Science Fiction and Its Future — To the Literary Den
It’s been a few days since I posted my rant on the genre/literary divide. One of the things that occurred to me after thinking about what I had written is that there does seem to be a rise in popularity for “literary” science fiction, and that there might be something to all this discussion of literary SF. I still have huge issues with the way critics approach the form, but the popularity of certain SF titles which aren’t categorized as SF makes one wonder if something is going on. If I had to hazard a guess, which is how future history always operates, I would say that the increased popularity of SF outside of the publishing category, particularly in its “literary” strain, may be signalling the fracturing of SF. Titles that are marketed as “literary” or some other non-SF category sell well enough and get plenty of attention, while category SF is declining only insofar as its non-tie-in industry is concerned. Star Wars novels will probably sell well so long as Star Wars is on our TV screens, in our video games, and so on. You could take the Star Wars section off the SF shelf and give it a whole new space and it would still sell quite well. I get the feeling that people come to Star Wars books not for the SF tales, but for, well, Star Wars. And, if we’re being fair, SF as a genre can’t survive on the backs of its “literary” takes, except where classic authors are still contributing to the field. What will save SF from obscurity is adventure and suspense, which other genres are, sadly, doing quite well without needing the SF label (though many of them are SF stories). It occurs to me that SF’s possible fracture will see the “serious” forms move out into general fiction (or “literary” fiction, if you will), while SF will become a haven for the adventurous and suspenseful, encompassing the tie-in wonders like Star Wars and Warhammer 40K and bringing back a lot of what we used to call the “sense of wonder.” As for “literary” SF: because it sells well enough outside of SF (or appears to sell well enough), I think we’ll see it move away from category fiction in general, because “literary” writers within the SF category might see the intelligence in moving out into non-SF shelves. But this is all conjecture. I don’t know if any of this is happening; it probably isn’t. All of the above is based on what I’ve observed in my tiny little world. Which is why I’m bringing the question to you: Do you think “serious” or “literary” science fiction will abandon category fiction for the general fiction pile?
Young Adult Literature: Is it too dark? WSJ Thinks So…
I suspect the YA folks have tackled the recent Wall Street Journal article already, but the more I look at the wording of the article, the more I feel like throwing in my opinion. The language suggests (to me, at least) a fundamental misunderstanding of YA and its intended audience, which is, in a lot of ways, an extension of a fundamental misunderstanding of non-adults in general (which I take to mean anyone under the age of 21, since society has a tendency to view anyone who is not fully responsible for themselves as less-than-adult). Our culture seems predisposed, if not subconsciously conditioned, to view non-adults as one group. There’s push against this view, of course, and many parents do try to distinguish between the various age ranges, but culture pushes against these distinctions, in part, I think, because it’s easier to think of a 16-year-old and a 6-year-old as part of the same thing. That kind of thinking doesn’t do teenagers justice, and leads to quotes like the following (from the WSJ article)(after the fold): How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child, my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18. We need to get over the idea that the 12 to 18 age range denotes child in the same sense as above. All people under the age of 18 are technically children, but someone who is 16 is from a far different adolescent culture than someone who is 6. There are also exceptional mental differences which make it almost insulting to think of 16-year-olds as children. This is why the category “young adult” exists. Young adult refers to people who are almost adults. A 6-year-old is not almost an adult. They are far removed from adulthood. They are not usually exposed to the adult themes that teenagers must navigate on a day-to-day basis. So when authors write these “dark themes” in their young adult books, they are writing for readers who are already dealing with being “grown up.” The fact that they aren’t actually “grown up” is less an issue for the thematic content of books than a reason to press these issues further and to throw out the old guard’s ridiculous assumption about the mental abilities of young people. Teenagers aren’t just capable people; they are people who often yearn for the independence afforded by challenging literature and themes. They want to be treated as capable people, not because they are arrogant (though many certainly are), but because there is a subconscious desire in all of us at that age to challenge ourselves to prepare