thinking out loud (4): and why am I talking about it?

[truepenny]

So Jeff VanderMeer bounces off Ted Chiang, who bounces off me (and thank you, matociquala, for pointing out the expanding conversation, even if you do think we're all dingbats), and I feel a certain urge to complete the circle and bounce off Jeff, mostly to say two things.

1. There is a difference between science and technology. My post didn't say anything about science, and that was intentional. Which isn't a complaint about Ted's post; he doesn't misrepresent me in any way. But I don't think science fiction is necessarily about science at all. But it is about technology. It's all about the machine. In my view.

2. The question inevitably arises, as it arose in the comments to Jeff's post: why make this distinction at all? Why does it matter if it's one genre or two or eleventy-one?

And the first answer is, well, obviously, it doesn't. Doesn't matter a bit. Read what you want to read. Don't read things that bore you or annoy you or gross you out. That's all the classification system most of us need or want.

But then there's the second tier of response, and this is the tier on which I feel that science fiction, fantasy, and horror and all the interstitially things in-between, do need a critical vocabulary to work with. It's hard to articulate what you're doing if you don't have the language to do it with, and because sf/f/h tends, as a collective genre, to be highly self-reflexive, one necessary component of that critical vocabulary is a way to talk about genre and what we do with genre and why we know a genre trope when we see one.

On that level, the distinction matters, not so much for itself as for the comparative value. Defining a genre, however provisionally, gives you a baseline, a control group, a way to say, well, what X is doing in The Y of Z is interesting and cool because it deviates from the standard in ways A, B, and C, with consequences D, E, and F. It's not about pigeonholing every last novel and short-story in a Linnaean taxonomy; it's about saying, here's the aggregate we define works against.

And trying to define science fiction and fantasy--although most of the time, honest to Pete, it's as silly a pastime as teaching a duck-billed platypus to tango--has the potential to help us understand what's going on when we write science fiction and fantasy, and what's going on when we read it. Entertainment, you say, and yes, that's true, but if entertainment is all we're after, there's no need to bother with stories that invent ansibles and FTL drives and generation ships (on the one hand) or talk about wizards and selkies and ghouls (on the other). Storytelling is the universal, it's the particular localizations that tell you about the storyteller and the storyteller's audience.

As genres, science fiction and fantasy are locked together (not, I suppose, unlike yin and yang, although my first mental image was wrestling cats). If they were the same genre, we wouldn't need different words for them, but if they were truly separate genres, we wouldn't keep trying to define them as oppositional.

I wrote my dissertation about category collapse in Jacobean drama and how it gets troped in the figure of the ghost. And that's what I'm talking about here, the way that the boundaries between science fiction and fantasy refuse to stay stable, that in some places they're the Berlin Wall and in other places they're a faded signpost marking the county line between Here and There. But that's why it's useful to define them, so that when they start to collapse, you know what's going on.

I also firmly believe that the more you know about reading, the more you enjoy and appreciate what you read. And that's why you need a vocabulary to talk about it. And that's why these definitions matter, even when they're partial, even when they're self-contradictory, even when they're wrong. Because they're all part of the great conversation about books that makes this a living art form instead of a dead one.

Comments

[rosefox]

So clearly I cannot read from the genre in front of you!

(Next I will discuss my firmly-held belief that The Princess Bride is actually science fiction.)

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

*g* And my pocket definition of science fiction has nothing to do with science, or technology. I define it as "the literature of testing to destruction." Which neatly includes sociological science fiction--testing societies to destruction--and "if this goes on" stories as well as stories of advanced technology.

And, you know, I wouldn't use the word "dingbat."

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I also firmly believe that the more you know about reading, the more you enjoy and appreciate what you read. And that's why you need a vocabulary to talk about it. And that's why these definitions matter, even when they're partial, even when they're self-contradictory, even when they're wrong. Because they're all part of the great conversation about books that makes this a living art form instead of a dead one.

On the off-chance you're wondering why I've friended you, this paragraph is why. :)

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

Ditto... that is a perfect summary.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think there's a defended border between fantasy and SF, which has Darkover and Pern and Star Wars lined up along it, bristling with guns, and stepping across it leads to loud explosions and bright lights, magic and spaceships! But I think there's also an undefended border where fantasy is quietly doing SFnal things.

I like your original idea, that you have different kinds of characters in fantasy universes from SF universes, and hence different kinds of stories arising from those different kinds of characters. I think that's a productive insight. I've been thinking about that. It's made me think of the possibility of a story where the hero's tragic flaw is that he is mindset-wise from a fantasy universe, whereas he's living in an SF one -- and I don't mean like Pham in A Deepness in the Sky or Vanye in The Chronicles of Morgaine which are the closest I can think of this being done.

Definitions

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not opposed to definitions--they are indeed part of the dialogue. But I find, as a writer, that many attempts to define are inert to me. They might as well be pebbles or straw or something. Basically, I don't think it's useful to think in terms of SF or F, beyond the way we've already defined such things. I think it's more useful to think in terms of the full spectrum of fiction and find connections that are more vital--thematic connections that acknowledge the connection between so-called "genre" and so-called "mainstream literary" fiction, or, perhaps more to the point of this discussion, how writers across the board deal with science or technology in their work. I.e., this is not the sole preserve of Science Fiction. Best novel "about" science in recent years was Clare Dudman's One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Of Its Dead. And it doesn't have a lick of SF in it.

So I'm not a complete anarchist. I just prefer definitions that reflect the complexity of fiction, and engage in a dialogue with the entirety of fiction, rather than definitions that reduce things down to a simplicity that is akin to a generality--i.e., false. Just as, when writing a work of fiction, you do not want to use cliche or to give banal detail, so too when defining, you want to take great care to be specific.

And I'm not saying your original post didn't attempt to do this, just that this is my take on definitions.

JeffV

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And, you know, I wouldn't use the word "dingbat."

No, but that's okay. I used it for you. *g*

This is one of those topics where it's very easy to get over-invested and lose both perspective and sense of humor. So the word 'dingbat' is mostly to remind myself not to do that.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

heee