Genre Signatures

Ruv Draba · Dec 30, 2007

(Hi. I'm Ruv and I'm new. One of the things that excited me about the Cooler is that it had its very own place to discuss critical theory, and people who seemed to be interested in that specifically. As a genre writer and compulsive tinkerer, I'd like to use this forum to air some thinking I've been doing about genre signatures. Prior to posting I searched this forum for discussions about the critical significance of 'genre' but found none. Please yell though if this has come up before, or if I'm approaching it the wrong way for the forum.

What follows is a bit 'essayish'. I did it that way to help order my thoughts. Please don't feel obliged to respond in the same way.)

Does fiction naturally fall into genres, or are genres simply a marketing invention? I think that the answer is a bit of both.

Good literature stands on its own, even if it's genre literature. Readers don't need to be steeped in a tradition of detective fiction to enjoy the tales of Sherlock Holmes, or in a tradition of science fiction to enjoy The Time Machine. So from a reader's perspective if genres didn't exist -- if books were shelved by author alone, say -- we might hardly notice. Having read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to death, we'd just stroll back into the book-store and ask "Do you have any authors who write like him?" "Oh, sure. Have you tried Agatha Christie? She's got a detective too."

But from a critical perspective, fiction tracks human concerns and interests -- and these run in threads. Give us rapidly changing technology and we'll want to speculate about it: Is it safe? What might it do tomorrow? Give us knowledge of horrific crimes and we'll naturally want to ask: Why would someone do that? Just how bad do people get anyway, and what can society do about it?

If genre has a meaning beyond merely marketing then I think it's in collecting aligned sets of questions and ways to answer them: in bundling together similar reflections on our society, our world, our relationships, ourselves; and subject-specific tools for exploring or presenting those reflections.

Time for an example.

What makes Sherlock Holmes stories detective stories is not simply that they have a detective, but that the detective detects and the story principally follows that. Many other kinds of literature have detectives too. We can see them in romances, horror stories, fantasy stories and science fiction stories. But what makes detective genre stories distinct from these is that the detectives dig through the malicious, cruel, unfair stuff in society, and we as readers race alongside them. It's that combination of concern and approach to exploring which defines the genre. Not the concerns alone, nor the approach alone - but the intersection of the two.

So from a critical perspective, a genre is not so much a marketing bucket as a knot in a spider's web of human thought -- a knot at which many interesting works collect. And that's important, because when we know that a work is a genre piece we can immediately compare it to the classics of the genre and ask questions like: Does the story explore anything new? Does it explore things in a new way?

If genres give us a frame of reference for critique, then conversely as writers they also help to give us a frame of reference for design. It's not a frame that we must use, but it can be handy to have it.

But that leads me to the question underpinning this post: If genres are defined (or collect) at some common junction of topic and approach, then what defines that junction?

My answer is to try to find a genre 'signature': some sort of fingerprint that keeps reappearing no matter who wrote the story, or what's in it. Such a signature (if it exists) should surely be found in the classics of the genre, and spill over to the other works that the classics influenced. A genre signature is really a signature of classic genre works.

A detective genre story will have crime of some sort, and a detective to investigate it. But the crime might be a felony, a misdemeanour or merely a personal betrayal. The detective might be a public servant, a private investigator or just an interested bystander. If we pull it apart we start to find a distinctive "Detective Story" signature -- some combintion of topic and approach that separates detective genre stories from other literature with crime or a detective in it. Thinking about classics in detective literature, this is the sort of signature I came up with:

Betrayal: There's a crime or at least some sort of social betrayal that is the principal concern of the story. There's a stake in the betrayal; it's not simply trivial
Investigation: There are major characters who investigate it, and the investigation is their principal concern
Clues: During the investigation there are frequent clues, hypotheses and speculations that tease the reader about the motivations or means or methods of the betrayal
Insights: Along the way, insights are revealed about people and the reasons that they betray
Consequences: When the betrayer is discovered, the story's concern shifts to consequences - whether there are any; whether they accrue to the right person and whether they're the right consequences.

The attaction of finding a signature like this is that as new genre authors, we can write to the signature and hopefully avoid a tyro's mistakes - without slavishly copying some genre master. As critics helping genre writers, we can pull it apart by signature - picking up more of theme and treatment, and not simply basic critique of character, setting, plot, dialogue and narrative.

But how do you know if a genre signature is the right one to use? How do you know if it's too prescriptive or not prescriptive enough?

I would suggest the following criteria:

Focus: All the classics of the genre should trivially match the signature, while stories not in the genre should fail to completely match the signature
Appropriateness What's memorable about the classics should lie somewhere on key elements of the signature, to help with critical comparison. (Holmes for instance, is memorable for seizing on the faintest clues while Columbo is memorable for the way he conducts his investigations and Marlow is memorable for his insights.)
Robustness: You have some confidence that if you wrote a story to the signature, you would produce a recognisably genre story -- even if you interpreted the signature in interesting or unusual ways

The signature I did for a detective story might meet these criteria or not. I haven't read all the detective classics, but it seems to fit the ones I have: from gritty crime stories to cozies. But one can always improve and refine a signature with experience.

I've had a play with signatures for some other genres, and have produced some initial ideas that I might put up later. But meanwhile...

What do you think? Is it worth trying to find genre signatures? Is it worth having good ones? Are they potentially useful to you as a writer or as a critic? Have you seen other signatures that may be useful, or do you have any yourself?

Hope this may be of interest.

ColoradoGuy · Dec 30, 2007

Hi Ruv, and welcome to AW. You raise some interesting questions. The genre question is flogged regularly over in the novels forum (usually in a tiresome genre good, genre bad dualism), but the issues you raise certainly belong here in this room.

I think genres of one form or another are nearly inevitable, in the sense that any popular book, or series of books, is bound to produce imitators. Those imitators naturally analyze and search for the essential components of the successful book they are copying, and over time those agreed-upon components become the genre. Popular genres persist and adapt to new ways: Pilgrims' Progress, for example, morphs into our current, standard fantasy quest tale. Medieval saints' lives become paranormal love stories.

For me the fun starts when authors take those genre conventions and bend or even upend them in various ways. They may honor the forms and mock them at the same time, and they trust their audience to know the formula sufficiently well for them to follow what is going on.

Ruv Draba · Dec 30, 2007

ColoradoGuy said:
I think genres of one form or another are nearly inevitable, in the sense that any popular book, or series of books, is bound to produce imitators.

I agree. Imitation is definitely a mechanism for propagating genre; arguably you don't have a genre until you have imitators. Writers often write what they like to read. But I think that's almost an end-point of genre. Once the casual fan-fiction looks almost as good as the classics, you know that the genre's very well explored.

But when genres are forming or transforming I think you have something different. Writers borrow treatments from one another to deal with new concerns, or tackle the same concerns with very different treatments. Or take the same concerns and parallel treatments to make different points. When that's occurring, I think that the genre is still growing. Perhaps this links into what you mentioned about upending convention.

For me the fun starts when authors take those genre conventions and bend or even upend them in various ways.

Yes - even old genres can be refreshed in this way.

For instance, the TV detective series has been around since the forties and has established some winning formulas, yet it still continues to mutate. Old conventions (e.g. the hero gets beaten up six times in an episode, catches the perp, gets the girl and restores order) have been overturned. In a modern TV detective series likeThe Shield, say, a single fight can produce maiming or mutilation for a main character; the detectives often are the perps; the romances are tenuous and often dangerous; consequences are far from predictable or just; and social order teeters on a knife-edge and sometimes collapses.

Nonetheless, though the conventions have changed significantly over the years, I think that the same genre signature applies as well to Sherlock Holmes as The Shield.

It was my own desire to upend convention without breaking the delicate balance of genre that led me this far. My hope is that a signature captures the "good" in the genre, while allowing innovation and freshness. If it can help me, it might help others.

That's not to say that writers won't want to break a signature too -- or that in breaking it, they won't come up with something new and good. But if your aim is genre freshness rather than new genre or non-genre, then my hope is that a solid genre signature could be a handy thing.

JBI · Jan 2, 2008

Hmm, this appears to be somewhat on the structural approach to this sort of thing; I tend to agree in some areas, yet completely contrast with your views in others.

For instance, you imply that the books are designed to probe certain knots, but I would argue that the original work that started the genre, or subgenre did, but not the derivative.

There are multiple layers; first the movement, where certain aspects of language and focus center, I.E. romanticism, realism, naturalism, then modernism, and finally postmodernism. Each movement is lead by Neitzschic supermen who start the trend and change what follows. For romanticism I think it would be Goethe's Werther that is the principle foundation block, Realism Balzac's Human Comedy series, Naturalism clearly is built upon the blocks Zola laid in his series, and modernism by the works of Joyce, Proust, Woolf, and finally the final kick off, Faulkner. All the contemporary or transition authors in between built on what came before, and probed with the same style.

The second layer is the form. Essay, tragedy, comedy, tragi-comedy, short story, poem or novel, each form, or semi-form, such as prose-poem, or verse novel, or thesis, have their own supermen, and their own emerging techniques and characteristics. The language, style, and direction these forms take are all created by supermen. Montaigne built the essay, Cervantes built the novel, etc.

On the third layer there are the emerging genre writers. Each genre is built upon a foundation created by a superman, and the direction a genre moves in is decided by another superman. Romance roots itself in medieval times, but the modern design comes from Jane Austen. All Romance genre authors have by some degree been influenced by her work, even if they haven't read her.

The genre forms from copycats, and changes by copycats who try to change. The more drastic the change, the more desire for someone to be a superman, or affectiveness of a superman there is.

The reader who reads only within a genre is someone who doesn't wish to branch out. He/she prefers to stick to a foundation, because of fear or attachment. In terms of structure, all sub-genres of genres have their own monoconstruct, where the author only has to plug in different names, descriptions, and arrangements. Thereby, people will see West Side Story even though they know that it is a Shakespeare rip off. They will settle with what is known, and what they know works.

Of course, the Jung type will go into more depth of the rationale behind this, but one can only decide whether or not to follow or to create. The markets will always label, as a means of selling to those who only read that which is familiar.

Ruv Draba · Jan 4, 2008

JBI said:
Hmm, this appears to be somewhat on the structural approach to this sort of thing

Yes, I assumed that the form was principally shorts through to novels, and that aesthetics are free to change as we like. The rest is concern and treatment - which I think you've called "structure".

Genres do rely heavily on borrowed forms, and are influenced by the aesthetics of the day. But they also span forms, aesthetics and literary ideologies. By way of example, there is fantasy poetry, shorts, essays, novels, graphic novels etc... On the aesthetic/ideological side, SF, Fantasy and Crime genres have survived the transition from modernism to postmodernism quite well.

So if we want to be practical more than philosophical, I believe (or hope at least) that we can limit the discussion of forms to just those we want to write in, and let the aesthetics be whatever we want, and still maybe have a meaningful discussion about genre signature for that form.

Each genre is built upon a foundation created by a superman, and the direction a genre moves in is decided by another superman.

Not always supermen. Sometimes, they're founded by trolls! Many genres get off to a very shaky and quite ugly start, but get cleaned up incrementally over time. And some genres (e.g. the 'Sword and Planet' subgenre) just never seem to mature.

More broadly, I'm reluctant to accept the Neitzschian superman explanation for every major literary movement, or innovation in form. Aside from being innately suspicious of idolisation, I'd then be obliged to accept a Neitzschian superman theory of infomercials and hula-hoops, too.

For instance, you imply that the books are designed to probe certain knots, but I would argue that the original work that started the genre, or subgenre did, but not the derivative.

The really enduring concerns seem to accommodate a lot of probing - and maybe it's not answers but perspectives we seek anyway. We poke at some issues over multiple generations and we're often no closer to definitive conclusion - yet authors still produce new insights. I love Austen's novels, but I don't believe that at the age of twenty-one, she gets the first or the last word on romantic comedy for instance.

The genre forms from copycats,

Yes, but in the same sense that nations are built by followers (though leaders often take the credit).

one can only decide whether or not to follow or to create. The markets will always label, as a means of selling to those who only read that which is familiar.

Or.. you can enjoy the familiar alongside the unfamiliar too. If I eat muesli in the mornings, it doesn't preclude me from eating a witchetty-grub filo pastry at lunch.

I think this last point has moved to the "genre is a thing of scorn" argument, which I understand gets a flogging elsewhere. Since this thread is about working with genres, I believe it's off-topic for the thread, so I'll leave it there.

Thanks for your thoughts, JBI. I found the aesthetics comments especially interesting and thought-provoking.

JBI · Jan 4, 2008

When I said structural, I was commenting on your approach as seen in comparison to the structuralist school of critical theory, (particularly Northrop Frye).

Ruv Draba · Jan 5, 2008

JBI said:
When I said structural, I was commenting on your approach as seen in comparison to the structuralist school of critical theory, (particularly Northrop Frye).

I had a dig to look at what you meant, and then discovered that it was something I recognised anyway... But it's not quite the angle I'm coming from.

As a jumping off point, let me take your excellent West Side Story = Romeo and Juliet example.

The plots of these two tales are virtually identical, and even the settings have a lot in common. As you cited, JBI, the structuralists argued that West Side Story is an identical story to Romeo and Juliet because it's essentially the same plot.

Well, it is a virtually identical story, but I think it takes more than plot to cause this to happen. I think it's also the themes and the way they're revealed through the characters that need to be the same. In other words: it's the through-lines, not jut the plot.

If the structuralists were right, it'd be hard to write new short stories nowadays - because all the plots that could fit in 5K words say, have been largely done to death. But short stories are still going strong - and I think that's because you can run different themes through very similar plots.

Here's an illustration. (Minor spoiler warning)

If we carve up a typical Chandler detective story like The High Window into major through-lines we might get a set like this:

Detective is hired to investigate a missing rare coin
Perpetrator struggles to evade detection and consequence

Rich family manipulates detective to deflect attention from other, scandalous matters
As relationships and deceit complicate matters, detective struggles to separate the perps from the victims, and pick a moral side

I've separated these through-lines into two complementary pairs. The first is a highly objective pair, and it's this pair that most accurately captures the high level plot. It's all about the what and the who and the where and the how. It's generic, fact-based investigation around a missing McGuffin and the staple of detective stories since Conan Doyle.

The second pair is far more subjective - it's about the who, the why and the so what. It holds the bulk of the aesthetic appreciation of the story. It carries Chandler's signature themes and displays his character concepts in their best light. It's his interpretation of the subjective through-lines that gives us the grimy, cynical moral crusader that has seen so much imitation. (The subjective through-lines themselves aren't his signature - but they carry his signature story aesthetic.)

All through-lines contribute to the plot, but only the objective through-lines are explicated in the blurb; the subjective through-lines are merely hinted at - and that's because summary seldom does them justice. Here's the blurb from the back of my copy of The High Window:

Mrs Elizabeth Bright Murdoch wanted to hire a reliable detective to find a rare coin she had lost. She knew who had stolen it, but [...] wanted to keep the information a purely family matter.

To my mind, a key differentiator between crime fiction classics and the mediocre stuff is not what's in the objective through-lines, but what's in the subjective ones. Just about any published detective story gets the objective plot right - and there aren't really too many objective plots in crime fiction. But the mediocre detective stories tend to complicate objective through-lines while ignoring the subjective ones. Classic crime fiction offers a compelling moral aesthetic; mediocre crime fiction simply portrays a sleuth solving a problem. (It's the desire to differentiate on the superficial that produces the bizarre, overcomplicated "locked room" murders that keep appearing.)

What's interesting to me is that the moral aesthetic changes over time, and from author to author. Conan Doyle, Christie, Chandler, Hammet, each used very similar objective plots, but carved out their own niche on the subjective side. That tradition still continues strongly today. We haven't run out of insights to reveal about morality and society, nor new ways to present them.

This is why I believe you can play in a genre and adhere to a signature while still innovating.

Hope this might be useful.

-- Ruv (from somewhere at the interface of structure and aesthetics)

Dawnstorm · Jan 6, 2008

I notice that you're placing your smaple signature into plot. But that's not the only area inhabited by genre. This is problematic, because (a) genres aren't mutually exclusive, and (b) some stories (especially short stories) might not have a plot at all (like Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens", for example).

For example, I remember a story I read in Alien shores, called "Mnemonic Plague" (by Bill Dodds). In it, the plot is a straightforward detective plot. Investigate a murderer, etc. It ends with the classic Agatha Christie standoff (suspects in a room, including the murderer...). The twist is that the detective is an alien, investigating on a planet where the people have a hard time keeping track of facts, and to boot annual Fith season strikes soon (which means that pretty much all memories are in danger of being erased). After half the story, the detective finds out the locals use names (nicknames); he has two names, one of which belongs most likely to the victim, the other to the murderer.

In this story, the detective-genre resides in plot, whereas the SF-genre resides in the setting. They co-inhabit the story, so to say.

So if you want to make genre analysis comprehensive, I'd suggest to create a signature for all aspects of story writing (including formal stuff: the science fiction pastoral stream-of-consciousness comedy, hehe). You'd then be able to point out what elements correlate with what set of expectation, and what elements are ambiguous between specifiable genres.

***

Also, I don't think genre is a marketing invention; rather - like so often - marketing takes advantage of the existance of genre. They're taking off from another approach, the social one, which includes writing, reading and publishing communities (and movements), as well as the worship of literary heroes. Things like: SF started to become self-conscious in the pulps (Gernsback), had lots of fun there (Campbell etc.), then tried to join the mainstream while not giving up the fun (New Wave/New Weird/Now What), etc. If you then take an innocent signature approach and use the terms the communities use, you risk offending them (see the Atwood debacle in SF: Handmaid's Tale isn't SF --[SF fandom is already tired of defending their beloved genre against Academic Ridicule]--> She is one of them!).

