And the trouble with sff is that it's a living genre.
Not, mind you, that this is "trouble" in most contexts. It's a joy and a delight--except when you want to talk about it as a genre, and then it's like trying to take still photographs of a rapidly moving object, such as a kitten or a dragonfly.
I'm thinking about this specifically because two people can be talking about "science fiction" or "fantasy" and mean the same general pool of books, and yet be talking about two completely different things.
Let me 'splain. We have (fortuntately or unfortunately) plenty of time.
Most genres talked about by academic genre theorists are genres that are either dead (seventeenth century English revenge tragedy) or have such a tremendous weight of tradition (the sonnet) that there
is some common ground, certain things that do in fact characterize the genre.
Now fantasy and science fiction are, in the first place, Frankenstein's monsters. They're hybrid genres, taking things from the gothic, from the modern novel, from the romance, from the avant garde and surrealisme and experimental literary fiction, from the travel narratives and utopias of earlier centuries, from the pulps, from detective novels and film noir ... a smidgen of this, a snippet of that; they beg, borrow, and steal without shame of any kind. Oh, and then they just plain make shit up. And there are no protocols for it. Nothing's off-limits, and, contrariwise, there's nothing that everybody MUST use, or they'll be drummed out of the regiment and their propellor of their propellor beanie ceremonially broken.
But fantasy and science fiction are also, as I write this in the middle of A.D. 2006, genres that have accreted a certain amount of tradition of their own. Certain things that, yes, you can point to and say, "this is characteristic of the genre." But just because they're characteristic, doesn't mean that they're compulsory, either. Because, see above re: hybrids.
And so there are two (at least two) quite different ways that a reader in the sff genre can approach a novel. I'm going to call these two approaches Protean and Procrustean (Proteus being the chap in Greek myth who had no fixed shape and Procrustes being the fellow with the bed where if you were too short, you got the rack, and if you were too tall, you got bits of you lopped off until you fit), because,
as I said in an earlier post, as a member of the species
Homo sapiens sapiens, I need to name things in order to talk about them. Neither Proteus nor Procrustes was exactly the sort of guy you'd want to be trapped in an elevator with.
The Protean reader is the reader who loves hybridity and fusion and subversion, who's bored by traditional treatments of genre tropes and shouts with joy at particularly clever deconstructions, who seeks out moral ambiguity and difficult protagonists. (True Confession: I am myself a Protean, both as a reader and as a writer.) The Procrustean reader is the reader who prefers conventions to be followed, who isn't interested in experimentation or transgression.
Protean readers tend not to like Procrustean books, and vice versa.
And both readers and writers can be Protean in one respect and Procrustean in another. It's not a tidy binary.
Now the snag is that both Proteans and Procrusteans love sff. But when they want from sff are quite different things, and when they talk about sff, it can get a little like the North-Going Zax and the South-Going Zax: everybody's going the right way and nobody's going to step aside.
Proteans see the glory of a genre that will let you get away with anything you have the cojones to try. Procrusteans see the security of a genre that has a good seventy-year tradition, that has developed certain rubrics about narrative and characterization and world-building. And because these two approaches are as hopelessly entangled as the genres of fantasy and science fiction themselves, there's no way to separate them into camps. (Anybody else remember the old MTV spot with Dennis Leary: "Okay, the shiny people on this side of the bus, and the happy people on this side.")
People are coming to sff, in other words, with widely divergent expectations of what they're going to find.
And as an sff
writer that's frustrating. Because, believe me, whether we're Procrusteans or Proteans, we're not setting out deliberately to disappoint people. But the genre has such a wide range of readers, it's like trying to aim a cannon loaded with buckshot at a single dandelion clock.
Of course, this is nothing new. But I've been trying to figure out a way to articulate the muddle, and this is as close as I've gotten. It's the same genre, but there are two sets of (sometimes oppositional) genre expectations at work.
The trouble with poets is still that they talk too much.
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papersky's remarks?
