the problem of genre & sffh

[truepenny]

I want to talk for a minute about why "genre" is the wrong word for science fiction and fantasy--though not necessarily the wrong word for horror. And how that makes the whole question of genre vis-a-vis sffh so damn complicated.

I'm sure I've said most of this before, probably more than once, so here's a cut tag for those of you who don't want to sit through it again.



Okay. Step 1, a definition: what is a genre?

(Step 1a: "genre" is not the same as "marketing category." "Marketing category" tells booksellers where to put the book on their shelves; it's an external label applied for the sake of convenience and has very little to do with what's going on between the covers. So the following discussion is not about marketing categories. Just so we're clear.)

Put most simply, a genre is a kind of story. The First Folio of Shakespeare is divided into comedies, tragedies, and histories: those are the genres his contemporaries identified. (And remember that to the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, a comedy was a story with a happy ending, not necessarily a story that was funny.) Modern scholars tend to divide them into comedies, tragedies, histories, romances, and problem plays (although this term is itself problematic, suggesting as it does that there's something "wrong" with the plays it's used to describe). Problem plays are plays like Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure: stories that aren't tragedies or histories, but don't meet our definition of comedy and most certainly are not romances. And even "romance" is a slippery term, because Shakespearean scholars don't use it to talk about plays like As You Like It or Much Ado About Nothing, which are concerned with erotic romance, but about The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Pericles, and Cymbeline. Romance in a much more old-fashioned sense, as a kind of precursor to the novel. Modern novelists have tried to resurrect the romance in this sense from time to time, but it mostly doesn't work very well. Romances are proto-novels, but they're also more and stranger than that; they're artifacts of a different way of understanding storytelling.

... I've distracted myself slightly.

Kinds of stories.

So mysteries are stories in which a puzzle is solved (generally it's a crime and most often a murder, but neither of those is mandatory). Romances (in the popular sense) are stories in which two people fall in love. Bildungsromans are stories in which a young person becomes an adult. These are genres that are identified by their plots. Other genres can be identified by the kinds of events that happen in them. The Gothic, for example, or the adultery-in-Hampstead novel which oursin decries so trenchantly. Westerns are defined by their setting (more about that in a moment), but also by the kind of events that take place within them--thus we can recognize "Westerns" even when they don't take place in the Old West. (Firefly is a sf example.) Horror, too, can be defined by the kinds of events that it allows and disallows--and those events aren't necessarily supernatural. Psychological horror is also horror (A Kiss Before Dying springs immediately to mind for me; doubtless someone can supply more recent examples).

By this definition--a genre is a kind of story--science fiction and fantasy are not genres. You can tell any kind of story you like, because what makes it science fiction, or fantasy, is the setting. ("Setting" is a tricky word, because it has connotations of the external, and therefore superficial--or of a stage-set in the theater, which is canvas and plywood made up to provide the illusion of a drawing room or a psychologist's office or even a theater. In other discussions about setting and sffh, I've used the word "world," as in world-building, but that also feels wrong here, because I'm not necessarily talking about world-building at all.) You can write sff mysteries, sff romances, sff bildungsromans, sff westerns ... None of the story elements that makes those genres genres needs to be tampered with very much. Note, however, that horror does demand that the story elements shift. A horror bildungsroman (like, say, Frankenstein) is very different from a science fiction or fantasy bildungsroman (Growing Up Weightless, for instance, or--to be utterly immodest--A Companion to Wolves). For that matter, you can write sff horror. Alien, Q.E.D.

The other problem is that what makes a setting sff can vary wildly from book to book. The two books I was talking about yesterday, The Drowning City and Dragon in Chains are secondary world fantasy; they take place entirely in imaginary places. matociquala's Blood & Iron takes place partly in imaginary places, but partly in New York. Is it an imaginary New York? Yes, of course. But then, every time New York appears in a work of fiction, it's an imaginary New York. pameladean's Tam Lin takes place at an imaginary college--but we understand as readers that it's a real imaginary college (not like Caroline Stevermer's College of Magics, which is a secondary world imaginary college)--except that it's also connected to the court of the Queen of Faërie. And then there's a book like Peter Dickinson's Sleep and His Brother, which is utterly, prosaically real--except that the condition the children suffer from, described in perfect, prosaic detail, is imaginary. Does that make it fantasy, or just fiction? And then there's the meta axis--Samuel R. Delany's Neveryon books (I apologize: I can never remember where the diacritical marks go, and at the moment I can't remember where my Delany books are) is fantasy about fantasy, sharply and scintillatingly self-aware.

You begin to see why sff defies genre definitions. It's a kind of story, yes, but the common element is simply the contravention of consensus reality, which can range in fantasy from the objective reality of ghosts or fairies or other supernatural creatures in the "real" world (Toni Morrison's Beloved) to the shifted details of a realistically extrapolated alternate history (papersky's Farthing books) all the way through to the creation of an entire imaginary and non-Newtonian world like Terry Pratchett's Discworld. And science fiction is no better in terms of definitional stability, as it can range from rigorously extrapolated "future history" (using Heinlein's term but not pointing to Heinlein as an example of rigorous extrapolation) through a vast variety of combinations of science and fiction (Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, C. J. Cherryh) to space opera to science fantasy like Star Wars.* Again, what makes two books recognizable as part of the same kinship group is the existence of an element contrary to consensus reality. Even horror isn't so much a kind of story as it is a pressure on the way those stories unfold (see above re: bildungsroman).

And to make things even worse (!), there are genres within these broader categories of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. We know this because there are genre conventions which we recognize. Diana Wynne Jones' The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is a compendium of these tropes, a satirical guide to the genre matociquala calls Fat Fantasy With Maps. Horror movies run on genre conventions; that's how you can have franchises like Friday the Thirteenth and A Nightmare on Elm Street. But there are also books in these categories (fantasy, horror, science fiction) that don't merely reject or subvert the tropes of those particular genres, but that aren't even playing the same game, much less by the same set of rules. Against the Belgariad put Molly Gloss's Wild Life. There are genres within fantasy, but fantasy is not a genre.

We need a better word, and the problem is not that such words don't exist--papersky uses the word "mode," [ETA: to talk about something similar but not identical]--but that there isn't consensus. It's hard to talk about something before you've agreed on a vocabulary, and the word that people have agreed on is "genre." And I guess all this post is, really, is an argument about why agreeing on that word doesn't get us any farther.

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*I, personally, have never been able to decide whether alternate history is science fiction or fantasy. But since my own view tends to make science fiction itself a subset of fantasy, we'll go with that.

Comments

[lee-in-limbo.livejournal.com]

I prefer to think of Alternate History as a form of Speculative Fiction, and though I know that tends to get lumped in with SF (even has the same initials), I do think of it as being a separate entity, somewhere between SFF/h and Magic Realism.

Lee.