Ruv Draba · Jan 6, 2008

Dawnstorm said:
I notice that you're placing your smaple signature into plot. But that's not the only area inhabited by genre.

Hi Dawnstorm,

I place genre into two key areas: the concerns of the writing, and how those concerns are explored. It's when these two areas come together in a particular way that I think we have genre.

For instance, I can't think of a classic SF tale that doesn't leverage people interacting with technology or frontiers. By technology I mean "methods and systems" rather than just physical machinery. By frontiers I mean "places or states that people haven't mastered". I consider these to be the signature concerns of the SF genre - both "soft" SF and "hard" SF.

The other part of genre is how the concerns are explored. Here I'm less interested in setting and plot than through-lines and themes: how characters interact with the events of the world, and what this demonstrates thematically. So in short, I don't believe that there are SF plots; I believe that there are SF treatments and themes about SF concerns.

The signature of SF exposition for me is a logical, rational, methodical through-line that leads the audience along. Other things may be happening too (e.g. characters being emotional, intuitive, dealing with the world symbolically), but that logical, rational analytic through-line seems needed to anchor a story in the SF genre. It doesn't just ornament the story; it's not an afterthought; it carries some strong thematic impact relating to the area of concern.

Those two signature elements seem to come together in all the SF classics I can think of, from the hard to the soft. More than that, I think classic SF tales distinguish themselves by innovating in one or both of these elements. Let me pick a few examples...

Niven's/Pournelle's Footfall: What happens when sentient elephants conquer humanity? It's a frontier concern: humanity trying to establish itself as an independent race in an opportunistic universe that's done it all before. The exposition leans heavily on a through-line that requires humanity to analyse (i.e. explore rationally rather than intuitively) how the conquering race thinks.

Bradbury's Farenheit 451: What happens in a world where books are banned? This is actually a technology concern: to what extent do we need books as a technology for critical thought? The consequences of having/not having critical thought are explored in a methodical, analytic manner.

Scott's Blade Runner: At what point do intelligent constructs have souls? A technological/sociological concern, but explored rationally by example and counter-example, like a debate. "Have you ever taken the Voigt-Kampff test?" "Have you ever retired a human by mistake?"

So I don't believe that signature resides in plot. In fact, I'd strongly suggest that we look away from plot and setting for genre signature - I think it's misleading (for the reasons you cite, and others below). I'm suggesting that we look at concern and exposition (especially themes and throughlines) instead.

(a) genres aren't mutually exclusive.

Genres can overlap on domains of concern (for instance, SF and technothrillers are happy to write about nukes and bioweapons), and on exposition (e.g. crime and SF both enjoy rational, analytic investigations), but they seldom overlap on both at once. SF has detectives, and detective stories can have technology, but what they explore is quite different. For example:

SF genre: Is this technology safe? How does it work? Can it be controlled? How does it change us? What does it tell us about ourselves? In the classic SF stories I believe you can find a through-line in which the technology is explored from either a consumer/victim's or technician's perspective.

Detective genre: Where is the edge of justice and social order, and how does this technology change that? To what depraved or culpable uses can this technology be put? What sort of person would be most likely to exploit it? How can their own natures be turned against them? In the classic detective stories I believe you can find a through-line in which the technology is explored from a social observer or judge's perspective.

There's some overlap there, but it's very slim. Gattaca, for instance, has characteristics of both a detective and a SF story but in the end leans far more on the "consumer of technology" side than the "investigator for justice" side. Most of the time-cop stories do the same. Once they introduce cool technology, authors tend to play with it and lose the compassionate distance that the detective genre needs.

some stories (especially short stories) might not have a plot at all (like Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens", for example)

"Kew gardens" still has through-lines and themes though - so if we suspected that it's a genre work (it's not), we could check its concerns, and see if there were any genre signature in its through-lines.

For example, I remember a story I read in Alien shores, called "Mnemonic Plague" (by Bill Dodds). In it, the plot is a straightforward detective plot. Investigate a murderer, etc. It ends with the classic Agatha Christie standoff (suspects in a room, including the murderer...). The twist is that the detective is an alien, investigating on a planet where the people have a hard time keeping track of facts, and to boot annual Fith season strikes soon (which means that pretty much all memories are in danger of being erased). After half the story, the detective finds out the locals use names (nicknames); he has two names, one of which belongs most likely to the victim, the other to the murderer.

I don't think I've read this one, so I'm just using your account. But this story has concerns linking both technology and frontiers; but the key perspective seems to be that of consumer/victim of the aliens' approach to memory - the social order imperative seems just an excuse to investigate this.

Also, I don't think genre is a marketing invention; rather - like so often - marketing takes advantage of the existance of genre.

I think it's a bit of both. On the one hand, people are interested in particular concerns, and certain concerns lend themselves well to particular kinds of treatments - so genres form whether the marketers label them so or not.

On the other hand, marketing is also notorious for creating artificial and baseless distinctions, and rebranding without real differentiation -- all to manipulate perception. To me "Paranormal romance" seems likely to be one of these. What romance is not at heart fantastical? What exploration of the paranormal does not have romantic resonance? I haven't done it yet, but I suspect that if we dig into concerns and through-lines in this "new genre" we will find a slew of romances that happen to involve a ghost or a vampire or such, and a smaller number of gothic creepies using love as a jumping-off point (as gothic creepies frequently do).

If you then take an innocent signature approach and use the terms the communities use, you risk offending them

A signature approach sits somewhere between prescription and description, so people who hate all prescription may find excuse for offence, and people whose genre preconceptions don't meet the descriptions may get offended too.

That's too bad. The acid test for critique is not 'Do I like it?' but 'Is this useful?' The most useful critiques are often the ones that challenge us (though alas, the reverse isn't always true! :tongue

) If we were afraid of offending, we could never critique usefully at all.

Here's an example that challenges some people: if you look at my SF genre signature, Anne McCaffrey's Pern stories don't meet it.

Sure, Pern has a futuristic, alien setting. In that setting is a frontier concern (the nearby Thread planet), so potentially it's SF. But the through-lines are not grounded in analysis, rationality or method. They're in fact exclusively romantic through-lines (in a "small r" romance sense). Moreover, the ostensible concern (getting rid of Thread), is seldom the actual concern of any individual novel. It's just background in the same way that the American Civil War is background to Gone with the Wind. Finally, the ins and outs of key new technologies and frontiers (the dragon race, Thread itself, chewing stone to make fire, and teleporting between) are not explored rationally and systematically - only symbolically and haphazardly.

Pern does however meet my Fantasy genre signature (which I haven't listed here yet). Does that mean Pern "is" Fantasy and not SF? I personally think it is, but who cares? Pern contains classic tales, but classic of which genre depends on how you define genre.

From a critical perspective I think the genre signature approach tells you something important though: if you try and compare Pern to Farenheit 451 or Footfall or The Dispossessed (just to fit in a female SF author), then on the basis of concerns and through-lines it won't come close to fitting. But put it beside the fantasy of Robin Hobb, Janny Wurts or Robert Jordan, and you can find a lot to compare and contrast.

SF fandom is already tired of defending their beloved genre against Academic Ridicule

That's not one for me. A classic is a classic, whether it appears in (or seeds) a genre, or not. What makes it a classic is its originality and timeless impact.

Hope there may be some use here, Dawnstorm.

Dawnstorm · Jan 7, 2008

Ruv Draba said:
I place genre into two key areas: the concerns of the writing, and how those concerns are explored. It's when these two areas come together in a particular way that I think we have genre.

Well, if I had read your replies in this thread more carefully (I was going mainly on your original post) my post would have looked a lot differently.

For instance, I can't think of a classic SF tale that doesn't leverage people interacting with technology or frontiers. By technology I mean "methods and systems" rather than just physical machinery. By frontiers I mean "places or states that people haven't mastered". I consider these to be the signature concerns of the SF genre - both "soft" SF and "hard" SF.

You'll have to be more precise. Else I'll find a way to apply this to D.H. Lawrence's coalminer community stories, or George Elliot's Middlemarch (which contains new medical methods from the capital that aren't accepted by the rural population at large).

So in short, I don't believe that there are SF plots; I believe that there are SF treatments and themes about SF concerns.

Whereas I believe that the only thing about SF that is unique is "setting", i.e. the world we're living in contains at least one alteration.

A story about a lab assistant who works in cancer research and whose mother has a malign tumor and doesn't take well to treatment is not SF. Add a new disease to the roster of diseases we actually have and use that instead of cancer, and you have a SF story, because - as you say later, I think - the change takes over.

The signature of SF exposition for me is a logical, rational, methodical through-line that leads the audience along. Other things may be happening too (e.g. characters being emotional, intuitive, dealing with the world symbolically), but that logical, rational analytic through-line seems needed to anchor a story in the SF genre. It doesn't just ornament the story; it's not an afterthought; it carries some strong thematic impact relating to the area of concern.

That one works better, I think, than the technology/frontier distinction above. Still, the cancer story above could easily be written with a grounding in rationality. It could explore frontiers and technology. And it still wouldn't be science fiction.

What I'm arguing is that you can tell *any* story, *any* way you want to within or whithout a SF setting. I'm arguing that it's the setting-change that makes the difference, at that the rationality/frontier/technology stuff relates to the setting change and nothing else. Everything else is incidental.

This is why I accept the Pern novels as SF, while at the same time realising that the SF-elements are being downplayed as far as the dragons are concerned. [The problem, then, would be where we place imaginary societies. The obvious candidate would be "Utopian fiction", but there would have to be a distinction between the "ideal-place" and the "other-place".]

Niven's/Pournelle's Footfall: What happens when sentient elephants conquer humanity? It's a frontier concern: humanity trying to establish itself as an independent race in an opportunistic universe that's done it all before. The exposition leans heavily on a through-line that requires humanity to analyse (i.e. explore rationally rather than intuitively) how the conquering race thinks.

Everything you say here falls back on one thing: sentient elephants. Now, sentient elephants, by themselves, don't make a story SF. The things you said are important, but - and this is my hypothesis - only in relation to the sentient elephants. (Does it explore the concept of "sentience" through "other"? Does it posit the elephants as alien, making the story a "communication puzzle"? I can imagine may SF-takes on this.)

Bradbury's Farenheit 451: What happens in a world where books are banned? This is actually a technology concern: to what extent do we need books as a technology for critical thought? The consequences of having/not having critical thought are explored in a methodical, analytic manner.

Now, this is where my take on genre forces to me abandon the idea that Fahrenheit is SF. I'd have to establish the independent genre of Utopian fiction, and place it there. (Now where I would I put Swift's Gulliver?)

Yes, "books" are a technology; but they're an existing technology. If I accept that argument, I'd have to accept the above story about cancer research as SF, too. What makes Fahrenheit different is an alternate social structure.

And this is also, why I understand why Atwood is saying that Handmaid's Tale isn't SF. (Though she's been saying it again about Oryx and Crake, which I don't find plausible at all.)

Scott's Blade Runner: At what point do intelligent constructs have souls? A technological/sociological concern, but explored rationally by example and counter-example, like a debate. "Have you ever taken the Voigt-Kampff test?" "Have you ever retired a human by mistake?"

Nothing to add.

So I don't believe that signature resides in plot. In fact, I'd strongly suggest that we look away from plot and setting for genre signature - I think it's misleading (for the reasons you cite, and others below). I'm suggesting that we look at concern and exposition (especially themes and throughlines) instead.

Whereas I think that genre does reside in these things, because the concerns aren't unique without these recognisible structures to support them. (Summary of above; more below.)

Genres can overlap on domains of concern (for instance, SF and technothrillers are happy to write about nukes and bioweapons), and on exposition (e.g. crime and SF both enjoy rational, analytic investigations), but they seldom overlap on both at once. SF has detectives, and detective stories can have technology, but what they explore is quite different. For example:

Well, my hypothesis (which admittedly I haven't thought through well enough) is that SF and detective stories can easily overlap, because what distinguishes detective stories resides in plot, whereas what distinguishes SF resides in setting. SF and Fantasy have a harder time overlapping, because they both dominate setting (it's still not impossible; anime tends to do this often enough). Finally, to the extent that SF and Fantasy are set in imaginary societies they always overlap with Utopian fiction.

Determining a genre then is an exercise in figuring out what element dominates. (And only then do we get into matters of "concern". I don't think that technology, frontier and rational presentation are unique to SF, but I must admit that I don't currently have any clear examples at hand. [I'm pondering Michael Ignatieff's Scar Tissue but it's probably not a perfect fit; I'd have to read it again.]

SF genre: Is this technology safe? How does it work? Can it be controlled? How does it change us? What does it tell us about ourselves? In the classic SF stories I believe you can find a through-line in which the technology is explored from either a consumer/victim's or technician's perspective.

Detective genre: Where is the edge of justice and social order, and how does this technology change that? To what depraved or culpable uses can this technology be put? What sort of person would be most likely to exploit it? How can their own natures be turned against them? In the classic detective stories I believe you can find a through-line in which the technology is explored from a social observer or judge's perspective.

I remember a short story by Greg Egan, "Cocoon". In it, a homosexual detective is hired to investigate a case of industrial espionage involving a highly marketable cure for homosexuality. Reading what you've written above, it's pretty much both; but - ironically - the scenes with the boyfriend, i.e. the scenes that involve the least modification, would be the SF part, whereas the social commentry, "Who uses the tech to what end?" would be the detective part.

But this doesn't work out, for me. For the "depraved uses" stuff you don't even need a detective. You can tell the story from the point of view of the perpetrator (e.g. Frankenstein). I guess, I don't find the distinction very clear.

There's some overlap there, but it's very slim. Gattaca, for instance, has characteristics of both a detective and a SF story but in the end leans far more on the "consumer of technology" side than the "investigator for justice" side. Most of the time-cop stories do the same. Once they introduce cool technology, authors tend to play with it and lose the compassionate distance that the detective genre needs.

"Compassionate distance"?

Gattaca reminds me more of scam-movies such as The Sting than of detective movies, to be honest. A better example, IMO, would be Dark City. It's much harder to draw the line, there. (And there's the scene where *****major spoiler***** the detective floats into space. Without both genres the scene is significantly weakened.)

"Kew gardens" still has through-lines and themes though - so if we suspected that it's a genre work (it's not), we could check its concerns, and see if there were any genre signature in its through-lines.

This is where your conception of genre and mine differ, it seems. To me every story can be ascribed a genre. I really don't know what "Kew Gardens" would fall into - I'm not a genre specialist - but it would be setting and motif-driven, I think, and William Gibson's Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City would also fall into it. Or not. Heh.

I don't think I've read this one, so I'm just using your account. But this story has concerns linking both technology and frontiers; but the key perspective seems to be that of consumer/victim of the aliens' approach to memory - the social order imperative seems just an excuse to investigate this.

I agree to an extent, but I'd argue that both genres, here, are an excuse for a moment of whimsy. Metafictional fun with two genres. And the last line is a pun, answering a thankyou: "Forget it." What really dominates is humour.

I think it's a bit of both. On the one hand, people are interested in particular concerns, and certain concerns lend themselves well to particular kinds of treatments - so genres form whether the marketers label them so or not.

Well, to put in the plainest words possible, genres form because:

- Writers read books
- Readers read books
- Editors read books
- Marketing folks and Accountants don't read books

Kidding aside, you're talking about different things when you're talking about marketing categories, reception history and movements, or academic/descriptive categories. (We are talking about the latter, I think. Here I was just pointing out - needlessly I might add

- that if you apply an academic/descriptive approach, you're going to piss off communities who invest genre terminology (social group stuff) with identity.

On the other hand, marketing is also notorious for creating artificial and baseless distinctions, and rebranding without real differentiation -- all to manipulate perception. To me "Paranormal romance" seems likely to be one of these. What romance is not at heart fantastical? What exploration of the paranormal does not have romantic resonance? I haven't done it yet, but I suspect that if we dig into concerns and through-lines in this "new genre" we will find a slew of romances that happen to involve a ghost or a vampire or such, and a smaller number of gothic creepies using love as a jumping-off point (as gothic creepies frequently do).

It's all about approach, isn't it? Different initial expectations change the response to the story, and different genre marketing changes initial expectations. This may be why Jonathan Strange hasn't been published in a fantasy imprint. This is the self-conscious aspect of genre: who is conscious of genre?

Magical Realism, anyone? Try to unravel that gordian knot. (And don't use a sword.

)

A signature approach sits somewhere between prescription and description, so people who hate all prescription may find excuse for offence, and people whose genre preconceptions don't meet the descriptions may get offended too.

I was talking about the Atwood-debacle. Atwood claimed Handmaid's Tale wasn't SF, and the SF community hasn't recovered since. It's probably why Atwood continues to be made fun of in David Langford's genre column, Ansible. This has little to do with prescription, I think. It's foremost a thing about being taking seriously. These are identity issues, I think.

That's too bad. The acid test for critique is not 'Do I like it?' but 'Is this useful?' The most useful critiques are often the ones that challenge us (though alas, the reverse isn't always true! ) If we were afraid of offending, we could never critique usefully at all.

Yes, but to be helpful you'll have to be understood. It doesn't help when all you have in common with the people who listen to you is the term "genre". I was off-topicly warning about misunderstandings.

Pern does however meet my Fantasy genre signature (which I haven't listed here yet). Does that mean Pern "is" Fantasy and not SF? I personally think it is, but who cares? Pern contains classic tales, but classic of which genre depends on how you define genre.