ourselves for adulthood. High school does not prepare teenagers for the world around them, and neither do the many parents and cultural icons who try to suppress “adult” themes and reduce young adults to the category of child. Such people hinder the progression to adulthood; I would even argue that such people motivate many young adults to shun responsibility (we might call this “rebelling,” but I think it is deeper than that). But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by the level of disdain for the mental faculties of young adults in the article. The author goes on to say things like Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail. Profanity that would get a song or movie branded with a parental warning is, in young-adult novels, so commonplace that most reviewers do not even remark upon it. Teen problems are pathologies. Remember that. Then there’s this: If you think it matters what is inside a young person’s mind, surely it is of consequence what he reads. This is an old dialectic—purity vs. despoliation, virtue vs. smut—but for families with teenagers, it is also everlastingly new. Adolescence is brief; it comes to each of us only once, so whether the debate has raged for eons doesn’t, on a personal level, really signify. The problem here? Teenagers are already thinking about adult issues. This is undeniable. Pretending for a moment that you can maintain childlike innocence during the teenage years is like pretending you can fly to the moon in a hot air balloon. No matter how hard you try, your balloon (i.e., illusion) is going to pop. But, again, what can we expect from a group that wants to think of young adults as children, as mentally incapable of handling the ambiguities of adulthood and the disturbing realities around them? Clearly young adults don’t live in a world where millions of people die in war, genocide, etc. They don’t live in a world where politicians are involved in sex scandals, where vulgar language is used by people all around them, where there is death, destruction, fear, murder, suicide, rape, kidnapping, child molestation (sometimes by priests), etc. etc etc. Except that they do. This is the world in which these young people are growing up, and if you care so much about their childlike innocence, you’d do more to curb the flow of death and terror in the world than work to keep them blind to reality. But people in this particular camp aren’t interested in putting their money where their mouths are. They are interested in suppression. Then there’s the old-fashioned, scientifically debunked logic found here: Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care. Well, actually, they do think about these extreme measures. You know how I know this?
Literary Genre Fiction: It’s Ain’t New, So Please Shut Up
One of things that annoyed me about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was the way it was received by critics. Specifically, critics from outside of the genre. A handful of them praised McCarthy for writing original post-apocalyptic fiction while ignoring altogether the rich history of such fiction in the SF community. While I enjoyed The Road, it was not a piece of solid genre fiction. Rather, the novel suggests that McCarthy is very much the outsider, despite his apparent excellence in other forms of genre. To praise The Road for doing something original would be akin to a genre writer being praised for writing the first realist novel…in 2011. This issue is one which continues to plague genre fiction writers, critics, and fans, even as we further solidify our strength as a community and dominate sales. Like the colonizer masking their involvement in human rights violations by appropriating indigenous history, so too do critics (many outside of the genre) appropriate ours. Alexandra Alter’s Wall Street Journal post is a superb example of this activity at work. She makes several absurd blunders, most of which are fabrications from the ancient literary vs. genre war some of us have decided to leave behind (the war is over; all that is left are people who can’t let go or don’t realize that the literary side lost — academics especially). One such mistake reads: Something strange is happening to mainstream fiction. This summer, novels featuring robots, witches, zombies, werewolves and ghosts are blurring the lines between literary fiction and genres like science fiction and fantasy, overturning long-held assumptions in the literary world about what constitutes high and low art. None of this is new. In fact, it has been happening for decades, and it is only by clever manipulations of language that some people are able to ignore the intersection of genre and literary fiction. Authors who didn’t want the label (Margaret Atwood, for example) claimed that they didn’t write SF; academics reclassified many works of fantasy as magical realism (Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Amos Tutuola) or “real literature” (Shakespeare) simply because it was unacceptable to give credit to a field of literature which included both great works of art and “trashy pulp novels.” And, in fact, what is strange about all