So it's Sunday morning, I just met a deadline, and I've nothing better to do.

[truepenny]

wicked_wish was talking recently about the difference(s) between fantasy, science fiction, and horror, and whether we really need dividing lines or not. And the subject has been niggling at me ever since. Not, of course, that the world particularly needs my opinion, but hey. What is the internet for (besides porn and cat pictures) if not for sharing unsolicited opinions?

There are three quite different answers to the question of whether the Siamese triplet genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror need to be separated:

1. Yes.
2. No.
3. They're just marketing categories.

Let me deal with the three in reverse order.


And let me start by explaining the difference between a marketing category and a genre.

A marketing category is an arbitrary and prescriptive pigeonhole into which books are put for the convenience of publishers and bookstores and other people involved in the marketing and selling of books. It has no deeper meaning than that, is sometimes quite wrong, and if I thought we could get away with it, I'd be all for storming the Bastille and pulling that mother down.

But considering the sheer quantity of books being published these days, I have every sympathy for those who just need a set of labels so they can see what they're doing. So as long as we all remember that marketing categories are there for convenience and nothing more, it's all good.

A genre--and please remember I'm a genre theorist by training, so I have decided opinions on the subject--is something quite different. Where marketing categories are prescriptive, saying This book is Science Fiction because we say so, genres are a tool for description: This book is related to these other books. And if you have a sufficiently large cluster of books which share a sufficiently large number of characteristics ("sufficiently large" being entirely relative: I know of a genre that has six exemplars), you call them a genre. Family might actually be a better word, if you understand the word broadly enough to include third cousins once removed on your mother's side and the children by her first marriage of your father's third wife. That kind of family. Genres aren't nuclear families; they're vast sprawling extended families with ties by blood and by marriage to other genres as well. And you can spend all day mapping out the exact relationship between one member of a genre and another, or between a member of one genre and a member of another, or you can just call them all cousins. It depends on what you're trying to talk about.

Now, because genres are categories created by human beings, they have to have names--it's how we work, as the book of Genesis recognizes, we name things--and these names, as it happens, are the same names that marketing categories use: fantasy, science fiction, horror. But it's important to remember that genre theory doesn't mean quite the same thing by those names that marketing categories do. It's still a matter of convenience, but it's a different sort of convenience. Marketing categories name things so they can sell them; genre theory names things so it can talk about them.

Language is an inexact tool, but it's the only one we've got.

So in what follows, I'm talking about genre. Not about marketing categories.



So does it matter whether we split fantasy off from science fiction off from horror?

Since I've just gotten through defining genres as interconnected families, the answer is obviously "no." Even if we did, the stories wouldn't pay any attention to us. They'd keep interbreeding and forming shocking mésalliances and running away together in the dead of night, as they've been doing for centuries. And you could go crazy trying to decide whether a particular book is horror with science fiction elements or science fiction with horror elements. ("Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter!" "Hey, you got peanut butter in my chocolate!") And insisting on clean divisions between the three, aside from being prescriptive (insisting that this is how things ought to be) rather than descriptive (noticing that, in fact, that's not how things are or ever have been) is a great big waste of time. They're all fantasy one way or another--using "fantasy" not because I'm privileging fantasy as a sub-genre over science fiction and/or horror but because the word has the broadest meaning, as in "a story with elements that are contrary to consensus reality." Those elements can be aliens or vampires or elves, and that choice inflects the nature of the fantasy--makes it "science fiction" or "horror" or "fantasy"--but in no case does the choice make the story not a fantasy, i.e., not contrary to consensus reality.

But.



At the same time, aliens are not the same as vampires are not the same as elves. I don't think we benefit any more by lumping the three together as the indiscriminate Other than we do by refusing to let them play together. Again, claiming there's no difference is a prescriptive move (there oughtn't to be a difference), and I want to stay descriptive and observe that, yes, you tell slightly different stories if you choose aliens rather than choosing elves.

And, of course, you can mix and match. Vampiric aliens. Alien elves. Just because they're different families doesn't mean they're not related.

This is complicated. And it stays complicated. Which is one reason it's so tempting to go back to #1 and talk about marketing categories instead.

wicked_wish talks about the difference between the genres in terms of narrative expectations and strategies. And obviously, when I'm talking about aliens, vampires, and elves, I'm using them as metonymies, as names (we're back to the book of Genesis again). I've posted before (and inconclusively) about the putative differences between fantasy and science fiction. And I could post about that topic again, though I wouldn't say the same things I said last November.

They are different. They are the same. Both statements are true, and both matter.

Comments

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

They are different. They are the same. Both statements are true, and both matter.

Nicely put; and this is something that can't be restated often enough for my liking.