Aye, it does. For my approach see above.

From a critical perspective I think the genre signature approach tells you something important though: if you try and compare Pern to Farenheit 451 or Footfall or The Dispossessed (just to fit in a female SF author), then on the basis of concerns and through-lines it won't come close to fitting. But put it beside the fantasy of Robin Hobb, Janny Wurts or Robert Jordan, and you can find a lot to compare and contrast.

Dune?

That's not one for me. A classic is a classic, whether it appears in (or seeds) a genre, or not. What makes it a classic is its originality and timeless impact.

Well, when I was at university, I never once encountered anyone who made fun of science fiction. There were courses. I suspect SF-fandom is a bit paranoid, when it comes to the words, "This is not SF." They'll immediately think it's a disparaging remark. Or, worse, a marketing remark, calculated to appeal to a disparaging sentiment. Lots of bad blood, based on misunderstanding. Enraged readers, exhausted author.

I guess I felt the need to add that, because genre terminology tends to trigger disproportional emotional responses. Another example would be the "debate" between Jeff Vandermeer and Scott Bakker about whether to use the term "Fantasy" of "magic realism". (here; History here and here).

Sometimes people get overly attached to labels. This is just a caveat, not part of the discussion proper.

Hope there may be some use here, Dawnstorm.

It's definitely an interesting discussion.

Ruv Draba · Jan 7, 2008

Dawnstorm said:
Well, if I had read your replies in this thread more carefully (I was going mainly on your original post) my post would have looked a lot differently.

I liked the comments in your reply. I don't agree with all of them, but all of them are thoughtful and thought-provoking. In the final analysis I don't care which view is right (or demonstrable): genre-via-setting or the way I've proposed; I'm far more interested in getting good genre stories out and (if I can), helping other writers to do the same

Having said that, I'll happily argue for the viewpoint I've put forward until I can see a better one. Hopefully, the discussion will produce more insight.

Here's some context.

For most of my reading life I saw genre much as you've described. To oversimplify and extend it: SF was about the setting; Fantasy was too. Horror was about the monsters, Suspense was about the plot, and Romance was about the situations. Whenever I described a genre story to a friend, or vice-versa, that's largely what we'd zoom in on.

That view served me very well through a couple of decades of reading, so it obviously I thought it had some merit. And this much at least is true: good fantasy and SF have good settings; bad settings mean bad fantasy and SF. Good horror has interesting monsters (if we take a broad enough view of what monstrosity means). Suspense has interesting plot twists. Romance has inventive situations.

But the reverse is not true. Even coupled with capable writing, an inventive fantasy setting does not make good fantasy. I believe that we're choking on mediocre fantasy with inventive settings. Likewise there's a tonne of mediocre horror with inventive monsters. There's plenty of twisty mystery/suspense stories that fail to grip, and plenty of trashy romance has inventive situations and pure cliche'd relationships.

Using these elements as signature, I concluded, is simply too coarse. And it's because the classics of the genre and the poor knock-offs that follow them both meet these individual genre criteria. Formulaic writers run these criteria to death. I tire of reading it, and I think that the market does too. I certainly don't want to write that way.

No design formula will ever produce good writing, but some frameworks (I believe) can produce good mental discipline, and help us avoid writing too much dross. What I value most in a fiction design framework is the questions it triggers. A good genre signature framework should help writers direct and focus their questions toward the soul of the genre, not simply the superficialities of the genre.

I believe that the soul resides in the core concerns of the genre, and the way the reader appreciates those concerns in the story. There's good stuff at the edges too of course, and good hybrid stuff beyond... but there is (or I think there is) something common about the genre classics that cleaves a genre unto them. They're not all disparate accidents. They touch us in a common place, in common ways.

Now down to the fine detail.

Me, saying that SF is about technology/frontiers and people explored in a sytematic, logical, analytic way

Dawnstorm said:
You'll have to be more precise. Else I'll find a way to apply this to D.H. Lawrence's coalminer community stories

I think it's precise enough already to separate Lawrence from Le Guin, say.

Lawrence is a sentimentalist. His through-lines develop and resolve through sentimentality. You can add Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens to the same camp -- they sometimes explored the new technology/people interface too. Kipling explored frontiers, but again, did it sentimentally. I don't think I've read Elliot's Middlemarch in its entirety, so I won't hazard a comment there.

But contrast these 19th century authors above with the likes of Wells or Verne. Their stories unfold like logic proofs: A therefore B therefore C. Unexpectedly, E - but that's because of D, and combined with C gives us F.

I feel fairly confident that my SF genre signature holds pretty well among the 19th century writers - but there might be some exception I haven't read, and some refinement needed.

Whereas I believe that the only thing about SF that is unique is "setting", i.e. the world we're living in contains at least one alteration.

One reason I'm very dissatisfied with the "setting" based definitions of SF (and similarly, fantasy) is just how easily you can pervert them. We already live in a world where truth is empirical and mutable. We don't know what's true in our world. We only know what we can demonstrate. So if I write about human clones today, and in 20 years they exist, does my writing cease to be SF? And when you try to distinguish 'science' from 'magic', it just becomes an ontological mess. Here's an illustration as to why:

Q: If you write a story set in the 20th century from the perspective of a cave man is it SF or Fantasy?
A: a) It's neither because the setting is reality, and cave-men are historical
b) It SF because the setting is science-based
c) It's fantasy because to the cave man 20th century technology is "science sufficiently advanced" as to be indistinguishable from magic
d) It's both
e) It depends on how the cave man got to be in the 20th century
f) It depends on the story concerns, and how you reveal them

My personal answer is f).

What I'm arguing is that you can tell *any* story, *any* way you want to within or whithout a SF setting. I'm arguing that it's the setting-change that makes the difference, at that the rationality/frontier/technology stuff relates to the setting change and nothing else. Everything else is incidental.

Well, if the marketers can label things however they want, then surely writers can too. :Shrug:

But I feel that labelling something meaningfully should somehow be to do with the values in the work. Now I'm going to try and persuade you that you believe this too.

If SF is only about the setting, then surely you can write any good story in a good SF setting and get a good SF story. So take a classic like Emma say, and transplant it into Niven's Ringworld with minimal changes, then by your definition it becomes SF. Since Emma is a classic, and Ringworld is a classic SF setting - and there's no reason that a middle class girl couldn't live there, it should make classic SF, right? Ringworld won a Hugo and a Nebula. Could Emma's Ring (©, Ruv MMVIII) do the same?

If you don't believe that (and I sure don't) then why not? Well, for one thing, the Ringworld setting won't get much use. For another, any mention of it will probably detract from what Emma is really about (a comedy of manners to do with youth, romance and English propriety). For a third, the subtle social satire is probably going to be lost. And lastly, doesn't Science Fiction really mean "Fiction about Science"? Not simply "Science in Fiction?" And post-lastly, even if the plagiarism weren't noticed, I can imagine a bunch of SF readers who'd be seriously teed off :rant:

and some SFWA members who'd be in hysterics. :roll:

Any consideration of SF genre must include the concerns of the story, I contend - not simply the setting. If the concerns are sciencey then that will appear in the setting anyway. And if they're not, then no amount of adding robots, rayguns and rockets to the setting will make it so.

This is why I accept the Pern novels as SF

Here's the sort of thing it would take to turn a Pern story into SF for me:

Build an economy that trades in dragon eggs
Have the dragons rebel against their slavery (they're "impressed" from infants, recall)
Run a selective breeding program to increase the number of fertile dragons
Try to force them to mature faster
Have the Weyrkeepers of one place or another assert martial law over a protected population, and rape the resources of that place for their own wealth
Have a war over control of the dragon-eggs as a strategic defence resource
Try and replace dragons with rock-crushing flame-spitting fixed artillery
Fund an investigation into toxins and repellants against Thread
Find ways to direct Thread against enemies
Harness dragons and other between travellers into both the economy and the military
Keep the above considerations as the central focus of the story, and push the "who's bonking whom" and "who's the most popular girl in the Weyr" stuff into the background.

These are all natural, logical consequences of the Pern setting. They're also carefully avoided for what is essentially a sentimental/symbolic aesthetic. (But that's just what fantasy stories do.)

Dawnstorm said:
Everything you say here falls back on one thing: sentient elephants. Now, sentient elephants, by themselves, don't make a story SF.

Niven enjoys taking animals, making them sentient and then having humans try to deal with them as adversaries and competitors. Moties are just smart rabbits; Kzin are smart tigers etc... But I agree: it's not that which makes it SF. It's the frontier issue, explored logically.

Now, this is where my take on genre forces to me abandon the idea that Fahrenheit is SF.

And you might lose Orwell, Huxley, Vonnegut maybe... and open the door to the "SF is not literature" silliness. :tongue

And this is also, why I understand why Atwood is saying that Handmaid's Tale isn't SF.

I haven't read it and can't comment. On the other hand, 2007 Nobel Lit Laureate Doris Lessing is proud to have written several SF books.

Whereas I think that genre does reside in these things, because the concerns aren't unique without these recognisible structures to support them.

As per an earlier post, I think it's the intersection of concerns and treatments that defines genre. You can't just look at concerns, because they overlap; treatments do too. You need to look at the pair of concerns and treatments together. If you do that then (say) Egan's Cocoon is definitely SF.

Kidding aside, you're talking about different things when you're talking about marketing categories, reception history and movements, or academic/descriptive categories. (We are talking about the latter, I think. Here I was just pointing out - needlessly I might add - that if you apply an academic/descriptive approach, you're going to piss off communities who invest genre terminology (social group stuff) with identity.

Genres can be marketing labels, or critical structures or tribal colours. I'm only interested in the second. I leave the first to marketers and the third to frothing fans. :snoopy:

Magical Realism, anyone?
Try to unravel that gordian knot. (And don't use a sword. )

...sits as fantasy under my fantasy genre signature which (since I haven't posted it here before) is something like "psychological/moral/societal concerns explored through symbolic development and resolution". (It's a broad signature; individual fantasy sub-genres get more detailed signatures. I can even tuck in lumps of Kafka as fantasy from this signature)

Dune?

Click to expand...

It's possible to deliver more than one story inside a novel. It's even possible to tell more than one story concurrently in the same chapter. I think of Dune as being a SF arc binding a set of fantasy stories. By contrast, I think of Star Wars and most Space Operas as being pure fantasy.

The whole Pern corpus would almost classify as fantasy novels inside a SF arc, except that McCaffrey never actually tells the SF arc in the text - she does it with end-notes instead.

Dawnstorm · Jan 8, 2008

Ruv Draba said:
I liked the comments in your reply. I don't agree with all of them, but all of them are thoughtful and thought-provoking. In the final analysis I don't care which view is right (or demonstrable): genre-via-setting or the way I've proposed; I'm far more interested in getting good genre stories out and (if I can), helping other writers to do the same

Pretty much the same, here. Although might strike "genre" from "getting good 'genre' stories out". I do have a slight preference for SF, but that's really not a coherent statement in any form.

Having said that, I'll happily argue for the viewpoint I've put forward until I can see a better one. Hopefully, the discussion will produce more insight.

Good, because I enjoy thinking about genre, and this thread is stimulating.

But the reverse is not true. Even coupled with capable writing, an inventive fantasy setting does not make good fantasy. I believe that we're choking on mediocre fantasy with inventive settings. Likewise there's a tonne of mediocre horror with inventive monsters. There's plenty of twisty mystery/suspense stories that fail to grip, and plenty of trashy romance has inventive situations and pure cliche'd relationships.

But genre is not a value judgment. How can I tell bad/derivative genre literature from good/fresh genre literature, if I can't compare them on the turf of genre.

Using these elements as signature, I concluded, is simply too coarse. And it's because the classics of the genre and the poor knock-offs that follow them both meet these individual genre criteria. Formulaic writers run these criteria to death. I tire of reading it, and I think that the market does too. I certainly don't want to write that way.

No design formula will ever produce good writing, but some frameworks (I believe) can produce good mental discipline, and help us avoid writing too much dross. What I value most in a fiction design framework is the questions it triggers. A good genre signature framework should help writers direct and focus their questions toward the soul of the genre, not simply the superficialities of the genre.

I do think I see where you come from now. Here's my take on the situation:

A formulaic writer, if clever enough, will be able to abuse your framework for a formula. Instead of re-inforcing any idea of "good genre", I'd de-emphasise the idea of genre. I'm rather sympathetic to the strain that expresses itself in SF as New Wave/New Weird/Now What? (To the more playful strands, at least.)

In fantasy, I keep hearing about the prominence of Tolkien. But personally I think Moorcock has infused the genre with much more vigor. More as an editor than as a writer.

In praxis, I much prefer such loose and playful approaches to genre than the re-defining methods. I'm thinking of Bruce Sterling's term Slipstream, as an example. (But issues are not that clear cut in praxis; the New Weird appeared to be more openly into genre politics than say the New Wave.)

I believe that the soul resides in the core concerns of the genre, and the way the reader appreciates those concerns in the story. There's good stuff at the edges too of course, and good hybrid stuff beyond... but there is (or I think there is) something common about the genre classics that cleaves a genre unto them. They're not all disparate accidents. They touch us in a common place, in common ways.

I do think I understand what you mean, here. If I may use a metaphor:

Your signature sounds a lot like a gravity centre. I guess I'm afraid that if you start with a sun you end with a black hole.

I think it's precise enough already to separate Lawrence from Le Guin, say.

Lawrence is a sentimentalist. His through-lines develop and resolve through sentimentality. You can add Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens to the same camp -- they sometimes explored the new technology/people interface too. Kipling explored frontiers, but again, did it sentimentally. I don't think I've read Elliot's Middlemarch in its entirety, so I won't hazard a comment there.

I probably agree about Lawrence (certainly Dickens; have read to little Hardy, but he's on my list).

Eliot, I feel, stands out. She's got a standard omniscient narrator, and keeps talking about her characters in affectionate terms, but this makes her sound a lot like an anthropologist. The doctor's story (Lydgate, I think, but it's been some time since I read it, so I might confuse the names) is a story that pits modern medical advances from London against the social prejudices of Middlemarch; the first patients he gets because some of the inhabitants don't like the old doctor. Eliot doesn't go into the science much, but it's a nice, ironically distant analysis of how improved methods don't matter one bit in Middlemarch.

I don't doubt your concept is precise enough; but your representation of it isn't. If I look at the SF I've read, I'm not sure what to make of "rational representation". What you've said below about Pern helps me understand a bit, but it also throws me back to setting/plot. If you're not describing the how, your "rational representation" is vague; if you do describe it, it's too restrictive. What I'm looking for is the balance.

But contrast these 19th century authors above with the likes of Wells or Verne. Their stories unfold like logic proofs: A therefore B therefore C. Unexpectedly, E - but that's because of D, and combined with C gives us F.

See, this is what I don't quite see yet. Also, intuitively I'd say it puts me at disadvantage looking at Japanese SF, who do not share western Greek culture roots to the extent that we do. If my approach presents you with an ontological nightmare, yours presents me with a hermeneutic one.

See where I fail to log on?

One reason I'm very dissatisfied with the "setting" based definitions of SF (and similarly, fantasy) is just how easily you can pervert them. We already live in a world where truth is empirical and mutable. We don't know what's true in our world. We only know what we can demonstrate. So if I write about human clones today, and in 20 years they exist, does my writing cease to be SF? And when you try to distinguish 'science' from 'magic', it just becomes an ontological mess. Here's an illustration as to why:

This may explain why lately SF seems to bleed over into different markets including mainstream more and more. I also think that the genre publications are becoming more and more genre conscious (In two anthologies I've bought recently I noticed three metafictional stories, clearly riffing off of classics. I'm not talking about subtle echoes. I'm talking about stories like "I, Row Boat" by Doctrow, or a story where the main character is a parody of Phillip K Dick the man, and SF writing is metafictional plot element [by Resnick and someone else I can't remember]. I can't recall the third.) I don't actually trust myself on this trend; I'm out of the short story market (I'm Austrian and imports have become very hard to get in recent years) and I may misremember the meta-fiction ratio.

Your response seems to be: safe it by giving writers a cause. Mine seems to be, well, pity, but time to let it go. I will find the same stuff elsewhere.

Q: If you write a story set in the 20th century from the perspective of a cave man is it SF or Fantasy?
A: a) It's neither because the setting is reality, and cave-men are historical
b) It SF because the setting is science-based
c) It's fantasy because to the cave man 20th century technology is "science sufficiently advanced" as to be indistinguishable from magic
d) It's both
e) It depends on how the cave man got to be in the 20th century
f) It depends on the story concerns, and how you reveal them

My personal answer is f).

I might pick f), too, as soon as I figure out the framework to interprete the question. But I'd also point out that you're asking this question about a caveman in the 20th Century. The question is fine-tuning; the setting-modification precedes it. The further down the tree you step, the fuzzier the distinction lines.

If SF is only about the setting, then surely you can write any good story in a good SF setting and get a good SF story. So take a classic like Emma say, and transplant it into Niven's Ringworld with minimal changes, then by your definition it becomes SF. Since Emma is a classic, and Ringworld is a classic SF setting - and there's no reason that a middle class girl couldn't live there, it should make classic SF, right? Ringworld won a Hugo and a Nebula. Could Emma's Ring (©, Ruv MMVIII) do the same?

If you don't believe that (and I sure don't) then why not?

That's actually a very intriguing concept. You make want to try that. (I won't; I don't love Austen enough, and I've only ever read one short story by Niven, which wasn't Ringworld.)