of this isn’t that “mainstream fiction” is suddenly accepting ancient tropes of SF/F, but rather that people are suddenly noticing that all this is going on…now. A year ago, it was happen. Five years ago, it was happening. Ten years ago, it was happening. The truth is that the intersection has been there since the dawn of literature. But where was Alter a few years ago? Where were the critics and the like who were talking about the long history of the intersection? I might have missed these discussions. But it’s not simply that Alter is channeling old arguments; her argument re-articulates the hypocrisies of the literary community which helped establish the artificial divides between literary and genre. Never mind that what is “mainstream” today is not actually literary fiction (it would be more accurate to say that the new mainstream is genre fiction in some shape or form, whereas what is referred to as “literary fiction” has been floundering desperately in obscurity for quite some time). Much of what we call “literary fiction” is actually not “literary fiction” at all. Few bookstores have “literary fiction” sections; instead, they have “general fiction,” which is just as likely to include the latest “literary” novel as it is to include something that is so blatantly of the genre seed that its placement in “general fiction” only shows how much some people still stick their noses out at us (reminding us of a hilarious argument which goes something like: “this is good literature and can’t possibly be genre fiction”). But it also reminds us of something else: that genre is in an endless game of bleeding and cross-pollination. And so when Alter channels these hypocrisies, she aligns herself perfectly with the imaginary history of the very people who now pretend to be doing “original genre work” by including zombies and robots and other genre tropes into their work: The explosion of fantasy titles from mainstream authors is eroding decades-old divisions in the publishing industry. “Genre” fiction…exists in a sort of parallel publishing universe, with separate imprints, bookstore shelves and dedicated fan websites. Those “decades-old divisions” have never been firm. Rather, the divisions were artificially selected, but never held to the standards established by critics, etc. Genre titles “slipped through.” Except they didn’t. They were brought in. They were loved. They were declared “pure,” despite their strangeness and disconnection with the realists and other literary purists. But they were loved just the same, because they were works which did something no genre writer could do: write real fiction. The hypocrisies piled up, and here we are, over a century since the modern forms began, talking about the same imaginary divides, ignoring the hypocrisies and “pardons” and snubs, and pretending that by some magic stroke of genius, these folks saw the light. Words like Alter’s are why people like Iain M. Banks must write posts like this one (in which he argues that science fiction is not for dabblers). His arguments are amusing; I’d love to post several paragraphs here, but I’ve talked long enough and need to end this post. But I will discuss one quote: Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what’s been done, what’s been superseded, what’s so much part of the furniture it’s practically part of the fabric now, what’s become no more than a joke . . . and so on. It’s just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research. This applies to all genre fiction, and it’s a problem we’re likely going to have to face as authors from outside the genre use our tropes and concepts without so much as bringing themselves up to speed on
How George R. R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones” Changed My Life
In a private message conversation on Young Writers Online, I descended into madness as the ending of A Game of Thrones sunk in. What follows is the very insane conversation that I had with a friend. The message was titled “Dlajdq24y89qu98yq2389yuadslajsblas bkn3kjgnkjajdsfalsdjflkasdjlkajlkaglasdlkgjalksgj.” I have inserted a space so it can fit… Warning: lots of foul language. (Do not read beyond this point if you do not want spoilers; I pretty much ruin the ending of the book in my rants). The message begins (after the fold): Shaun: They killed him. They fucking killed him. Chopped his head off and that stupid Sansa made it happen. That fucking stupid awful Sansa. But he’s dead. They killed him, and I’m losing my fucking mind right now. They killed HIM. Eddard Stark. He’s an amazing man, and they lopped his head off. An honest, honorable man…and he’s dead. And Jaime Lannister better be next. Better be more than next. Dead next. And all the other Lannisters to. Joffrey especially. I hope Arya guts him through his groin. WHY? WHY???????????????????????????????? Why Eddard? Why not Sansa? Or, I dunno, the whole fucking lot of the Lannisters…WHY? Carraka: Yeah, I was waiting for this. Imagine my amused smile every time you told me Ned was your favorite character. No, actually, don’t, because I wasn’t smiling. I mean, every time I take those character