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
Guest Post: A Quest for Treasures in the Stacks by Cindy Young-Turner
The bankruptcy of Borders puts another nail in the coffin of the big box bookstores. As a reader, there’s nothing better than browsing the stacks and looking for new books to discover. I admit, I love the sheer volume of books available in places like Borders and Barnes and Noble, and the combination of books and a café is appealing. But the cost of a new book is often a deterrent for me. And if you’re looking for an older, less popular book, or something by an indie publisher, you have little chance of finding it. Used bookstores, on the other hand, are a book lover’s paradise. Books for a quarter? I’ll take a dozen, please! I got hooked on SF/fantasy through used bookstores. I didn’t read much genre fiction as a kid, and I’m embarrassed to admit that when I initially picked up The Hobbit, it bored me (both The Hobbit and LOTR are now favorites, though). The first SF/fantasy books I tried to read were a jumble of confusing names and places, so I gave up on them for a while. Some friends in college successfully reintroduced me to the genre, and then after college a friend who shared my love of fantasy and creepy tales took me to his favorite used bookstore in Providence, Rhode Island. (Note: the year was 1996 or so, before Google and Amazon.) The best part about this bookstore was its amazing SF/fantasy section. What better place to be introduced to H.P. Lovecraft than in his hometown? I started with The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and At The Mountains of Madness and immediately became a fan, drawn in by the lush, descriptive language and bizarre and wondrous creatures. It’s sad to think that Lovecraft would probably never be published today, with the prevailing belief that readers don’t have the patience to wade through that kind of prose. I actually prefer reading authors who really care about the craft of language in addition to telling a great story. From Lovecraft, I moved onto Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and The October Country, Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan, and C.L Moore’s Jirel of Joiry. This bookstore also had a number of books that had been part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in the 60s and 70s, with beautiful cover art. I splurged on some of the short story collections edited by Lin Carter, partly because I loved the covers. Not only did these books make me a fan of the genre, they also raised the bar pretty high for used bookstores. After that, I tended to judge a used bookstore by the quality of its SF/fantasy section. I’ve found a few good ones over the years, including one in Boston that was solely devoted to genre fiction, but none that ever matched the store in Providence. Eventually my bookshelves filled up and the backlog of books to read became a bit overwhelming. I started to avoid the temptation of used bookstores. Then the big bookstores popped up everywhere, driving out the independents. Now the future of print books themselves seems to be at stake. You can download a book to your e-reader with the touch of a button without even getting up off your couch. I see the appeal in bringing an e-reader on vacation rather than lugging several books around, but I’ve rarely browsed for books online. It just doesn’t have the same appeal as perusing the musty shelves and pulling out a book to read the back cover blurb, admire the artwork, and flip through the pages. But I’m a throwback. I drive a stick shift, use a Mac (okay, maybe Macs are trendy these days), and I don’t even own an e-reader—yet. I’m a reader and an author and a book lover, and I’m proud to display my love for the genre in the form of well-worn paperbacks. Those pretty book covers don’t look nearly as nice on your Kindle. ————————————————— What about you? What kind of fun experiences have you had with used bookstores? Let us know in the comments! ————————————————— Cindy Young-Turner is the author of Thief of Hope, a fantasy novel published by Crescent Moon Press. Check out her website. Sydney, a street urchin and pickpocket in the town of Last Hope, has managed to evade the oppressive Guild for years, but there is no escaping fate when she’s sentenced to death for associating with the resistance. After she’s rescued by a wizard, Sydney is forced to accept that magic-long outlawed throughout the Kingdom of Thanumor-still exists, and the Tuatha, a powerful faery folk, are much more than ancient myth and legend. When the wizard offers a chance to fight the Guild and bring Willem, bastard prince and champion of the Tuatha, to the throne, Sydney embraces the cause as a way to find her own redemption. But Sydney’s fear of the Guild, distrust of authority, and surprising connection to the Tuatha threaten Willem’s success. Can she untangle the strange threads that entwine her life not only to the fate of the kingdom, but also to Willem himself?
Question: What interests you about military science fiction?