You see, if the setting change is well worked out, the term "minimal changes" becomes problematic. Setting labours on all levels, which is not the same as saying that a SF author has to pay attention to all levels (which is my caveat about your Pern comments; they're valid but not compelling to me). But if you're playing the transpositioning game, you're basically exploring romance in an alien setting. The transposition itself re-contextualises. My intuition is that - if well done - minimal changes have a maximal effect.

Well, for one thing, the Ringworld setting won't get much use.

No? You mean the setting won't impact things such as dialogue? You think romance transposes so easily? The setting is omnipresent. If it isn't, you didn't utilise the setting. [Since the story exists in another setting already, the transposition topicalises the changes, so that I'm less willing to forgive oversights.]

For another, any mention of it will probably detract from what Emma is really about (a comedy of manners to do with youth, romance and English propriety).

Really? I'd argue it will abandon Victorian England. Ringworld has no "manners" (in the literary term)?

For a third, the subtle social satire is probably going to be lost.

Check. (Unless you're going the metafictional-convolutions path, but that's messing with yet another genre...)

And lastly, doesn't Science Fiction really mean "Fiction about Science"? Not simply "Science in Fiction?"

It might also mean "Fiction through science" or "fictive science". See, to transpose Emma to Ringworld you'd need methodologies not unlike those you find in sociology. (People may argue about the scientificness of the social sciences, I agree.)

Stylistically, you're fronting the setting. (Reception would be different, depending on whether you know Emma or not.)

And post-lastly, even if the plagiarism weren't noticed, I can imagine a bunch of SF readers who'd be seriously teed off and some SFWA members who'd be in hysterics.

But it's not plagiarism. What about Brian Aldiss' Frankenstein Unbound, Dr Moreau's Other Island etc.? Or the current Rhett (I think this includes retelling of at least parts of Gone with the Wind.)

Plagiarism is taking Emma and crossing out the author's name.

[If by minimal changes, you mean a mere change of place names and dates, then I'd call it a lousy conversion, and a failure, but still SF, on the strength of the setting.]

These are all natural, logical consequences of the Pern setting. They're also carefully avoided for what is essentially a sentimental/symbolic aesthetic. (But that's just what fantasy stories do.)

This distinction reminds me a lot of the literary distinction between novel & romance (not the kissy genre; the term Wells had in mind when he talked about his "scientific romances"). Am I on the right track (at least when distinguishing between SF & F)?

And you might lose Orwell, Huxley, Vonnegut maybe... and open the door to the "SF is not literature" silliness.

Well, I could claim Orwell for Newspeak, and Huxley for genetics. (But I do realise that I confront you with an ontological nightmare, doing this. Hehe) I don't recall anything of that kind in Fahrenheit. The book seemed to me - dare I say it? - rather sentimental.

I haven't read it and can't comment. On the other hand, 2007 Nobel Lit Laureate Doris Lessing is proud to have written several SF books.

Yup, and sometimes she focusses on the setting at the expanse of character. Something she hasn't done in, say, The Golden Notebook. (I read two or three of her Canopus books, and one of the Dann books. I'm currently eyeing The Cleft. And won't worry about the SF/F distinction if I get around to reading it.

)

As per an earlier post, I think it's the intersection of concerns and treatments that defines genre. You can't just look at concerns, because they overlap; treatments do too. You need to look at the pair of concerns and treatments together. If you do that then (say) Egan's Cocoon is definitely SF.

I realise that. I still maintain that if I write a novel about cancer-research (well-researched) and present it rationally, it wouldn't be science fiction, although it might appeal to the same demographic. I do realise how dodgy this is: the character finds a cure near the end --> SF; the character doesn't --> not SF. It's not especially satisfying. But I need to do this, as your signature approach presents me with - so far - insurmountable hermeneutic problems.

Genres can be marketing labels, or critical structures or tribal colours. I'm only interested in the second. I leave the first to marketers and the third to frothing fans.

But when you're talking about the state of genre and being tired of reading derivative stuff you're overstepping the genre.

It's possible to deliver more than one story inside a novel. It's even possible to tell more than one story concurrently in the same chapter. I think of Dune as being a SF arc binding a set of fantasy stories. By contrast, I think of Star Wars and most Space Operas as being pure fantasy.

But to me SF doesn't even require story. Focussing on setting allows me to draw comparisons between novels and documentaries such as The Future is Wild (Wikipedia, official page).

I don't have the time to go into Star Wars no. The heading would be "Why I don't buy the Midi-somethings".

The whole Pern corpus would almost classify as fantasy novels inside a SF arc, except that McCaffrey never actually tells the SF arc in the text - she does it with end-notes instead.

I can live with that.

Out of time. See ya.

Ruv Draba · Jan 9, 2008

I'm afraid that the responses might get somewhat bitsy, Dawnstorm. Apologies in advance if I lose the thread.

Dawnstorm said:
genre is not a value judgment. How can I tell bad/derivative genre literature from good/fresh genre literature, if I can't compare them on the turf of genre.

You can and should compare a genre work to its genre context. A genre signature is a short-cut to help you do that. It's not an alternative to good genre knowledge, but a way to quickly bring that knowledge to bear.

For example, my horror genre signature makes a list of key things that I think all our horror classics have (or at least the ones I've read and can remember). Namely:

A through-line in which the familiar or the trusted is perverted, inverted or exaggerated to the point of menace and/or revulsion
A through-line in which someone is either seduced or engulfed by danger (i.e. they don't seek the danger)
A through-line in which someone is helpless and dependent
A through-line driven by suspense, with a growing sense of doom
Vivid imagery and stark contrasts
Unpredictability in some or all of the through-lines above

Very often, formulaic and derivative approaches to horror go for cliché in 1, skip 2 and 3, manipulate 4 through linguistic tricks instead of character arcs, overload 5, and thereby damage 6. If you know that a horror story isn't scary, my horror signature may help you work out why it isn't. (And on the other hand, if a story is scary but doesn't match this signature, then maybe the signature needs an update).

A formulaic writer, if clever enough, will be able to abuse your framework for a formula.

My issue isn't whether a writer is using a formula to write - why should I care? It's whether the writer is using a bad formula to write.

Recall that my signature is made up of two things: a domain of concern, and a way of treating it.

Our means for critiquing each part are different. When we critique concern we can ask: is this a new concern, or is it a new perspective on an existing concern? We can also ask questions like: is this a concern that interests us? Why or why not?

When we critique treatment we can ask: are all of the signature elements there that we expected? Do they work together or do they compete? Does this particular assemblage address the original concern and satisfy our reasons for being concerned?

Once a work has been subjected to that sort of critique (plus the usual syntactic stuff) I think you've critted it pretty darn thoroughly.

Instead of re-inforcing any idea of "good genre", I'd de-emphasise the idea of genre.

That's a valid choice for writing, but it dodges any sense of discipline when you're critting genre works.

I'm rather sympathetic to the strain that expresses itself in SF as New Wave/New Weird/Now What? (To the more playful strands, at least.)

I'm a fan of China Miéville's myself - exactly because of the playfulness you mention. But his fiction reads best (I feel) if you imagine Miéville reading it to you. He's teasing you. You know he wants to tease you, and if you're a genre-geek, you may well enjoy the teasing. (Miéville's exactly the kind of fellow who'd enjoy taking one of my signatures, twisting the hell out of it and handing it back.)

But exactly for that reason if you had to pick a domain of concern for his fiction you might quite understandably pick something like "the reader's attitude to genre". (As you mention later, it is very genre-political). It doesn't compare to F/SF "classic" genre works on criteria of either setting or plot, and in my opinion it doesn't compare on domain of concern either. I class it in a separate genre, just as you can class dadaist or surrealist literatures as their own genres.

In fantasy, I keep hearing about the prominence of Tolkien.

Speaking of Miéville, I read a quote attributed to him in which Tolkien was called "a wen on the arse of fantasy literature". I can't help but enjoy such a statement.

I wouldn't go that far, but I find Tolkien's fantasy screamingly sentimental (as indeed is the fantasy of his buddy CS Lewis). There are many successors who were able to bring smarts as well as feeling to fantasy - among which I'd have to include Moorcock, Vance, Zelazny, Wolfe and Le Guin. (And there are plenty of romantacists who are trying to drag fantasy back to sheer sentimentality again - but I'll rant on that another day.)

Your signature sounds a lot like a gravity centre.

In the Newtonian sense that the impact of a body acts through its centre of mass... my use of signature is meant to capture the "centre of mass" through which genre classics impact us. You can then use that as a frame of reference to help understand and interpret the impact of other things that either look (or purport to look or try to look) like a genre classic.

But don't blame my signature that writing clusters around notional centres of mass. I didn't cause that, and I neither advocate it nor lament it; I'm merely observing that it does.

I don't doubt your concept is precise enough; but your representation of it isn't. If I look at the SF I've read, I'm not sure what to make of "rational representation".

Culturally we have absorbed certain principles of rationality, including these:

We can understand complex things by dividing them into parts
Things tend to behave the same way unless their circumstances change
Cause and effect are consistent
Over a long enough time, an object's behaviour will reveal its nature
Form follows function
Occam's razor improves understanding
What I perceive, can also be perceived by others
The act of considering something does not change it
Left untended, things gradually get worse
Unchecked, life is selfish
Everything has a rational explanation

These sorts of principles are used in science (and math, engineering and philosophy). They also deeply underpin SF and mystery/suspense stories. Very few stories in these genres break any of these principles -- and if they do, it beomes a mystery to be puzzled and explained away.

However, in romance, fantasy and horror genres, these principles are either reversed, replaced or perverted (not all of them or all the time, but every romance, fantasy or horror story I can think of messes with at least some of these principles).

Pern breaks or ignores several of these principles, and never acknowledges this fact, or explains why.

I'd say it puts me at disadvantage looking at Japanese SF, who do not share western Greek culture roots to the extent that we do.

Genre is a cultural term. There's no reason that it must apply to literature from outside a culture.

That said, every culture seems to have fantasy. But not every culture has SF, romance or suspense as we understand such things.

If my approach presents you with an ontological nightmare, yours presents me with a hermeneutic one.

I probably didn't create that - at least, not from the context of lit outside our broad cultural confines.

If we can't fully appreciate foreign lit from our own cultural context, then there's no reason to imagine that genre categorisations should be any easier.

See where I fail to log on?

Yes, but I decline to take responsibility for being unable to classify Manga according to Western genres.

Reads and notes your comments on markets, but declines to reply cos individual actions need not make any sense in an economy, and therefore collective actions won't always either.

This distinction reminds me a lot of the literary distinction between novel & romance (not the kissy genre; the term Wells had in mind when he talked about his "scientific romances"). Am I on the right track (at least when distinguishing between SF & F)?

If you're thinking about different concerns and different treatments (and if Wells was), then we might be on the same page here.

I don't recall anything of that kind in Fahrenheit. The book seemed to me - dare I say it? - rather sentimental.

Ha! Agreed! I'd forgotten that! On the one hand, it's obsessed with technological detail. On the other hand, it uses none of that detail to drive through its major thematic points. (And as an experiment, replace the Firemen with orcs, and the books with scrolls, and see how easily it becomes an epic fantasy tale.)

I still maintain that if I write a novel about cancer-research (well-researched) and present it rationally, it wouldn't be science fiction, although it might appeal to the same demographic.

Well, it could be a technothriller too - or one of those John Grisham legal suspense novels.

It's getting late, so I'll have a think on that and get back to you.

Dawnstorm · Jan 9, 2008

Ruv Draba said:
I'm afraid that the responses might get somewhat bitsy, Dawnstorm. Apologies in advance if I lose the thread.

No, no. That's what I hoped for. It helps me understand better.

You can and should compare a genre work to its genre context. A genre signature is a short-cut to help you do that. It's not an alternative to good genre knowledge, but a way to quickly bring that knowledge to bear.

For example, my horror genre signature makes a list of key things that I think all our horror classics have (or at least the ones I've read and can remember). Namely:

A through-line in which the familiar or the trusted is perverted, inverted or exaggerated to the point of menace and/or revulsion

A through-line in which someone is either seduced or engulfed by danger (i.e. they don't seek the danger)

A through-line in which someone is helpless and dependent

A through-line driven by suspense, with a growing sense of doom

Vivid imagery and stark contrasts

Unpredictability in some or all of the through-lines above

Very often, formulaic and derivative approaches to horror go for cliché in 1, skip 2 and 3, manipulate 4 through linguistic tricks instead of character arcs, overload 5, and thereby damage 6. If you know that a horror story isn't scary, my horror signature may help you work out why it isn't. (And on the other hand, if a story is scary but doesn't match this signature, then maybe the signature needs an update).

This makes sense, mostly. A clarification ~~story~~ question (behold a strange typo):

How do we frame this claim: "A horror story is scary." Above it seems to function as a corrective to the formulated signature. Does the sentence fall under concern? Execution? Is it an extra-thereotical assumption, taken for granted?

The problem I'm having right now is that I can't see myself taking the same approach to determine whether a story belongs to a ~~story~~ genre, and then also to determine whether it works within a genre.

On the other hand, I could compare various fits. So, if people market Star Wars as SF, but it doesn't measure up to what you expect from SF, the observation that Star Wars measures up better to what you expect from fantasy may save your viewing pleasure.

I do think I start to understand, now. Am I getting close?

Recall that my signature is made up of two things: a domain of concern, and a way of treating it.

Our means for critiquing each part are different. When we critique concern we can ask: is this a new concern, or is it a new perspective on an existing concern? We can also ask questions like: is this a concern that interests us? Why or why not?

When we critique treatment we can ask: are all of the signature elements there that we expected? Do they work together or do they compete? Does this particular assemblage address the original concern and satisfy our reasons for being concerned?

Once a work has been subjected to that sort of critique (plus the usual syntactic stuff) I think you've critted it pretty darn thoroughly.

I still think we'd need to address how we determine whether a genre signature is relevant in the first place. Does the gnere label on the cover change the way we read the text?

I remember Samuel Delany talking in an interview (in the 70ies or 80ies; I wish I still had the reference, but that's buried in a library far away from where I'm now) about how to classify Kafka's Metamorphosis. He pretty much demonstrated two different readings of the same text, one of which resulted in fantasy, the other in science fiction. The difference resided in the questions you brought to the text, not in the text itself.

So, I guess what I'm ultimately wondering is: Is there a text-independent component to deciding what genre a given text is?

That's a valid choice for writing, but it dodges any sense of discipline when you're critting genre works.

Fair enough.

I'm a fan of China Miéville's myself - exactly because of the playfulness you mention. But his fiction reads best (I feel) if you imagine Miéville reading it to you. He's teasing you. You know he wants to tease you, and if you're a genre-geek, you may well enjoy the teasing. (Miéville's exactly the kind of fellow who'd enjoy taking one of my signatures, twisting the hell out of it and handing it back.)

But exactly for that reason if you had to pick a domain of concern for his fiction you might quite understandably pick something like "the reader's attitude to genre". (As you mention later, it is very genre-political). It doesn't compare to F/SF "classic" genre works on criteria of either setting or plot, and in my opinion it doesn't compare on domain of concern either. I class it in a separate genre, just as you can class dadaist or surrealist literatures as their own genres.

I'll have to think that through; I'm getting dizzy here. I'm now reminded of Brecht's "epic theatre", but instead of sensory deprevation, there's sensory overload. Instead of getting rid of ornament, it's showing them off. I'm also wondering whether there isn't an underlying concern of "unrooting ideology"? Is it a coincidence that these sort of meta-genre theory goes hand in hand with socialist ciriticism?

Speaking of Miéville, I read a quote attributed to him in which Tolkien was called "a wen on the arse of fantasy literature". I can't help but enjoy such a statement.

I wouldn't go that far, but I find Tolkien's fantasy screamingly sentimental (as indeed is the fantasy of his buddy CS Lewis). There are many successors who were able to bring smarts as well as feeling to fantasy - among which I'd have to include Moorcock, Vance, Zelazny, Wolfe and Le Guin. (And there are plenty of romantacists who are trying to drag fantasy back to sheer sentimentality again - but I'll rant on that another day.)

Hehe.

But don't blame my signature that writing clusters around notional centres of mass. I didn't cause that, and I neither advocate it nor lament it; I'm merely observing that it does.

What I'm wondering is how much "genre", viewed like that, is basically a set of self-fulfilling prophecy. You get what you expect, and if you don't get it, it could have been better.

Culturally we have absorbed certain principles of rationality, including these:

[snip]

These sorts of principles are used in science (and math, engineering and philosophy). They also deeply underpin SF and mystery/suspense stories. Very few stories in these genres break any of these principles -- and if they do, it beomes a mystery to be puzzled and explained away.

This last sentence pretty much addresses Lem, or Lafferty, I feel. (Notice how I'm beginning to think more than type? Good for me, but for the thread?

)

However, in romance, fantasy and horror genres, these principles are either reversed, replaced or perverted (not all of them or all the time, but every romance, fantasy or horror story I can think of messes with at least some of these principles).

Pern breaks or ignores several of these principles, and never acknowledges this fact, or explains why.

From memory, I'd argue for the "ignore" part (but it's been years since I read them), which may be where we differ. You seem to take absence of rationality as an argument against SF, whereas I'd take presence of rationality as an argument for SF. (I'm notorious for letting unmarked stuff stand without a default.)

Genre is a cultural term. There's no reason that it must apply to literature from outside a culture.

That said, every culture seems to have fantasy. But not every culture has SF, romance or suspense as we understand such things.

I probably didn't create that - at least, not from the context of lit outside our broad cultural confines. If we can't fully appreciate foreign lit from our own cultural context, then there's no reason to imagine that genre categorisations should be any easier.