I was particularly struck by the way you make the distinction between genre and marketing category. Screamingly obvious, to my mind, but we both know only too well how easy it is to miss the specific nature of the distinction between marketing category and genre category, simply because the names are the same. Though I'm not sure I've seen it expressed quite so neatly and effectively as you do.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

"sufficiently large" being entirely relative: I know of a genre that has six exemplars

Oh, go on. Cite this? Please?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The seventeenth-century English country house poem.

Marvell's Upon Appleton House* is the most famous (and the best) of the six.

Not entirely coincidentally, my one published academic article (http://www.geocities.com/magdamun/marvellappleton.html) is about Upon Appleton House.

---
*Restoration orthography here (http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/appleton.htm), modern orthography here (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=173955).

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Restoration, every time. And thank you. And oddly, I had a time in my teenage when 'Upon Appleton House' was in my journal and in my mind, catalogued under 'to be thought about'. I think it was about the time all my friends were going "Beatles or Stones?" and I was going "Marvell or Donne?"

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

I noticed, while I was doing my little piece of work on Upon Appleton House, that there seems to be a revisionist approach now, with varius people arguing that there were other country-house poems, but we just didn't know about them. In the light of what we are discussing here it's going to be interesting to watch that argument develop.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

They'd keep interbreeding and forming shocking mésalliances and running away together in the dead of night, as they've been doing for centuries.

I love you.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

My first impulse is to shout out, "But what about the alien vampire elves?" which just goes to show I've been hanging out in fandom far too long. (30 years this coming worldcon.)

Oddly enough I don't think of vampires as horror because I don't read horror and I love vampires. Or something. The newly developed cross-genre stuff which has vampires, weres, elves, witches, etc. coming out of the closet in a contemporary world is something I'm really enjoying. Just wish I knew what to call it. That naming thing again.

This was very enjoyable and has kicked my brain on a lazy Sunday. Thanks!

MKK

[secondsilk.livejournal.com]

Most of what I know about talking about genre is complaints from a film director friend about the perscription inherent in film making. "If you want to make a western film, then you must do blah 53 minutes in."

The rest comes from listening to Joss Whedon's commentary on Serenity. He says he had difficutly balancing the western and noir elements of the two main characters, until his professor told him to look at the noir westerns. Which was good advice "except, of course, none of them are sci-fi action films."

I actually get a little bit ranting thinking about markenting categories, the assumptions they make about audience. In year eleven our English teacher told us that we had to know who our audience was before we wrote, that we had to make a statement about who we writing for. But a friend of mine wrote a book that was published as 'young adult,' and that annoyed him, because he hadn't written it for teenagers, he'd written it for his contemporaries, those who'd grown up in the seventies.

I like fantasy, I don't like (hard) Sci-fi. And that's how I tell the difference. And the first of the reasons why I gave up on the Pern books.

[j-luc-pitard.livejournal.com]

There is a wonderful similarity in music and I am often confused when friends ask me to categorize something I listen to. Rock? Alternative? Pop? Folk?
Decades from now, some of our best sci fi and fantasy will all reside in the same category, 'classics.' With music, some folks have enjoyed the "employee picks" concept where record store employees recommend something you might not have looked for as it isn't in the "genre" you're used to. Some bookstores do the same, but it's probably harder for folks to cross markets with books. We form a different relationship with books than we do with music. Our investment differs. I read widely and I like many styles of music, but there are still good books I am unlikely to begin just because of the topic.
Can we judge a genre by it's cover?
One of the things I did in my (unpublished, in need of a second major re-write and on the back burner while I try and get some short stories published) novel was to have a christian character dealing with vampirism. When a reader picked up on that she suggested that it could be a 'christian' book and I resolved to remove some of that topic because I don't want such a label. The character will remain christian, but I'm toning it down. That's me judging a marketing niche, no? The book would remain vampire/fantasy but the idea that anyone would push it to a subcategory (markeing, not genre?) unnerved me.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think they do have different narrative expectations.

Pretty much everything Kristine Katherine Rusch writes is horror, some of it SF horror (Alien Influences) and some of it fantasy horror (Traitors) and I don't like horror but I did like those and I thought I'd be able to deal with her stuff that was marketed as horror, because it would be like that only in this world, but boy was I wrong.

I think there are all these mostly unstated genre expectations about how close you are and how fast things happen, and the fact that these are different for the three cousin sub-genres is one of the interesting things about definitions.

[fiction-theory.livejournal.com]

What I find fascinating about the entire discussion of genre/marketing categories concerning sf, f, and h is that it might be served by borrowing from the film industry.

Because it seems like the film industry is far more comfortable with crossovers and genre-mixers than any other media.

I mean, how many people who wouldn't touch sci-fi go see films which, in book form, are 100% sci fi - but because they're "action", they don't mind the alien.

Such as Independence Day. A lot of people I know who wouldn't go near the sf/f section of a bookstore adore that movie. It clearly *is* science fiction. It's got aliens, spaceships. But the movie categorizes itself by what happens in the movie, not by WHY it happens.