quizzes, they tell me I’m most similar to Ned. And so I start comparing myself to him, and I look at all the decisions he made that, while honorable, were not necessarily that smart, and suddenly I wonder exactly how much I’m screwing myself over by making important decisions such as choosing not to use SparkNotes. -croons- It’s okay … there are reasons to continue reading, though I cannot say what they are … it’s okay … -sniffle- -hugs Sansa- Poor girl, her father is dead. Shaun: Fuck Sansa. I hope she dies… Carraka: You are so cruel! Maybe it’s because I was once Sansa’s age. And Sansa’s gender. I really do not understand Sansa-hate. Shaun: Because she’s a naive moron who got her father killed. That’s why I hate her. She’s so blind by her silly childish romantic bullshit that she gets people around her killed. If she were my sister, I wouldn’t even bother trying to save her. I’d let her get beheaded while storming King’s Landing and Casterly Rock with an army of White Walkers and slay the whole of the Lannisters. Every last one of them. And I’d decorate the Red Keep with the hair of every Lannister in the lot, with the exception of Lancel, who I would immediately take under my wing and treat with great respect. Death to Sansa and the Lannisters! DEATH! Carraka: Wait, what? I know Lancel is cute and all, but why is he getting an exception? While we’re at it, I’ll name Lancel’s father, Kevan, as a Lannister who should also be spared. And Myrcella and Tommen Shaun: Because Lancel gets beat on by everyone and treated like garbage, and he’s so young and innocent. That’s why. I don’t trust any of Cersei’s children, though. All of them are rotten to the core. Infested with Lannister pride and wickedness. They should be tossed into the see to drown along with their mother and the Kingslayer and all of fair hair who bear the Lannister strain in their blood. Except Lancel. Carraka: Gods, Shaun. You’re like Robert with the Targaryens. Shaun: Aye, but I’m not drunk and I’m not fool enough to surround myself with scheming Lannisters with their gold and their lion helms and their smug smiles. And I’m not fool enough to run a Kingdom without honor. But like Robert, I would avenge the greatest of men with the greatest of violence in order to purify the Kingdom of its golden infestation and bring righteousness to the Seven Kingdoms, with Robb Stark and his mother, Catelyn, commanding the North, and the Iron Hand of the new King smashing those in the South who oppose the honorable new order. Long live King Shaun! Long live King Shaun! Carraka: Yeah, you’re reminding me that now that my summer is about to begin, I should be writing the next SBS round (in which people deal with your death). Also, like Ned, I would remind you that Myrcella and Tommen are only children, and it would be dishonorable to kill them. In fact, it would be … Lannister-like! You will become what you hate! Shaun: Then I will wait until they are adults and slay them each in their turn. If it must come to that to retain my honor, then so be it. But they will pay for what they did to Eddard of the House Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North… THEY WILL PAY! You see what George R. R. Martin has done to me? Please don’t have me committed… In all seriousness, though, I think this say something about how much I enjoyed A Game of Thrones. For me to get that upset about a character’s death and the characters responsible suggests that GRRM is doing something right. Then again, maybe I’m just trying to convince myself that I’m not a genocidal maniac…
An Amusing Aside: Aliette de Bodard on Fantasy Set in Non-Western Cultures
I don’t know if this is a trend in the blogging world, but not long after I posted my thoughts on why European-influenced fantasy is so prevalent in the publishing world, Aliette de Bodard took the reigns over at A Dribble of Ink to talk about the other end of the scale: writing fantasy set in non-Western cultures. Here’s an excerpt: For me, that’s the single most important step of drawing inspiration from another culture: if I don’t get this right, then my Aztec warriors will end up sounding like English knights in costume, and I might as well not have tried. Your mileage might vary; I think it’s disrespectful to raid a culture for the colourful exotic trappings and not put in anything of its basic values, though there is a question of where to draw the line between drawing inspiration and rendering the exact same culture in a secondary world fantasy (a thorny problem I mostly skirt around, as I’m writing historical fantasy set in the actual Aztec Empire). I think it’s interesting to see people treating this subject in much the same way as folks have been treating “writing the Other.” I also think it’s interesting to see more and more attention going to SF/F which isn’t oriented specifically in traditional Western culture (i.e., European-oriented Western culture). A trend? I don’t know. Maybe. Lavie Tidhar over at the World SF blog has made some serious waves in my opinion — so much so that he got a nod in my MA thesis. Definitely check out Bodard’s full discussion if you want to know more.