As many of you know, I’ve been teaching The Forever War by Joe Haldeman in my Survey in American Literature course at the University of Florida. Yesterday was the last day of discussion, which led me to wonder what so many science fiction readers find appealing about military SF. I wouldn’t consider myself a big military SF reader, though some of my favorite SF novels happen to be military SF (The Forever War and Old Man’s War, for example). That said, I do find the attention to detail, the technology, and the action that often occupies military SF stories appealing. I’m a sucker for a good, logically-oriented battle (which explains why I prefer the space battles in the original Star Wars movies to the ones in the prequels). Military SF isn’t always about the battles, but I can’t think of any military SF novels which don’t include the actual action of military campaigns. But as much as I like action and excitement in my fiction, I’m not drawn to military SF exclusively for such things. Rather, I like military SF because it provides a gateway into the mind of the soldier, officer, or other non-civilian character. As a staunch supporter of military personnel in the U.S. (as opposed to a supporter of the war(s)), I can’t help wanting to understand what the nation asks of its men and women in uniform (nation is rhetorical here); military SF is one way to think about such things. The Forever War, for example, is one of my favorite novels because of the way it approaches its singular soldier character: Mandella. I’m fascinated by the ways he copes with what he is forced to do and how the novel allegorizes the processes of alienation that often affect soldiers returning home from the battlefied. Even the military jargon, the attention to military detail, and the discussion of tactics are fascinating to me, not because I like military tactics (I really know nothing about it), but because it’s all part of a kind of mindset. In a way, a book like The Forever War develops an authentic reality from its totalized military viewpoint, which makes for a consistent and fascinating book. If not for the problem of repetition, I would teach Haldeman’s book again in a heartbeat. Now I’ll throw the question(s) to you: What are your favorite military SF novels? Why do you like military SF? What do you dislike? Let me know in the comments.
Book Clubs: Stereotyping Men Based on Football Commercials and Sexism
I don’t know why we still perpetuate the mythologies of maleness in this culture. We know they’re mostly bullshit, in part because today’s society is drastically different from the one in which such myths were formed. But we keep pushing them out there, repeating them in our heads, our news and TV shows, our blog posts, and so on. Maybe it’s some kind of genetic nostalgia for the old days when we knew what men were like. Or maybe there’s some kind of sick gene in our species that wants men to be non-feeling masculine bodybuilders who utter one-word sentences and grunt a lot. Ugh. Which brings me to this Book Group Buzz post about why men don’t participate in book clubs. I’m not going to deny that most men don’t participate in book clubs. To be honest, I’ve never been in an actual book club, so I can’t speak from experience about such things. What I can say is that Ted Balcom’s nonsensical rambles about how men don’t like to share their feelings is a disgusting stereotype which verges on sexist (granted, it’s hard to say Ted is a sexist when you consider that Ted has never been a girl’s name). Let’s start with the first offense: Choose books to discuss that interest men. That means, broadly speaking, books about sports, politics, history, crime, and making money. Nonfiction seems to draw better than fiction. And for the most part, books written by men — although a title like Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, might be the rare exception. The subtitle reveals the appeal: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption. That could bring the boys in — even if it was penned by a female. I know that the number of men who read fiction has declined in recent years, but I hope Ted realizes that men do read, you know, fiction. And some of them read the same stuff that women do. Really. They do. You know how I know? Because I’m one of those men. And all the men I know are similar kinds of men. True, we all have different interests, but it’s really not that hard to find someone with a penis who likes to read all the stuff listed above and the kinds of books that are supposed to be in book clubs (what those are, I don’t know, because Ted never tells us what makes up for “traditional book club material”). What I do know is that saying things like “men only read books with men being manly and politics, so we should pick some of those so we can include the menfolk” is sort of like saying “women only read romance novels and chicklit, so we should talk about that so they can feel like they’re part of the ‘in crowd.’” Do some men only read the kinds of things listed above? Yes, but I’d hazard a guess that they aren’t the majority. Rather than perpetuating the myths about what we’re supposed to read by saying what we do read (which is really what all of the above is doing), you could instead find other methods for including men in the discussion. You know, by asking them to take part, asking them what they like to read, asking them their opinions, and so on. And then you can start working on getting rid of all this social B.S. that is set up to fashion us into the very kinds of stereotypical men Ted starts setting up in the above paragraph. Ugha bugha… But there’s more. There has to be, right? Here’s what I’ve learned, both from observation and from talking to other men: guys generally do not like to share their feelings in public, especially in the presence of a group composed mostly of members of the opposite sex; also, they aren’t greatly interested in minutely analyzing character and motivation, unless they happen to have a degree in psychology and have made this activity their life’s work; and finally, they aren’t comfortable in situations where they are outnumbered by ladies and where the leader of the group — that formidable person in charge — is (Gadzooks!) a woman. Oh ho! There it is. The biggest stereotype of them all, and it comes from “observation and talking to other men.” Presumably, this talking was done at a sports bar during the Superbowl, or Ted lives in the only town where the water is laced with testosterone and the TV stations are stuck on 24/7 FOX News Manly Hour programming (in which Glenn Beck cries…wait, that’s not right)… But let’s get right to the meat: men don’t like to talk about feelings stuff. We’re anti-feelings. Well, except we’re not (really). Men can and often do talk about feelings, but we’re conditioned by culture to suppress overt demonstrations of emotional junk. But we still talk about feelings. I’ve never met a man who couldn’t express their outrage over a politician’s election or the failure of their sports team or…wait, I’m falling into the stereotypes again! Back to books. Since when did book clubs become the same thing as group therapy? Maybe the problem isn’t men, but the way Ted’s book clubs have been run, which, if we’re being honest, would turn off most people, including women. Most people don’t go to group therapy. Most people don’t want to, even if they need it. But the crux of the matter is the assertion that men can’t talk about their reactions to a book, even within a limited context. That is a feeling, and we’re not supposed to express those feelings, or something like that. I call bullshit. Most men can talk about books just fine. I don’t know why a lot of men don’t read, but it’s not because they’re anti-feelings… If we’re going to boil all this ranting down to one thing, it’s this: Ted keeps saying “men,” but in doing so he makes it clear he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Get Your Parenting Off My Metaphorical Child (Young Adult Lit B.S.)
