Accidental intersticiality

It think I may have written myself into something intersticial. Naturally, I'm not sure.

Basically, I got there by writing the Sci-Fi I would want to read (ie without a lot of the Sci-Fi baggage except the goofy fascist utopian elements) with a cosmic struggle where a few simple slip ups could get you way way out of the Fascist side (where one naturally begins in a Sci Fi universe, ie a Fascist Utopia) and over to the good guys who would not like you much, but who would put up with your moral cluelessness just because you were very, very good at slaughtering Fascists.

But you want to be more than that. You ask yourself as you look at some field coated with fallen Fascists and all their glokeinspeils and drums and what not...is this all there is?

Ruv Draba said:

Of course not; you get the girl too. There's nothing like a field of torn drum-skins and shattered glockingmallets to make a gal hawt, hawt, hawt -- especially if she wears a decidedly Unfascistical beret.

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well...of course, the girls....but while slaughtering fascists is easy for our heroic hero, the girls are essentially the fun of the intersticial tale. For some reason they are happy in their generic natures. Some are still working for the other side (that's so non-interstacial I have to say)...is this a lack of imagination? Or the whole reason one has an imagination?

Ruv Draba said:

Surely, invention itself is interstitial; else we wouldn't create things, we'd just run simulations.

I wouldn't be at all bothered if your gals are happy in their generic roles -- as Albert Camus pointed out, Sisyphus had high job satisfaction too.
On the other hand, when imagination makes (for example) all Unfascistical-bereted gals blonde D-cups with Marlene Deitrich voices, reality becomes more interstitial than our minds. Formulaic delusion, however comforting and marketable, is not at all interstitial. As I think has already been established here, adding tentacles is always a safe bet -- and may net you a solid Japanese readership to boot.

My fond hope is that perhaps from the carnage of torn drum-skins and sundered glockenmallets might come a New World Order -- or least an idea for another reality TV-show: So You Think You Can Maraud.

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So, in fact the sad fact is that a lot of generic stuff that I end up writing really is somewhat accidental. I don't want to escape genre...I just want it to be at least mildly amusing. Certain things seem to belong to the bedrock of certain genres. For example, fascist utopias (note not dystopias) remain bound up in whatever the museum (the home of the muses) of Sci Fi contains. So you're stuck with some kind of fascism and you can incorporate it while exploiting its unconscious appeal to readers: as in Ha! those fascists! I've seen their kind before in a million Sci Fi books. I've just sort of pushed their bedrocky nature into the foreground.
Girls in Sci Fi: another easily manipulated expectation of the reader. I have to say very annoying girls are the main reason I started reading less Sci Fi and moved on to say Jane Austen where the girls are quite entertaining.
Anyway, is sure isn't hard to invent better girls than Sci Fi usually comes up with while still keeping well within generic norms of girlhood. I'm not sure what the reader reads into them: perhaps: Ha! a girl. She will have something to do with the hero (or maybe not or maybe not what you would expect exactly).
easy stuff...I mean manipulating generic elements. How this leads to intersticiality is perhaps a much a matter of the deflation of the force of generic core elements as it is a new intersticial mode. So perhaps my intersticial accidents happen simply by pushing a story along willy-nilly and not so much by having a particular view of genre.
Oh the fields of fascist woe I have beheld: the stricken field strewn with banners and musical contraptions. reality TV would benefit from the additional props alone...and the terrifying scenes of giant fascist rallies collapsing under primordial scientific threats would have audiences gasping and ratings sky-rocketting. Oh the humanity.

Ruv Draba said:

I'm still waiting for the Chix to Take Over SF the way they did with Fantasy in the 80s. I don't mean hard-nosed bluestockins like Le Guin, or bunny-slippered SF wannabes like McCaffrey, or anyone who writes Space Opera. I mean sleek geek distaff physicsettes who know what a partial differential equation is and why you need them; mathematically-minded, multitasking missies who wouldn't blink at tracing a character arc around a Schwarzschild radius. (If you split a genre in two and force new material into it like rice into a stuffed capsicum, is that interstitial or intrastitial?)

In any case, the mad rush to the Next Big Thing would surely relieve some strain on the paranormal romance shelves, and obviate my need for a GPS to navigate past it all to find the three remaining books about blokes with swords.

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It seems very unlikely to me. I think the bedrock issues of Sci Fi (the tension between actual manly fascists and the imaginary women who adore them AND the eternal question of why fascist utopias are so misunderstood) are not likely to interest any writer who doesn't want to spend their time dissecting the 85 varieties of cultural nonsense that goes into every rich juicy bag of fascist utopianism. One suspects there are easier ways of putting an interesting plot together than by painfully reversing the vast mechanisms of fantasy over the sporting dreams of Hitler Youth and Vichy Catholic Young Outdoor Sportsmanship in the bracing air.
The writerly girls I know are perfectly happy with warmed-over paranormal surrealism ad nauseam and with debunking the (admittedly lame) cultural pretensions of the men who slighted them in college and are now wishing they hadn't. Their superior mathematical knowledge is just one of the many signs of superiority they have accumulated and perhaps not the most likely to help out much in evolving new plot devices.
For what is a plot device but a short-cut to cultural vengeance? And what vengeance is made sweeter with the right differential equations? None.