So if a movie is mostly about people blowing things up - then it doesn't really matter why things are blowing up. Aliens. Car chases. Government plot. Mobsters. Whatever. It's all one kind of movie.

It would make more sense if books were categorized this way, and it might be useful even within marketing categories themselves.

It seems like we're catagorizing and genre-izing (is that even a word) through settings instead of plot. Which seems a silly way to categorize *fiction*, which is sorta all about the plot.

[ahforgetit.livejournal.com]

My immediate reaction to that is, 'But Independence Day is crap!'

The reason for that bears examination. I am unimpressed by ID4 - as the marketers would have it - because while in the beginning it is a good, tense, alien contact/invasion story, the climax is preposterous. That character couldn't write that virus (I know it's a nod to HG Wells, but as it's written it's just not on), one single virus wouldn't do that to a human system let alone a star-travellers' one, a nuke that small couldn't destroy a vessel that big ('one-quarter the size of the moon'), and the debris that we see incoming at the end of the film would do for the human race what the K/T asteroid did for the dinosaurs.

Where I am going with this is, we expect different things from different narratives. As a hard SF story, ID(4) fails because the science is dodgy. As a hard SF story would be several ways around those difficulties that would make great, thought-provoking narrative, but they would be a lot slower and you wouldn't be able to make it work in 120 minutes and include all the dogfights.

That's the difference between a science fiction story and an action film. I expect to be able to unpack the whys and wherefores in an SF story and see that the author has actually considered the reasons why things have happened and built the story around them, including the consequences. Gattaca is a good example. In fantasy, I expect that the author should have considered the metaphors that they are building a story around and that the story should conclude in a way that is true to those metaphors; Pan's Labyrinth is the best fantasy film I've seen yet. A horror film should deal with those things that frighten us, whether they are cultural boogymen such as hauntings, vampires or taxmen, or the visceral aversion to being dismembered, and give us some kind of resolution, usually with the monster being killed but often, not finally. Alien is a good example of an SF film that is also horror.

On the other hand, Aliens is an action film. It is a perfect example of an idiot plot; nothing would have gone wrong if the expedition had not been led by a rookie taking orders from a yuppie. It has some creepy bits, but the dismemberings are either totally out of sight and not even alluded to by suggestive screams, or when it is fully on-camera it is the validation of the till-now suspicious robot character that he is actually a good guy. The film just isn't a horror film. It's not particularly good SF and it certainly can't be pegged as fantasy.

Star Wars (there is only one Star Wars, I'm forty) has been to me, since the first time that I saw it, a fairy tale. It might have blasters in it, the drinkers in the cantina might be green with bug eyes, the hero's steed might be a four-winged starfighter, but I'd read enough fairy tales to know what I was being told. A princess appeals to a farmboy for help. He goes off in search of adventure or at least something different from the routine of the farm. He is rescued from the first trouble he gets into by a wizard who tells him he has a mysterious legacy and who gives him a sword. You know the rest, and the history of the movie, which is that it was ripped off from, sorry 'inspired by' Kurosawa's Dark Castle.

My point, I think, is that blasters and spectacle don't make good SF, no matter how many ray guns and robots appear in the top-grossing movies. If a film is about things blowing up, I don't think it matters why the explosions are happening, it is not SF, nor can it really be fantasy or horror.

[chickwriter.livejournal.com]

Fascinating discussion! (FYI, I found your journal via wicked_wish and also via your Web site.)

Language is an inexact tool, but it's the only one we've got.
AMEN! As a writer of vampire mystery/paranormal romance (depending on which publisher is doing the marketing), I find myself often at a loss to describe what I write, especially when I'm amongst folks in the traditional mystery community. I finally realized that many of them weren't understanding what I already *knew* (having written it) - just because there are vampires/shapeshifters and the like, it's not automatically blood/guts/evil/horror.

This was an eye-opener, since I've spent so much time in the SF/F community and reading SF/F, that, to me, this went without saying and it never occurred to me that others didn't know this. I now make sure to tailor my introduction/description of my work to the audience and try to explain how genre lines are blurry, at best.


FYI, on a totally different note, I'm a rabid fan of yours and you can thank Charlaine Harris for it. She emailed me and a few other authors in January, recommending Melusine. As long as I've known Charlaine, I've never disliked a book she recommended. Kudos to you for a great series!

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

Someone has to write an article about the use of "genre" in reference to videogames. It is nearly orthogonal, but I've decided it's orthogonal for good reasons. Gamers are *right* to say that "shooter" and "stealth" and "platformer" are videogame genres, because the expectations of kinds of interactivity are more important than expectations of narrative.

[mariadkins.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend this essay:

SEASON OF THE NICHE
By Chet Williamson

... "In these olden times, there were no sections for individual genres. All fiction was lumped together, often in alphabetical order. Readers, in order to find the kind of book they were looking for, had to search through many books rather than go directly to one section." ...

http://www.storytellersunplugged.com/archive/2006_07_01_archive.html