Imagine for a moment that I am happily married and have a lovely 12-year-old child who likes doing jumps and learning tricks on his BMX bike. Because we don’t have billions of dollars, we can’t afford to buy our imaginary child the best BMX bikes, but we’re very fortunate to live in a town with an awesome bike library where kids can go to borrow all kinds of bikes. Tandem bikes. Normal street bikes. Bikes with little bells and baseball cards in the spokes. Pink bikes with little tassels and red bikes with racing stripes. They also carry BMX bikes. You know, the kind with the little metal poles on them for grinding and what not. I may not fully understand BMX bikes or why my child wants to jump off boards leaned up against cement parking stops or grind off rails, and so on (well, I do, because I did similar things as a kid, but let’s pretend otherwise for now), but we’ve talked talked about such things and we’re there for our child when he or she needs us. You’ve got the image in your head now, right? Happy little kid doing semi-dangerous tricks on a bike, falling and hurting him or herself, talking to mommy and daddy (or daddy and daddy, as is always possible in any analogy) and learning life lessons, as is the domain of parents? Good. Now I want you to imagine this: my next door neighbor, who may be a man or a woman, but almost always a very grumpy, controlling person, wanders over and tells my child that they aren’t allowed to ride on BMX bikes, because they are dangerous and inspire dangerous behaviors and what not. My child, obviously, ignores these people and continues pursuing BMX biking, until those grumpy neighbors show up at Town Hall and try to get BMX bikes banned from the bike library using the same argument. After all, kids shouldn’t be BMX biking! It’s dangerous. They could get hurt or scarred or something, right? And the grumpy people don’t want their kids exposed to that kind of thing. The rest of us cry “censorship,” while they say “well, it’s just parenting.” Let’s pretend that the dictionary has nothing to say on this matter. With all that in your mind, what do you think I would say to such people? If you guessed “please, go fuck yourself,” then you would be right. Your job as a parent ends with your child. You have no right telling my child what he or she can have access to (or say the same to me), nor do you have a right to remove materials from publicly accessible spaces in order to fulfill your narrow moral agenda or to tell me, as a parent, what I am allowed to give my child. (This does not extend to materials which are illegal, such as child pornography.) So when Ru Freeman (a supporter of Gurdon, who I talk about here) at the Huffington Post says As the parent of three avid readers, I agree with Meghan Cox Gurdon’s point that what is considered “banning” in the book trade is known in the parenting world as doing our job. I have to say: get your parenting off my metaphorical child and please, go fuck yourself. Parenting is the act of monitoring what your child does and access to. It does not extend to monitoring my child’s access to materials, whatever those materials may be. You are certainly allowed to tell me that I cannot molest or rape my child, or sacrifice them for a religious ceremony, lock them in the basement without food, beat them, and so on. You have that right because those behaviors are detrimental to the well-being of the child. But reading a book only has detrimental consequences when people who are supposed to be parents fail to act like parents when their children are exposed to things beyond their scope of knowledge. This is precisely why the furor over Janet Jackson’s semi-nipple slip elicited absurdity. Parents weren’t really concerned about a boob being on the TV; if they were, they would have been upset with the overt sexual nature of Janet Jackson’s entire set at the Super Bowl. No, what they were pissed about was the fact that they suddenly could not avoid having to be parents when little Timmy or Jenny wondered what had happened on the screen. And I have no doubt that this is the same kind of policy of avoidance that governs book bannings. I don’t see much point in going into the substance of Freeman’s post. Most of her arguments are either anecdotal or contain serious errors of logic. For example, she frequently sites how young adults who are starving don’t want to read books about starvation (she actually calls them children, which is another issue I’ve railed against). That may or may not be true. I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean that other young adults don’t want to read a book about other young adults battling starvation. This is a piss poor example precisely because reading such a book might make a young adult more willing to do something about it. People have been compelled by literature to do less and more, and if something good comes from reading a book on suffering, it doesn’t seem to me that there is much of a problem. But when it comes down to it, what Freeman and Gurdon do is argue by fallacy (reading dark books will destroy young minds, even though I’ve yet to see a study that conclusively supports this assertion), reduce young adults to lesser people (i.e., calling them children), and arguing for censorship by way of claiming that book banning is parenting. And to such people I can only repeat myself: please, go fuck yourself and keep your parenting within your family. Or if you’ll accept a severe reduction, there’s this comment by Jenni Langlois: Restricting what your children read? Parenting. Restricting what