Shweta said:

Yeah, I'm with Beezle, Higgins. What you're talking is not anywhere near outside the boundaries of SF, not unless one defines SF in amazingly restrictive terms. Most of the field doesn't, and the SF/F forum most certainly doesn't. Even the old-skool SF you're talking about was libertarian as much as fascist.

You're welcome to come hang out, of course, but I'm gonna take the risk that goes with labelling anything and say, you seem to be interested in close-to-category-central genre SF, and certainly no more out-there than Iain Banks or John Scalzi.

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As I mentioned earlier, I have no interest in being more or less "out there"...and I know people donk't like accepting the strange truth about Sci Fi and its odd (but deep) relation to "getting things done" (ie using the 85 varieties of more or less Fascist cultural normalizations to move the plot). Iain Banks of course utterly bears out the point that fascist utopian fantasies are the bedrock of the genre since his books all feature major fascist schemes that come to grief through some superior elaboration of those berock fantasies in other terms. The fact that fascism loses in Banks over and over just shows how clearly he has worked out the mechanisms that drive the genre.
So if I'm writing intersticially it is purely by accident.

Sharon Mock said:

I suspect most interstitiality comes about more or less by accident. We are dissatisfied with the commonplaces of Genre; we feel the urge to tear things down and rebuild them to better fit our own voices and obsessions. We read works that tear down and rebuild and think, "You can do that?" Everybody builds their own houses out of the scraps of what has come before us--except sometimes when we do it, it doesn't look anything like a hobbit hole or a shiny starship. Sometimes it's a brick spaceship with wooden portholes. And sometimes it's a bioengineered space squid.

Work that critiques the genre in which it resides is definitely interstitial (points to metafiction). At the same time, both science fiction and fantasy is full of it. I'd like to steer this conversation away from "pernicious tropes in Genre" and more toward "how our reaction to pernicious tropes shoves us out of Genre and into the gaps".

So, Higgins, want to share some examples of your accidental interstitiality?

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I'm not satisfied with current models of cosmic conflict and their deep (or generic) implications for how a character's character relates to where a character stands
in terms of having to chose sides, or betray friends or make new enemies.
I think stories need conflict,but that simplistic models of conflict and character shut out a lot of areas that I am interested in exploring with my perhaps slightly intersticial characters.

Ruv Draba said:

It does seem that the most popular things to do with space are to paint tribal boundaries over it and have fights, or go on adventures of conquest. This has been a tradition stretching from Wells through to Herbert, Lucas and Bujold. Our futurism and neohistories tend to do the same within societies, from Huxley and Orwell through to Le Guin, Gibson and Stephenson.

Whether defining SF's story-conflicts as ideological conflicts reduces all stories to fascism I'm not so sure, but what I will agree is that the supremism that often comes with it (whether it's human supremism, democratic or libertarian supremism, etc...) sure has that whiff. The moment we have Good Tribe and Bad Tribe fighting it feels like fantasy to me. I too wonder what we're trying to show.

Maybe there's some dramatic reason that the best thing we can do with space or the future is to fight over it, but I see no reason that such a fight needs Good Tribe and Bad Tribe. Certainly, there are modern war-stories that break that mold, and in fairness I think that some SF does too (Aldiss' Helliconia series being a good example). Also, in fairness, I think that much of the dislocation-SF we see (e.g. in Greg Egan's work) isn't so much fight over ideology as struggle for identity and new values.

Whether you might produce interstitial fiction from playing with the tropes of SF tribe-fights, or simply something that still feels recognisably SF I think would be up to experimentation -- which perhaps is your point. If it occured, it'd be accidental. But the motives at least seem to reflect the motives of interstitial fiction -- dissatisfaction with formula, trope and convention.

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I keep coming up with characters who have been through all the tribal fights and won and lost and well...the fight itself is seen as a bit absurd and the hero deduces that he is somehow changing sides just by sticking to what his superiors have told him the program is...but he is supposed to have gotten some message that he simply is too jaded to bother figuring out. And now having missed the turn (since to stay on the original side you have to be willing to change a lot) he now has to figure it all out.
So there are a lot of puzzles for the hero:
1) Is it all a set up?
2) Is he really switching sides?
3) What exactly are the sides?
4) If you don't trust anyone then how do you ever really know what side you are on?
5) And what the hell is going on anyway?

Ruv Draba said:

Taken out of context that looks awfully like a set of questions that John Le Carré or Robert Ludlum might put... or the sort that Joseph Heller might satirise. I'm wondering whether this needs to be SF at all? In principle, could it not be a double agent psych thriller in modern or historical milieux, or perhaps undercover police or investigative journalists? I understand that it can offer distance, but aside from that what dramatic role does the SF premise play?

Certainly SF has had a few of this sort... the likes of John Haldeman's The Forever War (a stylised representation of Vietnam veterans' social alienation) or Barry Longyear's Enemy Mine (marooned enemies losing tribal identity) might have played with it -- but they play it as straight SF.

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I guess I like the idea that a character's existential puzzles are parallelled by cosmic existential puzzles.
In the non-SCi Fi world somebody might have a moment of reflection about the fragility/ ephemerality of some aspect of the world. In Sci fi, that fragility/ephemerality can be transfered to an entire universe, thus involving the reader in a rather hyperbolic re-setting of the sentimentality meter that vaguely parallels a sentimental leap from say a train journey in the late 1930s when Sci Fi was beginning to gel to an imaginary space journey or intercosmic journey or time travel in the cultural present (which is itself a construct)...