And yet a setting-approach (or a trope-approach, or a plot-approach) may help with discussing cultural differences within a genre framework.

Yes, but I decline to take responsibility for being unable to classify Manga according to Western genres.

Tsk. Dodging responsibility. Those wily genre theorists.

If you're thinking about different concerns and different treatments (and if Wells was), then we might be on the same page here.

Well, the traditional notion is that the "novel" is a rational enquire into the "here and now", whereas the romance is a fanciful venture into the "wherever, but not here". It may be very British distinction. For Wells it must have been an oxymoron: science would have looked incompatible with "romance".

Ha! Agreed! I'd forgotten that! On the one hand, it's obsessed with technological detail. On the other hand, it uses none of that detail to drive through its major thematic points. (And as an experiment, replace the Firemen with orcs, and the books with scrolls, and see how easily it becomes an epic fantasy tale.)

I think I may have been expressing myself in your terms concerning Fahrenheit without noticing. You're creeping in sideways.

Ruv Draba · Jan 9, 2008

Dawnstorm said:
How do we frame this claim: "A horror story is scary." Above it seems to function as a corrective to the formulated signature. Does the sentence fall under concern? Execution? Is it an extra-thereotical assumption, taken for granted?

The problem I'm having right now is that I can't see myself taking the same approach to determine whether a story belongs to a story, and then also to determine whether it works within a genre.

Ah, let me fill in a critical bit of the reasoning which I keep overlooking.

I'm asserting that over time, a culture's concerns tend to cluster, and writers find tight, effective, synergistic aesthetics and methods for dealing with each cluster of concerns. Initially, a "genre" is just visible in the concern itself - which you can find salted in tropes of setting, plot, character. But over time, as treatment methods shake out, a genre gets characteristic treatments too -- these are especially visible in the commonality in its classics.

Those treatments aren't accidental or arbitrary. They're a reflection on how our culture thinks and reasons about particular concerns. If we're writing in an area of established concern, we ignore these lessons learned at our own risk.

Epistemologically, I don't care what genre a piece of literature "is". That's arbitrary; we can classify lit however we like.

But practically I need to know how best to crit it - especially, how to enhance its impact, crystallise its message, deliver the strongest, most focused punch I can for the idea. The knowledge-base for that is grounded in our cultural experience of how other authors have dealt with similar concerns - and what's had the greatest impact.

And (I assert) some of that knowledge can be condensed into genre signatures that help you recognise that a piece isn't simply writing about a genre concern - it's doing so using genre methods -- and then help give you some advice on how to improve it.

Example:

As I recall it, Bradbury's Farenheit 451 offers a passionate and largely symbolic argument for the importance of literature. Book-stores everywhere park it on SF shelves, and they're welcome to do that; I don't care. (I normally buy books by author, not genre labels anyway.)

But if you were in Bradbury's crit group when he subbed this novel, and you had some genre signatures handy, it might help you make the following sorts of comments (mild spoiler warning):

Ruv's retrospective advice to Bradbury on Farenheit 451 (pls remind me to invoice him for it!)
Ray, it feels like you're straddling two horses here, and they're pulling in different directions. On the one hand, this story starts off as rational social commentary: what would society be like if we didn't have books? It looks like it sets out to make the case that fictional literature has more perceptual power than (say) the oral tradition found in TV and cinema, and that without this power, society risks losing something critical. So far so good.

But it never really makes that case. Your MC starts off believing that novels are evil - so presumably he already accepts the premise that they're powerful (powerless things don't scare us). Moreover, he flips attitude on books on whim and by the time he finds a subculture who agrees with him, they look like a bunch of escapist sentimentalists - they have no economic or social impact at all. Your story starts rationally and ends sentimentally - without ever justifying why it does that. I think your through-lines are breaking in some places, and your themes are falling over.

If you want to make the rational case, I think you may need to do one of two things: 1) either show society in melt-down for lack of literature and make your MC a pig-ignorant champion of society's destruction. Make it a tragedy. Write a 1984 or a Brave New World, Bradbury-style; or 2) Show how having learned to appreciate literature, the MC develops perceptions not available to society, and can use those to solve social problems. Make him a visionary hero; a revolutionary. Show him being effective with what he knows.

Or if you don't want to make the rational case but just the sentimental or symbolic case, why not tell this as a fairy tale? Make the books come alive. Have them speak of their passions and dreams for us. Make them become our mentors and guides physically as well as figuratively. Show them honouring the great labours it took to create them. Make them quirky, interesting, playful. Show just how much care and insight is killed whenever a book is burned, and show just how much ignorant brutality this requires. Make us want to make friends with these wonderful creatures, to defend and protect and cherish them. You almost, almost did this at the end of your novel - but you presented your "living books" as passive, introverted, rote-driven pedants, not thinkers, visionaries and advocates. In the final analysis, you failed to show why they had any social value.

(Disclaimer: In fairness to Ray, Farenheit 451 first appeared in 1951. It would have been very hard to work out SF/Fantasy signatures back then - they were still being pioneered! Hindsight makes sages of us all.)

The problem I'm having right now is that I can't see myself taking the same approach to determine whether a story belongs to a [genre], and then also to determine whether it works within a genre.

Sometimes writers see themselves as entertainers. For them, genre may be a target: "I want to write good space opera; I'm just not sure how to do it". For such writers a genre signature helps you design something space-operatic and gives you a frame for critiquing whether it's a good example of the genre, and how it might become a more effective example.

Sometimes writers seem themselves as architects of thought. When they write genre it's because the genre offers them a convenient toolkit for developing and exposing an idea. For them, a genre signature lets them quickly determine if a particular genre is the right vehicle. It also helps them play with the edges of genre - adding or subtracting elements, or applying them in new ways to produce something different.

Sometimes writers see themselves as adventurers. They let their imagination and sense of fun drive the story along, and then may have to come back and refocus it. For such writers, it might be handy to have some genre signatures to compare to. "Oh wow - this is almost a detective story! If I just added this, and shifted that, I could sell it to a mystery market."

I'm not advocating that signatures should be used in a particular way. All I'm advocating is that if you're flirting with genre for any reason, you should know what the classics of the genre have in common. A "signature" (once it's perfected) is meant to just be a convenient distillation of that.

On the other hand, I could compare various fits. So, if people market Star Wars as SF, but it doesn't measure up to what you expect from SF, the observation that Star Wars measures up better to what you expect from fantasy may save your viewing pleasure.

I don't know that genre signatures have anything to offer readers who don't also aspire to write or critique. If you're browsing books on a shelf, you probably don't need to think about through-lines. Author, coupled with setting, plot and character are sufficient to peg whether you're likely to enjoy a work.

I still think we'd need to address how we determine whether a genre signature is relevant in the first place. Does the genre label on the cover change the way we read the text?

Probably not, unless you're in a hurry in an airport bookstore. :tongue

Genre signatures are for writers and critics - not your average punter. My first reading of Farenheit 451 was in my teens. I picked it up from my High School library shelf because I recognised Bradbury's name from various F&SF anthologies. My High School arranged its shelves by author, but would put coloured stickers on the spines to indicate genre. F/SF got a yellow sticker.

We'd started to study novels in class, so I already knew that sometimes stories weren't just to entertain - they could also provoke, persuade or inform.

I recall being entranced by Bradbury's idea that firemen could burn books, but feeling vaguely cheated by the ending. It made me feel good - it's a moderately happy ending - but intellectually it bothered me: so what's the point?

A knowledge of through-lines and genre signatures wouldn't have helped me feel any better about that work as a reader: after all, I'd already spent the time to read it, hadn't I? And having been poked to think about the merit of novels, I could form my own view on that - as Bradbury probably wanted.

But as a writer I can now say: "Well, this is probably what Bradbury was trying to do here, and this is how he might have done it better."

I remember Samuel Delany talking in an interview (in the 70ies or 80ies; I wish I still had the reference, but that's buried in a library far away from where I'm now) about how to classify Kafka's Metamorphosis. He pretty much demonstrated two different readings of the same text, one of which resulted in fantasy, the other in science fiction. The difference resided in the questions you brought to the text, not in the text itself.

In my third year of high school, (SF geek that I was) I once took the position that Picnic at Hanging Rock is really a SF story -- it's just that the alien abduction which had obviously occurred in the plot, is never revealed.

I haven't read Delany's analysis of The Metamorphosis, but I know from personal experience that rational dissection of stories about emotions and relationships can produce some very bizarre but apparently self-consistent results.

Samsa's transformation to insect has a purely symbolic role in the story, and doesn't admit much rational investigation. To me, that screams "fantasy" - but that doesn't stop a rationalist from trying to make sense of it in SF terms.

What I'm wondering is how much "genre", viewed like that, is basically a set of self-fulfilling prophecy. You get what you expect, and if you don't get it, it could have been better.

This doesn't happen if you commit to being an advocate for the author and the work - not for the genre, the market or the particular critical tools you use.

a setting-approach (or a trope-approach, or a plot-approach) may help with discussing cultural differences within a genre framework.

I agree. That's where our appreciation of genres begins.

Well, the traditional notion is that the "novel" is a rational enquire into the "here and now", whereas the romance is a fanciful venture into the "wherever, but not here". It may be very British distinction.

It looks like one of those convenient modernistic simplifications to me. "There's reality, and then there's fluff."

Novels can inform, provoke, persuade and entertain, and that's been true since the 18th century at least. When you're informing, you need something like realism, naturalism or some clever metaphor to deliver your info. When you're provoking, you need cognitive dissonance (logical, symbolic, emotional) to bug your reader with. When you're persuading you need to build logical, symbolic or emotional tension against your point, then discharge it. And when you're entertaining, you need surprise. All of those techniques have been in novels for at least two centuries.

Since novels can do more than one thing, you're free to mix these techniques and balance them. For this reason, I think Wells' analysis is quite superficial - and maybe even outright wrong.

I think I may have been expressing myself in your terms concerning Fahrenheit without noticing. You're creeping in sideways.

i'm in ur base, killin ur d00dz. :hat:

Ruv Draba · Jan 9, 2008

(Unrelenting, the dawg continues to worry at the half-buried bone)

Dawnstorm said:
I realise that. I still maintain that if I write a novel about cancer-research (well-researched) and present it rationally, it wouldn't be science fiction, although it might appeal to the same demographic. I do realise how dodgy this is: the character finds a cure near the end --> SF; the character doesn't --> not SF. It's not especially satisfying. But I need to do this, as your signature approach presents me with - so far - insurmountable hermeneutic problems.

Let's forget my signature as a recognition tool for a minute. Instead, let me try and design a cancer-research story as something that we'd both be happy to recognise as SF. Let me further do it without making it a futuristic setting. And let me use my SF signature as a tool to help focus and assist design - so that I don't stray into technothriller or "patent suspense" fiction (does such a thing exist?)

(What follows is just my own design process. It'll be riddled with assumptions and beliefs that I'm not going to defend here. Happy to discuss them elsewhere though.)

I want to write a SF story about cancer research. My signature tells me that I'll be concerned with the technology of cancer (e.g. how and why cancer occurs, and what we can do about it), but I also need to think about this from a people perspective. To reach my target audience, I need to think about why they'd care and how they presently appreciate the disease. Further, to get published in my target market (Dawnstorm's Bumper Biotechnology Biannual), I need to use a fairly contemporary setting.

Cancer as a scientific study: (I didn't research specifically for this exercise; it's just what I think I know about cancer. Source: random dimly-remembered readings). I've underlined key thoughts that might be useful for my story.

Cancers occur when cellular replication gets confused and cells mutate. Cancerous cells can replicate without bound, but lose their original function. Our bodies aren't terribly good at producing immunity to our own cells, so once cancers start it often requires external intervention to stop them.

Cancers are bad for us because they can interfere with the function of critical organs and systems. They do this by obstructing or pressing on organs, by depriving them of nutrients, and by creating lesions or other nasty effects that make us vulnerable to disease.

Cancers tend to occur more as we age, and that's partly because of increased exposure to mutagens - but it may also be due ageing effects themselves. Our cells get worse at replication as we age. Our organs and immuno-systems also get weaker, more vulnerable and less effective.

Cancers can actually take a long time to become dangerous to us - or even be detectable. The doubling time of breast cancer cells means that women can have breast cancer for 8-10 years before it's even detected. In prostate cancer, more men die with prostate cancer than from it because it appears so late in life and (in many cases) has a slow doubling time.

Environment plays a factor in cancer risk, and heredity does too. But even if you controlled both these things, I don't believe you would eradicate cancer in the same way that you can eradicate (say) polio.

Cancer from a people perspective: (Source: my personal perceptions as a social observer). Again, key thoughts underlined.

Cancer is scary to us because it's our own body being either incompetent or malicious. Unlike many diseases, it can appear spontaneously -- apparently without rhyme or reason. This makes us revert to mediaeval thinking that we've somehow done something immoral to deserve it.

When we suffer cancer, we sometimes like to imagine that it's for a purpose: to teach us to appreciate our lives more, or to live more cleanly, or think kinder thoughts.

Because cancers increase with age, they're also a symbol to us of our inevitable age and decrepitude. There are many tragic cases where young people suffer cancers but it's easy for our society to dismiss those as "congenital weakness" or signs of parental neglect. But when we think of cancer in ourselves, we think of it appearing in our declining years.

Because cancer operates against us from the inside, it's easy to think of it as a form of cellular terrorism. It looks just like terrorism looks: senseless, malicious, abrupt, pernicious and destructive.

This gives me a bunch of ideas for potential cancer stories. By picking ideas from each of the science and people elements and joining them, I might try and write about any of the following:

A "cure" for cancer that just protects critical organs, allowing the cancer to continue to grow unabated
A society that tries to eradicate cancer by controlling environment and heredity - but at what cost?
An inexpensive cure for cancer that is also (inadvertantly) a cure for ageing too
A clinical method of accelerating cancer doubling that inadvertantly becomes a terrorist weapon
A "proven" link between human immorality and cancer - but the proof is ambiguous
A religion or ideology that promotes inocculation with cancer to improve appreciation of life

These aren't stories - they're just story ideas. All of these have "science and people" elements as per my SF signature. All of them lend themselves immediately to SF treatment in a contemporaneous setting - you just need to work out how to tell it. (I can expand one as a further exercise if there's interest.) Only two of them (#3, #4) look to me like they might become a technothriller story - and I think you could write them either way. Focus on individual consumer/victim perspective and you'd get SF. Focus on social order and disruption and make a mystery of it and you'd get technothriller.

#6 could make a fine detective story, but you could write it as SF too. Again, it depends on whether you focus on the consumer/victim or social order/justice angle.

#1, #5, #6 could make good horror stories, if you emphasise the perversity of the idea -- and find a way to seduce/engulf a main character in the perversity so that it's helpless and out of control. But you'd be working the symbolic/emotional side of things more heavily than for a SF, technothriller or detective story.

What I think I've demonstrated here is that if you take an interesting science topic and join it (as per my signature) with a people angle - focusing particularly on the consumer/victim side... and then give it a rational treatment, you can get a quite decent SF story - maybe not a Nebula-winner, but workable. Not only that, but the amount of speculative invention required is tiny. You don't have to invent space-ships, ray-guns or new species to write good SF: just a simple coupling of ideas that are already in our world.

This article took me 30 mins to write. But if you know your domain reasonably well (i.e., you have reasonable casual readings about science, and make social observations as a background professional activity), you can do it on a notepad in five. Speaking personally, if I'd tried to think up a cancer story without a SF genre signature to help, I'd almost certainly have thought up either a weepy or a technothriller. (And even more likely, I wouldn't have tried in the first place.)

My conclusion: genre signatures help us write good genre by helping us focus on what works, and how best to reveal it.

Dawnstorm · Jan 10, 2008

Ruv Draba said:
Ah, let me fill in a critical bit of the reasoning which I keep overlooking.

I'm asserting that over time, a culture's concerns tend to cluster, and writers find tight, effective, synergistic aesthetics and methods for dealing with each cluster of concerns. Initially, a "genre" is just visible in the concern itself - which you can find salted in tropes of setting, plot, character. But over time, as treatment methods shake out, a genre gets characteristic treatments too -- these are especially visible in the commonality in its classics.

Those treatments aren't accidental or arbitrary. They're a reflection on how our culture thinks and reasons about particular concerns.

What I take from this (correct me if I'm wrong):

1. Genre is culturally specific. You could colour-code a map for genre and ask why SF thrived in, say, America, Britain, and Eastern Europe, but not so much in, say, Italy (despite Leonardo DaVinci et al.).

2. Talking about a book in terms of genre, then, means locating in a social context, and viewing it as a response to a specific set of circumstance.

3. Talking about a book in terms of genre, is also talking about it in terms of a literary tradition. [assumption]This is significant because the way literary production worked out in a socio-economic context is not inevitable. The tradition builds up expectation in writers, readers and critics alike. You're writing to a millieu; you can't start over - you and your audience are tainted by what has come before.[/assumption]

4. Rather than a genre-approach that's based on a formalism, the signature-approach assumes a shared context between story and criticism, writer and critic, such that, in the spirit of pragmaticism, we can rely on intuition to make the decision whether the story is at fault or the signature needs updating. That is because the concerns that inform the genre also inform your daily life. This would be why you can say:

If we're writing in an area of established concern, we ignore these lessons learned at our own risk.

Epistemologically, I don't care what genre a piece of literature "is". That's arbitrary; we can classify lit however we like.

That's interesting because most of the literature about SF (I haven't read much about genre criticism as such) never gets beyond trying to establish what SF even is. (This may be because of a lack of distance: the genrefication isn't finished yet; but I'm not sure.)