Psuedo-European Fantasy and World Speculative Fiction
Haikasoru (the publisher of English translations of Japanese SF/F) is currently running a mini-essay contest for a copy of Mirror Sword and Shadow Prince by Noriko Origawa. They’ve asked folks to respond to the following question: When readers think “fantasy” they often think of stories taking place in a pseudo-medieval Europe. Is this just due to the facts of publishing—that’s what gets labeled fantasy, and it will change with audience tastes—or does it represent a problem by limiting the field of what can be successfully published? Here’s what I had to say (after the fold): In all honesty, I think the Western thematic dominance of fantasy is a product of two things: 1) the fact that the largest amount of “popular” and “read” literature is produced in the West, and, therefore, is assumed to be for a Western audience over a non-Western one; and 2) the European “fragment,” as it is sometimes called in postcolonial studies, is always in the habit of making itself the center of knowledge, even within fields of fictional exploration which have traditionally been considered in the modern period to be “lesser literatures.” (By fragment I refer to the constant barrage of European methods of knowledge, culture, and so on which clearly form the basis of most Western nations despite those nations referring to themselves as “melting pots” or other derivations of the term. In the U.S., then, we have historically disenfranchised non-Western and also non-white people (i.e., foreign) and gone to great lengths to reproduce Western culture by imposing educational curriculum, deciding what is “acceptable” to be published, shown on television, and so on at home and elsewhere. That’s not to say that Western culture is bad, per se, just that our culture is one which, like many cultures in a dominant position, wants to make sure it remains in a situation of authority even while it sees itself as a utopian “better place.”) The first of the points is a fallacy, since a great deal of literature is produced outside of the West, but it is true insofar as the West has, for a long time, controlled what gets seen by the most amount of people. The West has always had the largest distribution channels for everything form literature to film in the modern era, and, thus, has always had the means of choosing what does and does not get seen. Couple this with colonialism and imperialism and you see the West’s attempts to reproduce its European-infused literary products elsewhere while reinforcing its appropriateness at home. To turn to film, it is amusing and somewhat terrifying to know that Rambo was at one point, and probably still is, one of the most popular American films in the South Pacific, in part because it gave a visual of an American (Western) image which had already been inserted into tutelary colonial systems (of governance). All this informs why publishing companies in the West typically publish fantasy with a European-influenced setting, and also why so little non-Western-esque fantasy has been written by people in the West or translated or brought over from elsewhere. It creates the conditions under which non-Western work can be considered “unmarketable” while reinforcing the proliferation of Western-influenced fantasy. Things have always slipped through the cracks (a movie here, a book or short story or what-have-you there), but never as much as they have in the last ten years. The good news is, as I see it, that things are changing. The SF/F community is seeing an influx of non-western writers, non-western themes, and so on. This is a good thing. A very good thing (no matter what anyone else says). We need the diversity as much as countries just now forming their science fiction or fantasy canons need the space and time and support to develop through their own Golden Ages. Let’s hope it keeps going that direction. Now click through and leave your own essay! ————————————————— Correction: I meant to say that Rambo was popular in Southern Asia, not the South Pacific. It might be popular in the South Pacific too, but I am only familiar with its reception in Southern Asia. Pardon me for the incorrect factoid.