Writing Young Adult Fantasy: The Challenge of Darkness
How dark is too dark for young adult readers? How dark is too dark for a young adult character? Not long ago, I responded to a Wall Street Journal post by Meghan Cox Gurdon which argued that YA fiction has become exceedingly dark. I didn’t agree with the author’s assessment, largely because it was a “conservative” political manipulation of reality rather than anything approaching legitimate criticism of the genre. In a lot of ways, the thematic shift in the YA literature field to a more active engagement with the things that plague teenagers has been a good thing for me as an author (of YA and other “genres”). When I first began writing The World in the Satin Bag, I intended it to be a quirky fantasy romp a la Leven Thumps, but the deeper I got into the world, the more I found my darker side taking over. WISB is not fluff. In a lot of ways, the novel tricks you into think it is just that. Is there humor? Absolutely. Are there quirky creatures and characters? You bet. But is it a novel that avoids taking its 13-year-old character through the ringer? Nope. WISB is a novel about the limits of young adults. James, my main character, experiences some of the darkest things imaginable for a child, from murder to child kidnapping to the terror of children as soldiers and the horrors of power. And, if you’ve been listening, you’ll know that James has to constantly deal with the fact that his very existence in the world of Traea is the catalyst for near-genocidal behaviors in others. I don’t want to say more than that, because you should listen to the novel (or get the ebook when it comes out). The point is: I might be on Gurdon’s list of depraved authors simply because I’ve written a book which puts a poor 13-year-old character through things that no child should experience, and most children probably won’t. But I hold a very different opinion of young adults than Gurdon. I don’t view them as children in the traditional sense. Young adult is a category which should be taken literally: they are young adults. They may not have the same rights as those of us over the age of 21, and, perhaps, shouldn’t have all those rights for very good reasons (mental growth, etc.), but they are in a long transition phase between childhood and adulthood. As I mentioned in my response to Gurdon, young adults are already dealing with things many adults want to hide them from. They treat young adults like they treat little children, which I find grossly offensive. It’s for that reason that I don’t feel a need to hold back when I punish my main character. The only limits in my story are the limits of James. That doesn’t mean James can’t die (or that he won’t), but it does mean that I know where the line rests and what will happen to my story if I cross it. The challenge of darkness isn’t about public morality or, as Gurdon suggests, avoiding reinforcing bad behaviors. It’s about exploring the limits of the potential of young adults as thinking people. In my mind, it’s also an issue of respect. You drag your characters as far as you can imagine your characters going, and you put a foot over the line to test them. With James, that line is his own cowardice (or, more accurately, his disinterest in things that might get him hurt). But he’s also a character who places extraordinary value on the people who matter to him, and it’s because of this that he has to challenge himself to do something beyond his nature. His strength and resolve will be tested throughout the book, even beyond his initial leap of courage; in fact, James will have to explore the farthest boundaries of his disinterest and experience the very things he has spent his short life avoiding at an exaggerated level. I won’t tell you what happens to him, but it’s not “good,” if you get my meaning. For other authors, those lines are very different. Some authors may want to put a young adult character through the trials of molestation or the scary experience of teen pregnancy. YA fantasy authors might include these themes in their work because they want to show that even characters who use magic and wander around in mystical worlds experience such things too. There’s nothing dark or wrong about exploring these issues; in fact, I would argue that exploring the “dark side” of teenage existence is essential for young adult literature, whether fantastic or otherwise. Perhaps a lot of this discussion comes from the fact that I interact with young adults on a regular basis. As the co-owner (and, more or less, the only “boss”) of Young Writers Online, I talk to a lot of teenagers of all ages. Many of them are people I would consider my friends, even if I am older than them. And through my interactions with these folks, it’s become very clear to me what kind of world they live in. Reading a book like WISB, which does contain a fair deal of blood and violence and, if I’m being honest, downright wicked stuff, won’t destroy their minds. They might find it a good deal of fun, or they might enjoy the underlying “messages” compelling and find themselves thinking about things they might not have thought about before (or might not have expected someone else to write about). And that’s really the point. Darkness or not, YA fantasy (and YA literature in general) is an exploratory process, for authors and for young adult (and even adult) readers.