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.