This brings me back to an earlier post: if, epistemologically, you don't care what genre a piece of literature "is", than what did you mean by your claim that "Kew Gardens" (Woolf) is not genre?

Mind you, I like the approach. Both your critique of Fahrenheit and your cancer-story-improvisation are very interesting demonstrations of application. I don't have the time to go into that indepth (the cancer-post took you half an hour? Would have taken me one and a half. I'm slow.), so you'll have to make do with a couple of ad-hoc comments:

- What if I read Fahrenheit as a book about stigma, and our protagonist is a book-fetishist in denial? Is this incompatible with a genre approach?

- What if I use the cancer-research-process rather than cancer itself as the spring board? The real-life context that goes into hypothesis creation, statistic modelling etc. Correlating the ostentive objectivity of science with private-life events? This would certainly a concern of science and people, and you could well portray it quite rationally, never losing sight of the theme. Would such a story be plyable to the approach?

I'm not advocating that signatures should be used in a particular way. All I'm advocating is that if you're flirting with genre for any reason, you should know what the classics of the genre have in common. A "signature" (once it's perfected) is meant to just be a convenient distillation of that.

Yup, it's a tool to be used.

I don't know that genre signatures have anything to offer readers who don't also aspire to write or critique. If you're browsing books on a shelf, you probably don't need to think about through-lines. Author, coupled with setting, plot and character are sufficient to peg whether you're likely to enjoy a work.

It may point a reader to what they've missed and give them a better approach to the text. Criticism at university has occasionally helped me appreciate a book more. I may have gotten better at writing, too, but that's primarily a function of becoming a better reader. (Even if I crit a story online, I view it primarily as an exercise in learning to read. In other words, my staple approach is preserve what's on the page as much as possible. Which is - of course - rather vague.)

Probably not, unless you're in a hurry in an airport bookstore.

I can't help thinking that expectations change how I approach the book in the first place. And genre contributes to expectations.

I remember a friend opening my eyes to Wallace & Grommit. I think what had happened was that - because of the clay - I associated these with some type of annoying five-minute-films I saw as a kid, and that element made the clay stuff prominent. I just found the animation ugly. I literally couldn't watch it. I still don't like the way it looks, but I learned to focus on expressivity. Now, the friend was studying - how to translate this (I'm Austrian, with German being my mother tongue) - to be a teacher and her subject was "art": painting, drawing, sculpting. But it's not a theoretical subject; it's practical. Kids get to paint, draw, sculpt in school, and she's been learning to hold this class. Well, she liked Wallace & Grommit.

So what happened was that I re-contextualised the animation with what I knew about her tastes. What a world of a difference it made. I can still bring myself to dislike Wallace & Grommit, because the things I disliked (basically the animation-style aesthetics) are still there, and I still don't like them.

Now this may just be a case of breaking prejudice, but I don't think so. I think different approaches can literally change what you perceive. Selective intention, interpretation.

It's from such a perspective that I look at genre. But that's rather hard to explain, and it doesn't make 100 % sense to me even as I type it.

In my third year of high school, (SF geek that I was) I once took the position that Picnic at Hanging Rock is really a SF story -- it's just that the alien abduction which had obviously occurred in the plot, is never revealed.

Is that the one where a schoolgirl disappears? Peter Weir made a film of it?

I haven't read Delany's analysis of The Metamorphosis, but I know from personal experience that rational dissection of stories about emotions and relationships can produce some very bizarre but apparently self-consistent results.

Samsa's transformation to insect has a purely symbolic role in the story, and doesn't admit much rational investigation. To me, that screams "fantasy" - but that doesn't stop a rationalist from trying to make sense of it in SF terms.

I don't remember much of it, and - considering that it was a pre-internet interview, I think - it wouldn't have been too elaborate (probably no more than a paragraph for two approaches).

I actually remember trying out both readings, and they did work. (Both readings, though, might have been besides the point according to the through-line model. I really wish I could remember it better.)

This doesn't happen if you commit to being an advocate for the author and the work - not for the genre, the market or the particular critical tools you use.

Probably not.

It looks like one of those convenient modernistic simplifications to me. "There's reality, and then there's fluff."

That's because I've always thought it was a simplification. Which probably means I never understood it properly. And what I did understand I simplified.

Anyway, it's not a modernistic concept. I'm not sure how far back the distinction goes. But I do know that Sidney's Arcadia was referred to as a pastoral romance, and that was 1590.

Novels can inform, provoke, persuade and entertain, and that's been true since the 18th century at least. When you're informing, you need something like realism, naturalism or some clever metaphor to deliver your info. When you're provoking, you need cognitive dissonance (logical, symbolic, emotional) to bug your reader with. When you're persuading you need to build logical, symbolic or emotional tension against your point, then discharge it. And when you're entertaining, you need surprise. All of those techniques have been in novels for at least two centuries.

Since novels can do more than one thing, you're free to mix these techniques and balance them. For this reason, I think Wells' analysis is quite superficial - and maybe even outright wrong.

I don't recall what Wells himself said about this. He wasn't a genre theorist. My guess is he just used a term that made sense to him. The "oxymoron" part was purely speculation on my part, and now that think on it, it's probably wrong. If you're writing about time-machines and invisible men, you're writing romances. Wells may not have reflected much on that. From Wells' point of view (the way terminology was used back then) it was probably not a remarkable term.

Anyway, as you can see, I'm not an expert on the way Brits used the terms outside of criticism in the early 1900s. Neither am I an expert on the difference between "novel" and "romance" in criticism. It's quite complex and contains a lot of marketing-stuff that includes biographies ("personal histories") and histories ("public histories") and "romances". The novel as the genre category that's pretty much taken over all longer prose didn't establish itself until the 18th century, I think. In the 19th Century, when Sir Walter Scott published Ivanhoe and called it a romance the distinction was clearly a literary one. It's not a novel; it's a romance.

It seems to me that taking for granted that there's a difference between Fantasy and SF has much in common with making a distinction between novels and romances. (SF:Fantasy = Novel:Romance; I doubt that anyone forced to make the analogy would reverse this. I don't doubt that plenty would resist making the analogy in the first place.)

In the end it comes down to "What is plausible?" So, whether you're arguing "really happened vs. ivented", or "realist vs. fanciful", or "rational vs. sentimental", I keep having the same, hard-to-articulate problem, and it's part hermeneutic and part epistemological. How do we establish the difference?

The current rationalist diversion tactics would probably "brain scans" (there! unravel the the meta-claims in that one. I'm dizzy now. :e2hammer:

)

Ruv Draba · Jan 10, 2008

Dawnstorm said:
What I take from this (correct me if I'm wrong):
1. Genre is culturally specific. You could colour-code a map for genre and ask why SF thrived in, say, America, Britain, and Eastern Europe, but not so much in, say, Italy (despite Leonardo DaVinci et al.).

Yes.

Concerns are likely to span cultures, because concerns probably arise from comparable social circumstances, basic human needs, and continuing change. Every culture I know of has tales of love and spooky tales, and tales of brave adventure under adverse circumstance, tales of people finding wonderous tools etc... we're concerned about similar things.

The treatments of those concerns can differ markedly though. For instance, many Japanese stories link technology with social order; Japanese stories also love taking fantastical departures with technology, and personifying it (which we only see in a few non-Japanese subgenres like Cyberpunk).

2. Talking about a book in terms of genre, then, means locating in a social context, and viewing it as a response to a specific set of circumstance.

Yes. I call these "concerns" -- they're more a response to recurrent circumstances than to a one-off event. We'll be concerned about love. We'll always tell stories about justice and social order. And while ever our technologies are changing, we're going to worry about that.

It's when we start finding common ways to tell tales about our concerns that I think genre appears.

3. Talking about a book in terms of genre, is also talking about it in terms of a literary tradition. [assumption]This is significant because the way literary production worked out in a socio-economic context is not inevitable. The tradition builds up expectation in writers, readers and critics alike. You're writing to a millieu; you can't start over - you and your audience are tainted by what has come before.[/assumption]

Yes again, but it's a bit subtle.

JBI argued earlier that genre proceeds by copying. While that's true, it can also develop independently in many respects and still result in a quite coherent body of work.

For any culture I believe there are "sweet spots" of literary craft -- ways to break and tell a story that have near instant impact and recognition because of our common cultural context. That includes a language of symbols, but it also includes ways to handle through-lines, say, that suit the cultural values and expectations. Different concerns lend themselves to different treatments in a culture.

Authors can find these "sweet spots" independently because they reside in the values of the culture. Once they're proven, other authors will use them of course. So a literary tradition builds. But it's not an arbitrary tradition born of blindly imitating and random chance. It's actually a reflection of how the culture thinks, values and appreciates its concerns.

It's also true that literature changes its culture. But I don't believe that a culture changes overnight just so it can appreciate the literature it has. Iinstead I think that some stories become popular fairly quickly - sometimes for quite superficial reasons - then work a slower, more long-lasting change as people think about them more. I'd put stories like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Stoker's Dracula, HG Wells' The War of the Worlds, Orwell's 1984, Heller's Catch-22 in this category. They have instant appeal, but raise some profound questions for generations to ponder.

4. Rather than a genre-approach that's based on a formalism, the signature-approach assumes a shared context between story and criticism, writer and critic, such that, in the spirit of pragmaticism, we can rely on intuition to make the decision whether the story is at fault or the signature needs updating. That is because the concerns that inform the genre also inform your daily life.

Yes! Fiction is a communication from the culture to itself. As members of our culture we can all ask questions like: Does the concern of this story concern us as a culture? If it does concern us, is the story effective in exploring those concerns in a way that hooks into the way this culture thinks? If it's not, is that because it's offering a new and better way to think about the concern, or is it simply that the author doesn't understand how to treat these concerns effectively in this culture?

A signature is simply a pragmatic code that shows "proven sweet spots" for exploring a concern in a culture. We can use it in design or not, as we choose. And signature recognition is a simplified way of assessing likely cultural recognition that the concern is being explored in a way we'll understand.

That's interesting because most of the literature about SF (I haven't read much about genre criticism as such) never gets beyond trying to establish what SF even is. (This may be because of a lack of distance: the genrefication isn't finished yet; but I'm not sure.)

I don't know whether genrefication can "finish". It can innovate and consolidate. Concerns will evolve, and that evolution may create need for new treatments -- and open opportunities to discover them.

The "is/isn't" question doesn't really say much about genre, but it does say a lot about what "tribe" we think we belong to.

People who love neither fantasy nor SF often see them as almost identical: "imaginative ramblings". People who love both frequently distinguish them according to the values they think these genres represent.

This brings me back to an earlier post: if, epistemologically, you don't care what genre a piece of literature "is", than what did you mean by your claim that "Kew Gardens" (Woolf) is not genre?

I meant that if a reader from our culture unfamiliar with Kew Gardens read it, they would very likely form the view that it was about anxiety, relationships and flowers, and nothing to do with science or science fiction. I made the pronouncement not to you, who've read it and therefore have your own views, but to others who may not. But I also made it in the blithe confidence that you wouldn't argue that it was SF. :tongue

What if I read Fahrenheit as a book about stigma, and our protagonist is a book-fetishist in denial? Is this incompatible with a genre approach?

A book can have deep personal relevance in addition to its cultural relevance. There might be a character or a situation, or an observation of such personal impact that it overshadows anything else we see in the book.

When that happens, we'll tend to view the book in very personal terms. We may forget that great lumps of our culture don't share those particular concerns. We may replace our cultural appreciation with personal appreciation. If we know we're doing that, we can try and shift our head and get perspective again.

But more broadly, our culture isn't unitary anyway. We have sub-cultures and counter-cultures and ratbags. The same thing can happen to groups that happen to individuals. They'll find some specific relevance to their factional concerns, and treat this as the primary concern of the story. I've seen people use Ursula K. Le Guin's The Disposessed as a political manifesto, for instance.

It's fine to do that, but it's also worthwhile to realise that across the culture as a whole, the perception may be different.

Back to SF: I hold that technology concerns are cultural concerns, and not simply a personal concern of mine, or a specific concern of any subculture I may belong to. So in putting together a SF signature, I have tried to faithfully represent the culture on this. Other members of the culture are welcome to disagree, of course. But the key to holding that discussion effectively is to first abandon any personal, subcultural or counter-cultural agendas we may hold. Cultures form because people can set aside their differences. To discuss matters at a cultural level, participants must do the same. (I mean this to apply to our hypothetical examples - this discussion itself is going fine, I think.)

What if I use the cancer-research-process rather than cancer itself as the spring board?

It might work, or it might not. I'd suggest that key to making a SF story of it is to work on the relevance of the process to people - especially from a consumer/victim story. So here's a quick attempt to break it down (without doing any additional research).

Process:
Cancer research takes a long time. There's theory and synthesis and laboratory testing and animal trials and clinical trials and eventually some treatment may come to the market. Even then, it's monitored.

Like a lot of medical research, cancer research works with populations and stats, rather than focusing on an individual and his condition. That can make it seem immensely inhuman to a desperate sufferer -- you're just a number. Researchers want the process to succeed -- they're not so concerned about how it goes for you.

Like many aggressive medical treatments, cancer treatments often have adverse effects. In other words: treatments sometimes make people worse, not better. On a statistical basis, the over-all population benefits, but some individuals are better off not having some treatments.

There are codes of ethics associated with medical research. Especially, a critical code is that of informed consent. You need to know and agree that you're part of an experiment. You need to be informed of what the adverse effects and risks might be. That said, human trials often use a double-blind mechanism whereby some participants are not given the treatment, and don't know that they're not given it. (I have a dim recollection that SF writer Greg Egan wrote a short on this)

People:
We have conflicting wants with medical research. We want it to be on the market quickly, and we want it to be absolutely safe.

The more desperate we are for relief and cures the more willing we are to take risks with our health. But we're often not capable of knowing if we're getting any better - especially if our condition is already deteriorating. Are we deteriorating slower or faster? We can't tell.

On a people side, placebo effects can be very powerful - especially with respect to our perception of symptoms, and our engagement to fighting disease. There's some research to show that antiplacebo effects can be powerful too.

Researchers are often desperate to see conclusive results. A commitment on a single avenue of research is fundamentally an act of faith - faith that it will yield good results, and that it will do so before some other approach solves the problem. Since research can take years of a scientist's life and cost millions of dollars, it's a matter of collective faith, not just individual faith.

Picking pairs from the technology and people perspectives again, this suggests the following sorts of ideas:

A researcher's clinical cancer trials are producing brilliant results - but only when he prays
A husband and wife who both suffer cancer take part in a double-blind human trial (I'm fairly sure that I've read one where twins with a heinous disease were put in the same position) - but who has the placebo?
A researcher with a strong line on a cancer cure can't get funding - and so decides on his own clinical trials
A researcher discovers that a company is using an antiplacebo effect to exaggerate trial results

#1 and #2 look made for SF. #3, #4 could be mystery, technothriller or perhaps SF with some effort.

In general, SF tends to prefer stories about tools and products rather than methods. Methods tend to lead us into the police/medical procedurals, mystery and detective stories. But still, it dug up a couple of decent SF ideas.

It may point a reader to what they've missed and give them a better approach to the text. Criticism at university has occasionally helped me appreciate a book more. I may have gotten better at writing, too, but that's primarily a function of becoming a better reader.

Heck yes! If you understand why stories work and don't, you write better. Reading is way faster than writing. It's often cheaper to learn from the mistakes of others than make your own.

I can't help thinking that expectations change how I approach the book in the first place. And genre contributes to expectations.

Some writers start off knowing that they want to write a genre piece, and trying to figure out what. Others want to run with an idea or explore a theme... they may use genre if it helps.

I do a bit of both. Often when I write for "fun" I'll pick a genre to write in. The fun arises from trying to innovate inside some structure - a bit like playing TheatreSports or a similar dramatic game where the "rules" are fixed but the content is free to vary.

At other times I'll have an idea or a perception I want to explore. At those times the idea comes first. I'll accept a genre constraint if I think it will help, but if it doesn't I'll work up a non-genre approach.

Dawnstorm said:
Now this may just be a case of breaking prejudice, but I don't think so. I think different approaches can literally change what you perceive. Selective intention, interpretation.

Living in Australia as I do, we try to find as many was as we can of laughing at English people. Since much of the humour of Wallace and Grommit arises from an English animator satirising Englishness, Australians appreciate it very much. The "ugliness" in the animation (bulging eyes, big teeth etc...) enhances our appreciation - not because English people have bulging eyes and big teeth, but because the startled, strained emotions caricature the character's inner conflicts.

But if you're not predisposed to laughing at satire on Englishness then it could easily look just like poor aesthetics. I think we're back to culture here.

Thinking of Kafka again, Europe has whole strains of fantasy that one hardly ever sees in the US, Britain or Australia. I believe that these do safely fall into an over-arching fantasy genre (I more than suspect that fantasy is a common human genre rather than simply being confined to one culture), but form subgenres of their own.

ColoradoGuy · Jan 10, 2008

I just want to say that I trust others are enjoying this discussion as much as I am. You two are having a dialogue in the best humanist tradition--reasoned, clear, calm. Too often posters don't really read what others are saying; you guys carefully respond to each other, and I appreciate that.

I wish I had something to add, but not being much of a genre reader myself, I don't. You two got any friends you could bring by?

Ruv Draba · Jan 10, 2008

Thanks!

ColoradoGuy said:
I just want to say that I trust others are enjoying this discussion as much as I am. You two are having a dialogue in the best humanist tradition--reasoned, clear, calm. Too often posters don't really read what others are saying; you guys carefully respond to each other, and I appreciate that.

