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truepennyAnd 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.
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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no subject
Date: 2006-08-19 11:35 pm (UTC)That aside: In recent years, mysteries have been proliferating into subgenres. Hardboiled (aka noir) and cozies have been around a long time, and there are people who love one but won't read the other. Now there are culinary mysteries (with recipes), crossword mysteries (with puzzles), knitting mysteries, mysteries in which the detective, the culprit, or both are vampires or werewolves, and a series whose protagonist-detective is a dinosaur disguised as a human.
Perhaps sf and f will be broken down into similar categories.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-27 05:50 pm (UTC)Please, citation?
no subject
Date: 2006-08-27 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 12:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 12:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 12:38 am (UTC)Some excellent points. One thing worth adding, though, is that "Protean" and "Procrustean" are end points, and readers (based on the example of, well, me) can fall (and move) on a continuum between those points. There are times when I want something transgressive, but there are times when I want to take a ride down a familiar literary road (and I'm aware that Procrustean isn't necessarily the same as "fluff" or "comfort novel," although I think the various ven diagrams will have some overlap). I suspect I'm not the only one.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 01:17 am (UTC)MKK
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 01:29 am (UTC)But if a reader goes back and forth between more Protean and more Procrustean, then they have (whether consciously or instinctively) an understanding of both sets of protocols and can recognize when they've got hold of a Protean book while in a Procrustean mood or vice versa, and adjust. It doesn't lead to the kind of talking at cross-purposes that was the impetus behind my trying to think this thing out.
And I was quite explicit about it not being a binary.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 02:00 am (UTC)Re: Genrification
Date: 2006-08-20 04:49 pm (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 07:24 am (UTC)But what boils my soup is when one set loudly and sneeringly denigrates the other for liking what it likes or reading what it reads. In my experience so far it seems that the Protes are the most likely to attack the other team for liking the traditional, the comfortable, the 70 years of established parameters.
I absolutely support and celebrate the idea of pushing the envelope, of resisting stagnation, of experimenting with the form and the tropes and the genres to see how else these stories can be told. After all, at some point in history everything is 'new' and 'experimental' before it's 'tried and true'. But that doesn't mean there is something inferior or stupid or lesser or unworthy about the writers who stay inside the lines that have already been drawn, or the readers who choose to purchase those writers' books over and above the stuff that's a little left or right of mainstream.
But that's the message so often sent out within the genre community. How often do we hear people complaining that such and such a new book failed to reinvent the genre? And then using that observation to dismiss the work, regardless of how well executed it might be? I don't see that this elitest attitude does anyone any favours.
I mean, we must be the only genre that does it. I don't hear the romance community, or the crime writing community, bitching and moaning about the new Nora Roberts or the new Michael Connelly. I mean, damn, there's her new book and you know what? The guy gets the girl, again!!!! How old is that? Or, gee, there was a crime and a detective investigated it, isn't that so so predictable????
Okay. Those two genres are far more easily defined, perhaps, than spec fic. But I believe the principle still holds. Why can't the folks who want to push the envelope push the envelope, with brilliance and audacity, without putting down the folks who like the envelope the shape it is?
Could it be because, so often, publishers will choose the familiar envelope to the new one? And could that be because in the mainstream, the bookbuying public prefers to read the familiar envelope? As a former spec fic bookseller I saw over and over and over again that the folks who regularly were reading spec fic (but not often getting involved in the spec fic community) weren't buying the cutting edge stuff. They chose the more traditional stories. The much maligned epic and big fat fantasy books. They enjoyed them. That style of storytelling fed their needs. Okay, so sometimes those books aren't always the most technically breathtaking, sometimes it might be fair to say that the writing is a little ordinary, but nevertheless -- they hit the reading public where they live. They give the readers what they want. And yet that is so often treated like a crime within the spec fic community.
I think we need to be far more supportive of *all* kinds of spec fic storytelling, we need to cheer each other on regardless of what kind of envelope we want to play with. There is nothing more disheartening than sitting with a group of spec fic writers and hear them viciously ripping apart someone who's achieved success, the kind of success they can only dream about, and in doing so insult not only that colleague, that peer, but also the reading public they want to spend money on them.
I believe it is possible for all spec fic to be celebrated. I believe it should be. I believe we should be self-critical, we should always be asking ourselves, can we do this better? But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that, at the end of the day, it's the bookbuying public that determines the rise or fall of the genre we love. And we won't achieve much by disrespecting them or the people who seem to speak their language most effectively.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 10:49 am (UTC)Some parts struck me at the time from what I'd read here about genre and characterisation. Somehow, in reading the amount of fan fiction and the amount of Critical Theory I have, I have lost track of what to expect from stories. And so I'm tempted to work out a list of things I expected from a fantasy novel that weren't a part of Melusine, and things I did not expect that were.
You said something recently about the internet being about gratuitous opinions and I'm tired, or I would never be so presumptious.
I loved Melusine, generally and in many specific ways. And I will be special ordering The Virtu tomorrow.
Seconding the emotion
Date: 2006-08-27 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 11:45 am (UTC)And in any given antedisciplinary area, you will have the scientists who are doing it because it's new and groundbreaking, and the ones who are doing it because it is the discipline that will be on their gravestone, even if it wasn't in the textbooks when they were undergraduates.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 03:00 pm (UTC)For example, Melusine was exactly the right blend for me. But I didn't really enjoy Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town until over half-way into the book when I could suddenly appreciate the weirdness metaphorically.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 01:35 pm (UTC)Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
"Most poets have no character at all.
Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear
and best distinguished by bore, fraud and fair."
SFF... living genre? Dryden or pope's genre certainly wasn't dead while they were writing it, so I wonder how we get off so lightly. And our genre fetish is that kowtow to modernism where we have to distinguish ourselves. SFF is often socially exclusionist, though no more than cyberpoets.
I think the problem is that people think too much. Thinking's well and good in it's place, but like fast food it is addictive and leads to bad results. Thinking, untempered by praxis leads away from just getting shit done... the central theme of nietzsche and dostoyevsky's work, provided you read them simultaneously while drinking pints, sans exegesis.
More time getting those words on the page... less thinking about the cocktail discussions at WordCon... imho...
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 02:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 02:51 pm (UTC)I'm sure you didn't mean it to be, but to me your tone seemed didactic and condescending. Thus my response.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 03:00 pm (UTC)And here I was being told, don't talk about writing, write.
And of course I was writing. And when I stopped talking about it, I found I did not write as well or as much.
So, yanno. I'm sure its good advice for some people--including the ones who never bloody write. Just not for all of us.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 07:54 pm (UTC)Luckily no advice is good for more than a few for whom it resonates... And I'm starting to teach 120 folks how to write next month... and wondering how I'll do it this time... using LJ of course!
no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 07:50 pm (UTC)Well, I was, anyway.
---L.