur with her. English majors are not only interdisciplinary, but they are valuable in nearly every career field – communications, politics, law, business, even science related careers who need a bit of a hand in terms of creative thinking and expressing ideas. There’s a reason that most technical