Ah - music to my ears!

CG, I fled to the Cooler from a genre-specific forum (which I shall leave nameless) exactly because I couldn't have such conversations there. For one thing, there weren't enough people interested in critique theory to hold the discussion. For another, punters simply didn't have the right approach to kicking ideas around in a scholarly sort of fashion, and the moderation wasn't focused on ensuring that they did.

This conversation is a delight, and I'm grateful to Dawnstorm and JBI for both the quality and the erudition of their contributions. Much respect! :thankyou:

I also appreciate that you made this comment, CG. Moderation is mostly about interventions on bad behaviour. Mod encouragement for good behaviour goes a very long way toward building trust and good community.

I wish I had something to add, but not being much of a genre reader myself, I don't. You two got any friends you could bring by?

I wish! I have plenty of friends who write, and plenty of friends who like abstraction, but none in the intersection, and I don't know many folk at the Cooler just yet.

Dawnstorm · Jan 11, 2008

Ruv Draba said:
Concerns are likely to span cultures, because concerns probably arise from comparable social circumstances, basic human needs, and continuing change. Every culture I know of has tales of love and spooky tales, and tales of brave adventure under adverse circumstance, tales of people finding wonderous tools etc... we're concerned about similar things.

The treatments of those concerns can differ markedly though. For instance, many Japanese stories link technology with social order; Japanese stories also love taking fantastical departures with technology, and personifying it (which we only see in a few non-Japanese subgenres like Cyberpunk).

So, basically, concerns are the uniting factor (by type), while the treatments are the discriminating factors as far as culture is concerned. This may well explain why cross-cultural imitation often doesn't work out properly. For example, I found the Hollywood re-make of Ring to be rather fragmented: there's the story about the video and the story about the girl, but they don't come together, for me. I'd blame the different attitudes towards technology (and perhaps a not-so-strict differentiation between old and new tech; ray guns and swords, so to speak).

JBI argued earlier that genre proceeds by copying. While that's true, it can also develop independently in many respects and still result in a quite coherent body of work. [...]

Click to expand...

What I had in mind was an interpretative framework. Once you know something you can't un-know it. A favourite pastime of genre theorists is the game "spot the ancestor". For fantasy, the current mainstream sacrifices at the altar of Tolkien while the resistance marches with Peake on the banner. Very traditional. I wonder what happened to Howard, who was a very important ancestor in the eighties. You occasionally hear about Lieber and Dunsay. It's an identity game. And to the extent that you derive your genre identity from any given ancestor, the imitation becomes a deliberate move.

But there's something to be said about pervasive influence. Once deliberation fades, the question becomes what are you imitating? What set Tolkien apart from the fantasy of his contemporaries, I'd argue, was the appendix. Less the history stuff (which is still narritive), but more the language stuff. An etymology of Hobbit? A made up history for a made up word? World-building wasn't the same afterwards.

But Tolkien was a linguist. What this boils down to is: Writers have hobbies. Or: Scholars write fiction. You may have wanted to do something similar anyway, or Tolkien could have given you an idea. The point is that once you know that Tolkien has done it, you cannot do something similar innocently. Not anymore.

This is what "literary tradition" means. Classics can provide the model, but more often they're the image on the coat of arms we choose to bear (if we do at all).

It's also true that literature changes its culture. But I don't believe that a culture changes overnight just so it can appreciate the literature it has. Iinstead I think that some stories become popular fairly quickly - sometimes for quite superficial reasons - then work a slower, more long-lasting change as people think about them more. I'd put stories like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Stoker's Dracula, HG Wells' The War of the Worlds, Orwell's 1984, Heller's Catch-22 in this category. They have instant appeal, but raise some profound questions for generations to ponder.

Click to expand...

I have troubles thinking like that because literature is culture. The very fact that I can sit down and write fiction is culture. It's very hard to separate cause and effect. (In sociological suicide research, there's something called the "Werther effect" - after Göthe's epistolary novel that is said to have triggered suicides in a similar manner as it was described in the novel. You should see the discussion of the statistics involved. Cause, trigger, hidden variables...)

I don't know whether genrefication can "finish". It can innovate and consolidate. Concerns will evolve, and that evolution may create need for new treatments -- and open opportunities to discover them.

Click to expand...

Well, I don't think there's any teleological principle at work in genre, so "finished" may be a strong word. But genres fizzle out. How many pastoral poems are written today? It's easier to classify when you have it all before you.

The "is/isn't" question doesn't really say much about genre, but it does say a lot about what "tribe" we think we belong to. People who love neither fantasy nor SF often see them as almost identical: "imaginative ramblings". People who love both frequently distinguish them according to the values they think these genres represent.

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But if genre is cultural then tribal behaviour is at the heart of genre. The is/isn't debate is one of its motors. Especially when viewed from the PoV of writers and genre critics. (Even this discussion is part of that, but once I start to think like this...)

I meant that if a reader from our culture unfamiliar with Kew Gardens read it, they would very likely form the view that it was about anxiety, relationships and flowers, and nothing to do with science or science fiction. I made the pronouncement not to you, who've read it and therefore have your own views, but to others who may not. But I also made it in the blithe confidence that you wouldn't argue that it was SF.

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Ah, a misunderstanding. I thought this was a general statement, that "Kew Gardens" was a story of a type that somehow manages to be immune to genrefication. Which would have made me wonder what we're actually talking about. (For the record, I would have troubles placing the story within a genre at a moments notice, but I'm sure someone else has done that for me.)

A book can have deep personal relevance in addition to its cultural relevance. There might be a character or a situation, or an observation of such personal impact that it overshadows anything else we see in the book.

When that happens, we'll tend to view the book in very personal terms. We may forget that great lumps of our culture don't share those particular concerns. We may replace our cultural appreciation with personal appreciation. If we know we're doing that, we can try and shift our head and get perspective again.

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I'm still trying to work out how this is relevant to what I said and how what I said is relevant to your sample critique of Fahrenheit. I'll come back to this later, if I don't forget. I think the basic drive of my quip (it wasn't much more, really) was: if neither the sentimental nor the rational approach make for a good book, perhaps there's a different approach that makes for a more interesting read. This isn't primarily a genre question; but it is a question about when genre-expectations start to curb the enjoyment of the actual text on the actual page.

I'm not sure Mr Bradbury would appreciate my reading, but that's not my point.

But more broadly, our culture isn't unitary anyway. We have sub-cultures and counter-cultures and ratbags. The same thing can happen to groups that happen to individuals. They'll find some specific relevance to their factional concerns, and treat this as the primary concern of the story. I've seen people use Ursula K. Le Guin's The Disposessed as a political manifesto, for instance.

It's fine to do that, but it's also worthwhile to realise that across the culture as a whole, the perception may be different.

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I once read, and I wish I could recall where, that any reading is valid if they can make a case for it, but if we start to notice that the same critic applies the same reading to a diversity of texts, we're going to suspect it's not really about the texts at all. This doesn't make the reading invalid, but it has an impact on how we view the critic.

Back to SF: I hold that technology concerns are cultural concerns, and not simply a personal concern of mine, or a specific concern of any subculture I may belong to. So in putting together a SF signature, I have tried to faithfully represent the culture on this. Other members of the culture are welcome to disagree, of course. But the key to holding that discussion effectively is to first abandon any personal, subcultural or counter-cultural agendas we may hold. Cultures form because people can set aside their differences. To discuss matters at a cultural level, participants must do the same. (I mean this to apply to our hypothetical examples - this discussion itself is going fine, I think.)

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That's very difficult to talk about for me. For one thing, it raises questions of how institutionalised genre differs from the critical concept, and whether genre criticisism is part of the instutionalisation process or merely an interacting institution (much theorising happens in genre conventions; this discussion takes part on a board which has a genre sub-board, but since SF is really only the topic here because I'm not overly familiar with detective fiction, which you started on, it's not appropriate there, and since the drive is "academic" it does fit here, but... um... see?)

***

Out of time. I hope to be back later.

Colorado Guy said:

You two got any friends you could bring by?

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I wish. I'm training a rusted muscle here (talk about mixed metaphors). This discussion is very, very helpful to me. Thanks to RD for an excellent thread.

And thanks for the encouragement. In recent years I've pretty much devolved into a "rules? bah humbug" web presence. The crank on the sidelines.

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Dawnstorm · Jan 11, 2008

Ruv Draba said:
#1 and #2 look made for SF. #3, #4 could be mystery, technothriller or perhaps SF with some effort.

It's fascinating to watch you seed stories.

It's seeing the dividing lines between technothrillers and SF that causes me trouble, still. (Would be interesting to look at Michael Crichton in that respect; didn't read too much of him, so I can't really.) Remember that in my way of viewing thing, there is no conflict between mystery and SF because mystery primarily unwinds on plot, whereas SF inhabits setting. These are not separate. In one story we have both elements.

So if I frame the story of Galileo Galilei as a techno thriller, focussing on the telescope, then am I not automatically triggering "historical fiction"? For example, I'll be called on historical inaccuracies. It's a balancing act between making the actual events more - ahem - interesting, and getting the facts "right".

So what do we do then? Decide in favour of one or the other? Run two profiles and stare at them until they click?

Would this be similar to the story-within-arc idea you introduced with Dune? The same? If not what are the differences?

In general, SF tends to prefer stories about tools and products rather than methods. Methods tend to lead us into the police/medical procedurals, mystery and detective stories. But still, it dug up a couple of decent SF ideas.

Not sure. Example:

Would you say time-machine stories are about the change a time-machine brings?

Wells' Time Machine pretty much plays on the dystopian approach, but the time-machine itself is merely a framing device, like the arctic explorer in Frankenstein. It's a future history; a dystopia of the classical sort (unlike 1984, or Brave New World, we have the traveller who tells the tale), but displacing it through time rather than place (as he did in Moreau). The effect is historicity. Inviting the reader to reflect on how history happens. There's a story in the dark (with flashes given on the way to the future). This is very much a process, though the eye watching is moral, rather than disengaged (a scientific ideal).

Moorcock's Behold the Man on the other hand is pretty much all about the process. Karl Glogauer sets out in his time machine to prove that Jesus Christ is nothing more than a Jungian archetype. And succeeds in a way, though Jung's theory isn't proven at all (in a typical time-machine twist).

I find SF does look rationality into the eye on occasion, exposing how much logic relies on premises.

Heck yes! If you understand why stories work and don't, you write better. Reading is way faster than writing. It's often cheaper to learn from the mistakes of others than make your own.

Actually, I thught of learning from my reading mistakes. See what it is I'm taking for granted. I suppose it depends whether you use genre classification to counter or support your intuitions.

Some writers start off knowing that they want to write a genre piece, and trying to figure out what. Others want to run with an idea or explore a theme... they may use genre if it helps.

I do a bit of both. Often when I write for "fun" I'll pick a genre to write in. The fun arises from trying to innovate inside some structure - a bit like playing TheatreSports or a similar dramatic game where the "rules" are fixed but the content is free to vary.

At other times I'll have an idea or a perception I want to explore. At those times the idea comes first. I'll accept a genre constraint if I think it will help, but if it doesn't I'll work up a non-genre approach.

My current WiP has a mage and surgeon in a musueum staring at a dragon skeleton and wondering if it is a fake, and if it isn't if the beast could really have flown as the stories suggest. I call this project "fantasy", because it has magic, but this scene really sums up my attitude to the story. I have no idea how to properly frame this in genre terms.

I'm not looking forward to summarising the story.

Living in Australia as I do, we try to find as many was as we can of laughing at English people. Since much of the humour of Wallace and Grommit arises from an English animator satirising Englishness, Australians appreciate it very much. The "ugliness" in the animation (bulging eyes, big teeth etc...) enhances our appreciation - not because English people have bulging eyes and big teeth, but because the startled, strained emotions caricature the character's inner conflicts.

But if you're not predisposed to laughing at satire on Englishness then it could easily look just like poor aesthetics. I think we're back to culture here.

Quite possible. I have this working assumption that there's always something I'm missing. This is good for reading, but it doesn't give me much confidence when critiquing. Heh.

Thinking of Kafka again, Europe has whole strains of fantasy that one hardly ever sees in the US, Britain or Australia. I believe that these do safely fall into an over-arching fantasy genre (I more than suspect that fantasy is a common human genre rather than simply being confined to one culture), but form subgenres of their own.

Again, possible. When I did a superficial online research on the South American "Magic Realism" movement I was surprised to find how many of them cited Kafka as an ancestor (remember the "spot the ancestor" game?) I also remember viewing The Metamorphosis in a different light, after reading about shaman transformations and the correlating world-view. Re-contextualisations can be powerful. This is why I wonder whether genre isn't primarily a reception concept.

Fantasy in particular. I wonder whether there's something vacuous about images. We all have two legs and two arms, unlike beetles. This difference is pretty universal. But beyond that?

Btw, the Kafke + magic realism revelation came at a time where I was still wondering about someone else's comment about the Jewish cultural echoes in Kafka's work (I can immediately see the obsession with law and patriarchy and Word). None of these things had occurred to me before. Rather I was thinking about Kafka in terms of Austrian beaurocracy.

Fantasy does seem to have a vague formulaic nature, to be filled by readers.

Ruv Draba · Jan 11, 2008

Dawnstorm said:
So, basically, concerns are the uniting factor (by type), while the treatments are the discriminating factors as far as culture is concerned.

I think so.

This may well explain why cross-cultural imitation often doesn't work out properly. For example, I found the Hollywood re-make of Ring to be rather fragmented: there's the story about the video and the story about the girl, but they don't come together, for me.

This happens so often on Hollywood remakes of Asian and Euro cinema. They take the concern, the characters and the plot, then futz with the through-lines - typically to make American audiences cheer and feel good. In doing so, they lose a lot of the original perspective that made the story worth seeing.

What I had in mind was an interpretative framework. Once you know something you can't un-know it.

I noted that but didn't bite at it in my last post. If you chase that rabbit too far down the hole you may get a silly conclusion like this: writers, to be wholly original, shouldn't read (You probably know writers who believe this; I know a few). :Headbang:

Skilled critics can shift perspective to ignore literary influence; skilled writers can do this too. Coupled with good discipline, knowledge creates choices; it doesn't take them away.

But... lacking skill, writers often emulate treatments -- a bit like copying another writer's "voice". That would be fine if they had the right themes to justify the treatment they choose. Often they don't even have that.

Hypothetical example: Roy Batty in Blade Runner has a quite moving final scene. What makes it moving is not the setting, or the dialogue or the action - but that it culminates three key through-lines (Dekhard's hunt, the "are replicants people", and "replicants want to live" through-lines) - and brings together the themes associated with them (job vs compassion, function vs soul, duration of life vs quality of life). Graft that scene onto a story without those themes, and it will never have the same impact - no matter how many doves you add.

I wonder what happened to Howard, who was a very important ancestor in the eighties.

If you mean Robert E Howard, I have been reading him extensively lately along with one of his ancestors - the little known Harold Lamb - and Leiber, Zelazny, Moorcock, etc... because I could still see carpet by my bedside.

I must have read millions of words of Sword and Sorcery classics since around November last year, just trying to get a feel for what the S&S masters were doing and how. I put together a Sword and Sorcery subgenre signature which I might include if there's interest, or if it's relevant.

I reckon that S&S has fallen away in favour of a more relationship-driven/romantic fantasy in recent decades. The fantasy of the 90s and later typically has deeper characters, more complexity to relationships but often lacks the mood and punch of the S&S that preceded it.

What set Tolkien apart from the fantasy of his contemporaries, I'd argue, was the appendix.

There weren't many contemporaries, I suppose. CS Lewis was in Tolkien's coterie and the two are different in many respects.

Tolkien chose to write about social concerns; Lewis chose to write about moral and religious concerns. Tolkien used a prose saga sort of treatment; Lewis chose allegorical fables of a more Aesopian sort. Tolkien drew on pre-mediaeval pagan symbols; Lewis drew on mediaeval Christian symbols. Tolkien polished his language and settings to an unsurpassed level; Lewis honed his symbols.

Successors to each have borrowed bits of their approach, but few have made exactly the same design decisions that either Tolkien or Lewis did - or treated the same concerns.

The point is that once you know that Tolkien has done it, you cannot do something similar innocently. Not anymore.

Well, that's a strange choice of words! If the opposite of innocence is guilt, then of what offense is a writer guilty if some element of treatment resembles or derives from that of another author?

Reading, maybe.

literature is culture.

I like Holly Lisle's description of culture. Paraphrased, it's a community of people sharing common ground, born of a shared philosophy, adhering to specific goals, requiring the setting aside of differences, demanding a sacrifice from each member, so that the members can work together to propagate the whole beyond their own lifetimes.
That's a sociological view rather than an artistic one, but I believe that the arts have a key role in creating common language, reflecting on shared philosophy, propagating shared values, helping to identify and resolve differences, inspiring commitment and sacrifice, and creating a common vision for the culture. In short, they're critical. Lose the arts and the culture falls apart.

But at core I see the arts as reflective and communicative tools. I don't believe that literature is the culture any more than a photograph is the person or the fossil is the dinosaur. An individual piece of literature is a record of some thought. But of course if you have the whole corpus of a culture's literature then you (should) have a very deep and broad sociological record - depending on their literacy and who controls their publication.

But genres fizzle out. How many pastoral poems are written today? It's easier to classify when you have it all before you.

Actually, I think that plenty of pastoral poems are written still by amateur poets - they're the sort of poems you can find in family albums out in rural Australia for instance. It's just that few are sold. Pastoral concerns may have receded to the province of pastoralists and "tree change" retirees; in the main I think we've replaced pastoralism with environmentalism, and environmentalist poets may prefer other treatments.

Whether that's a "failure" of the pastoral poetry genre or a transmutation, I don't know. Vested interests might tell you one thing or the other. But surely a poem like Hopkins' Binsey Poplars (1879) still has resonance to the environmentalists today, even if they'd pick a different treatment:

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.

(Or could a modern rapper with environmental concerns quote a passage like that to a break-beat, largely unchanged?)

But if genre is cultural then tribal behaviour is at the heart of genre.

In a qualified way, I agree. We will of course form tribes around cultural artefacts and claim those symbols for our use. But appropriation signifies appreciation -- not necessarily critical understanding. And while subcultures should claim artefacts for their use, I argue against them claiming sole use.

I think the basic drive of my quip (it wasn't much more, really) was: if neither the sentimental nor the rational approach make for a good book, perhaps there's a different approach that makes for a more interesting read.

I tend to view exploration of a concern as being either rational or emotional or symbolic... I suppose that I could add "sensory" to that list too though I haven't thought about it deeply.

Rational: using the sorts of principles that underpinned the philosophy of ancient Greece, and which I mentioned some posts back

Emotional: using appeals to sentiment, our social instincts and desires, our personal drives and impulses

Symbolic: using existing associations in our mind (e.g. road signifies a journey, or balloon signifies imagination). Really, I think that this is just an indirect way to get our rational or emotional minds working

Sensory: I think it's there; I just haven't thought much about it.

I once read, and I wish I could recall where, that any reading is valid if they can make a case for it,

That may be true in the same sense that any scientific theory is valid if one can demonstrate it empirically.

But notwithstanding that, some theories are stronger than others - better predictors and easier to use. If I see only one through-line in a story, and you see mine plus three more - and can show them to me - then while my reading may be valid, I'd be silly to insist that it's as useful as yours.

And thanks for the encouragement. In recent years I've pretty much devolved into a "rules? bah humbug" web presence. The crank on the sidelines.

I'm presently basking in the free "esteem" I've received simply for signing up here (it says "Esteemed new member" above my avatar). But I dread that as I post more, my esteem shall wane - and with it my enthusiasm - until I become a "bored fanatic". :ROFL:

Ruv Draba · Jan 11, 2008

Dawnstorm said:
It's fascinating to watch you seed stories.

Was it Samuel Johnson who said Only a blockhead writes, except for money? Please remind me to invoice you.

if I frame the story of Galileo Galilei as a techno thriller, focussing on the telescope, then am I not automatically triggering "historical fiction"? For example, I'll be called on historical inaccuracies.

Not necessarily. Look at Neal Stephenson's Baroque cycle stories. They're historical, highly researched with great verisimilitude - focusing on people like Isaac Newton and Ada Lovelace.

They're also quite unfactual with respect to certain technologies and their social impacts, but unless you do thorough historical research, you can't see the seams.

Rather than call them historical fiction and then criticise Stephenson's failure to work with the precise technologies of the day our culture has done (I believe) the right thing and called it a new subgenre: Steampunk. It's historical SF with a focus on giving technology a strong historical aesthetic.

So what do we do then? Decide in favour of one or the other? Run two profiles and stare at them until they click?

In the case of Steampunk, it's clearly a subgenre in my view. It has the same signature as its "parent" genre SF, but has additional signature elements.

However, it's clearly not a subgenre of historical fiction, because it removes or weakens signature elements of historical fiction, rather than adding to them. (In historical fiction to mess with the setting is a no-no).

Would you say time-machine stories are about the change a time-machine brings?

Recall that I described SF concerns as being technology/frontier vs people concerns. In SF, Time-machine stories (time travel stories really) are normally about frontiers more than the technology itself.

When we travel into the future, the frontier we face is consequence. We bring our chickens home to roost sooner. When we travel into the past, the frontier is ignorance. We force ourselves to face just how little we knew - and perhaps force our past selves to swallow a large lump of insight.

Both fantasy and SF use the time-travel premise. SF tends to use it to make us face consequence; fantasy often uses it to help us escape consequence. In the same way, SF time-travel makes us confront ignorance, Fantasy frequently helps us deny or avoid ignorance.

I'm not suggesting here that SF is 'realistic' while Fantasy is 'escapist' - but the 'logical/rational' approach of SF often leads us to unpleasant and inevitable results, whereas the symbolic/emotional to fantasy can lead us anywhere (what is horror but twisted fantasy).

Wells' Time Machine pretty much plays on the dystopian approach, but the time-machine itself is merely a framing device, like the arctic explorer in Frankenstein.

Yes. Wells presents us with (as he sees it) a logical extrapolation of modern (for his day) trends - in other words, consequence.

By contrast, Julian May's Pleiocene Exiles series used that technique of McCaffrey's - start with a SFish premise (a logical extrapolation of existing technologies) and then construct fantasy stories inside it.

My current WiP has a mage and surgeon in a musueum staring at a dragon skeleton and wondering if it is a fake, and if it isn't if the beast could really have flown as the stories suggest. I call this project "fantasy", because it has magic, but this scene really sums up my attitude to the story. I have no idea how to properly frame this in genre terms.

If I were critting that story I'd likely offer the following suggestions and provocations (depending on what else is happening in the story):

For genre purposes, forget the term "dragon". It's a winged saurian that your characters may "call" dragon. It may or may not have abilities that people find hard to explain. It doesn't matter whether your characters call that "magic" or "an anomaly".

If the existence of this creature works a symbolic change on the major characters and/or their world then consider it fantasy, whether or not there's "magic" per se. Your work will likely be appreciated by the elegance of your symbolism and its relevance to moral, psychological and societal concerns -- these are fantasy appreciations. By all means use scientific terminology as much as you like, but write it as a fantasy and you'll get a better outcome.

If the existence of this creature leads your characters into a rational investigation that overturns some assumption, or reveals some logical but unexpected insight then consider it SF. Your work will likely be appreciated for its exploration of a frontier, the degree of surprise you bring in doing so and the elegant reasoning by which you brought that about. Use magical terms all you like in-story; it won't matter.

Of course, there might be other things happening in the story that would make me think differently.

I'm not looking forward to summarising the story.

If it's a short, you're welcome to PM it to me - or send me the outline. I'll send you a Ruv-approved log-line right back.

One benefit of having crisp genre signatures to work with is that you can zoom in on a clear log-line almost instantly - if it adheres to a signature.

Re-contextualisations can be powerful. This is why I wonder whether genre isn't primarily a reception concept.

If genre is a cultural construct then it's also a psychological construct. But since the author resides in some culture (I mean psychologically and sociologically rather than merely geographically) then it makes as much sense to talk about it at the writing end as the reading end.

Fantasy in particular. I wonder whether there's something vacuous about images. We all have two legs and two arms, unlike beetles. This difference is pretty universal. But beyond that?

I personally believe that fantasy is probably an artifact of dream-reasoning that we happen to apply in conscious life. The reason that fantasy is virtually ubiquitous to human cultures, I believe, is that we all dream. Even more interestingly, many fantasy symbols are either common across human cultures, or have recognisable cognates.

Fantasy does seem to have a vague formulaic nature, to be filled by readers.

The 'formula' in fantasy typically resides in its symbolic palette and its through-lines. Work from the middle of the palette - with symbols deeply rooted in our culture - and you get the fantasy of Tolkien, Lewis and many others. Work from the edges of the palette - twisting the symbols and ascribing new and unusual significance - and you get the fantasy of Lewis Caroll or Robert Holdstock.

In the through-lines you get classic formulae like the "hero's journey". That journey may or may not be embedded in objective plot - it may simply be a through-line.

For this reason, you can write any character or plot into fantasy, and put fantasy in any setting. It's the through-lines and the symbols that readers pay attention to - even when they don't necessarily think of things in that way.

Dawnstorm · Jan 11, 2008

Ruv Draba said:
I noted that but didn't bite at it in my last post. If you chase that rabbit too far down the hole you may get a silly conclusion like this: writers, to be wholly original, shouldn't read (You probably know writers who believe this; I know a few).

Chase further, and you'd have to decide as a toddler to spend your life in a deprivation tank. I've seen that sentiment, but can't think of a particular person who holds it. Personally, I think that's a misguided notion of what originality means, and an underestimation as to the number of places where you encounter "story".

The flipside is how terribly hard it is to fake an "unknown manuscript" from one of the classics.

Skilled critics can shift perspective to ignore literary influence; skilled writers can do this too. Coupled with good discipline, knowledge creates choices; it doesn't take them away.

Definitely. Every piece of knowledge of pre-existing creativity output is both restricting and enabling. The thing is: if you're aiming for ignorance in your chosen field of writing, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage by not being able to predict your readers response at all. (That's not to say that the ignorance approach can't produce interesting results. But it's a shot in the dark. <-- cliché)

If you mean Robert E Howard, I have been reading him extensively lately along with one of his ancestors - the little known Harold Lamb - and Leiber, Zelazny, Moorcock, etc... because I could still see carpet by my bedside.

Yes, him.

I must have read millions of words of Sword and Sorcery classics since around November last year, just trying to get a feel for what the S&S masters were doing and how. I put together a Sword and Sorcery subgenre signature which I might include if there's interest, or if it's relevant.

I reckon that S&S has fallen away in favour of a more relationship-driven/romantic fantasy in recent decades. The fantasy of the 90s and later typically has deeper characters, more complexity to relationships but often lacks the mood and punch of the S&S that preceded it.

I get the impression from what people say, but I'm not really up to date. I haven't read too much fantasy in the first place, and hardly any of the newer authors.

There weren't many contemporaries, I suppose. CS Lewis was in Tolkien's coterie and the two are different in many respects.

Tolkien chose to write about social concerns; Lewis chose to write about moral and religious concerns. Tolkien used a prose saga sort of treatment; Lewis chose allegorical fables of a more Aesopian sort. Tolkien drew on pre-mediaeval pagan symbols; Lewis drew on mediaeval Christian symbols. Tolkien polished his language and settings to an unsurpassed level; Lewis honed his symbols.

Successors to each have borrowed bits of their approach, but few have made exactly the same design decisions that either Tolkien or Lewis did - or treated the same concerns.

I wonder why I made that claim [that only the appendix sets Tolkien apart from his contemporaries]. I think it's an automated defense mechanism to the over-estimation of Tolkien's influence on the genre that's so rampant among his admirers.

I'd consider Peake a contemporary writer, for example. But even comparing the two is rather hard. I think I made a strange claim. *Shrug*

Well, that's a strange choice of words! If the opposite of innocence is guilt, then of what offense is a writer guilty if some element of treatment resembles or derives from that of another author?

Reading, maybe.

Hey, I used "tainted" before, and you didn't comment. :tongue

I used "innocent" as a synonym for "naive", here. For example, I found the fantasy elements in Harry Potter had a certain charm, because they were "untainted" by the larger genre. Rowlings style reminded me a lot more of those British boarding school stories (like A Little Princess). There was a comment that she didn't realise she was writing fantasy, which Pratchett made fun of. But I kind of see that, certainly in her earlier books.

But at core I see the arts as reflective and communicative tools. I don't believe that literature is the culture any more than a photograph is the person or the fossil is the dinosaur. An individual piece of literature is a record of some thought. But of course if you have the whole corpus of a culture's literature then you (should) have a very deep and broad sociological record - depending on their literacy and who controls their publication.

I'm not exactly sure what you thought I was saying. I do not suggest, of course, that the arts are all there is to culture. That would be silly. On the other hand I don't agree that literature:culture = photograph

erson.

Literature, whether it's written, read, or talked about is cultural activity, much like cooking a meal, visiting your neighbours, walking past strangers in the street instead of greeting them, and going to the toilet in your coffee break.

So rather than saying 1984 caused cultural changes, I'd say it was part of cultural changes. Triggering, preventing, reinforcing behaviour. But neither reading nor writing the book happened in a vacuum. I find it very hard to separate cause from effect here, to the point of chicken-egg dilemma.

Actually, I think that plenty of pastoral poems are written still by amateur poets - they're the sort of poems you can find in family albums out in rural Australia for instance. It's just that few are sold. Pastoral concerns may have receded to the province of pastoralists and "tree change" retirees; in the main I think we've replaced pastoralism with environmentalism, and environmentalist poets may prefer other treatments.

Interesting. I'm surprised that pastoral poetry comes from rural areas. The genre pretty much thrived on ignorance of manure, and an idealisation to the point of Elysium. Perhaps my definition's too narrow? I think I'm becoming confused as to how far cultural specifics go into the establishment of genre.

(Or could a modern rapper with environmental concerns quote a passage like that to a break-beat, largely unchanged?)

Heh, that could be interesting.

In a qualified way, I agree. We will of course form tribes around cultural artefacts and claim those symbols for our use. But appropriation signifies appreciation -- not necessarily critical understanding. And while subcultures should claim artefacts for their use, I argue against them claiming sole use.

Well, there's a difference between carrying the banner and actual production. You'll sail past the radar of tribal wrath if you avoid loaded terms (such as genre names). It is more complicated.

Rational: using the sorts of principles that underpinned the philosophy of ancient Greece, and which I mentioned some posts back

Emotional: using appeals to sentiment, our social instincts and desires, our personal drives and impulses

Symbolic: using existing associations in our mind (e.g. road signifies a journey, or balloon signifies imagination). Really, I think that this is just an indirect way to get our rational or emotional minds working

Sensory: I think it's there; I just haven't thought much about it.

To me, this reads like a two-dimensional grid with four types:

rational-symbolic (e.g. allegory); rational-sensory (e.g. objectivism); emotional-symbolic (e.g. expressionism); emotional-sensory (e.g. impressionism).

Ad hoc, I have trouble making sense of "rational-emotional", or "symbolic-sensory".

I like typologies. Heh.

That may be true in the same sense that any scientific theory is valid if one can demonstrate it empirically.

But notwithstanding that, some theories are stronger than others - better predictors and easier to use. If I see only one through-line in a story, and you see mine plus three more - and can show them to me - then while my reading may be valid, I'd be silly to insist that it's as useful as yours.

I agree, but you've torn the quote apart only commenting on the first half. The point is something along the line of separating the message from it's intent. (I really wish I had quote, or remember where to find it; it was interesting.)

I'm presently basking in the free "esteem" I've received simply for signing up here (it says "Esteemed new member" above my avatar). But I dread that as I post more, my esteem shall wane - and with it my enthusiasm - until I become a "bored fanatic".

Only one way to find out.

// You like puns? /// ... ////

Was it Samuel Johnson who said Only a blockhead writes, except for money? Please remind me to invoice you.

If you remind me to give you a false address.

However, it's clearly not a subgenre of historical fiction, because it removes or weakens signature elements of historical fiction, rather than adding to them. (In historical fiction to mess with the setting is a no-no).

This is pure theory, now:

If a sub-genre adds to the super-genre, but has commonalities with another genre (from which it takes away), it should be possible to have a hybrid genre that takes away from both genres in such a way that what remains makes sense in its own right.

Highly abstract (no examples), but does that make any sense?

Recall that I described SF concerns as being technology/frontier vs people concerns. In SF, Time-machine stories (time travel stories really) are normally about frontiers more than the technology itself.

I did forget the frontier part. Point taken.

Of course, there might be other things happening in the story that would make me think differently.

Thanks for the suggestions. I do mainly think of it as fantasy. I think the symbolic content dominates, but the rational insight is there, too, to an extent. The point is that the skeleton is anatomically strange; a four limbed vertebrate with an additional set of wings (I'll have to work on the description some more in the edit to create a plausible implausibility...) Before writing the scene I looked at lizard skeletons, bat skeletons and insect wing diagrams a lot. The scene still looks better on the drawing board, but I'm not worrying about that now.

Lots of other things happen. This scene is basically laying the ground work for a couple of themes.

If it's a short, you're welcome to PM it to me - or send me the outline. I'll send you a Ruv-approved log-line right back.

Thanks for the offer, but it's anything but short (around 130k words and growing), and it's not done. I don't have an outline, although I know pretty much where I'm going with it. Writing it down would help, but not before I finish draft 1. The time I spend writing an outline I could spend writing a scene; writing-wise I jump from scene to scene (along a loose plan; less loose now that it's in the last third).

The real work comes with the editing.

One benefit of having crisp genre signatures to work with is that you can zoom in on a clear log-line almost instantly - if it adheres to a signature.

Thinking of both your genre signature approach and my WiP at the same must have made my brain crash. I've been staring at the screen for ten minutes says the clock.

I personally believe that fantasy is probably an artifact of dream-reasoning that we happen to apply in conscious life. The reason that fantasy is virtually ubiquitous to human cultures, I believe, is that we all dream.

Dream reasoning?

The 'formula' in fantasy typically resides in its symbolic palette and its through-lines. Work from the middle of the palette - with symbols deeply rooted in our culture - and you get the fantasy of Tolkien, Lewis and many others. Work from the edges of the palette - twisting the symbols and ascribing new and unusual significance - and you get the fantasy of Lewis Caroll or Robert Holdstock.

I was actually thinking of the symbolic palette only, here. The symbols aren't especially specific. "Rooted in a culture" to me means mainly recognition value and a predictable response. But even if you take that away, fantasy seems to have the power to fascinate. Perhaps because much relies on visuals.

But you're right in that this may not be true for all sorts of fantasy. (I'm too tired to think, now. This post has taken me three hours.)

Genre Signatures

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ColoradoGuy

I've seen worse.

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JBI

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JBI

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Dawnstorm

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ColoradoGuy

I've seen worse.

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