More on the eternally interesting (to me, anyway) question of genre. A friend posted a review of the movie The Road on her Livejournal, and in comments her friend noted that the book, like the movie, gave no indication of what caused the apocalypse. (Note: I haven’t seen or read The Road, because it will terrify me.)
I was all, “Rar! I hate post-apocalyptic stories that don’t explain! Because then you can just declare, ‘There’s no animals and no plants and people are all cannibals ’cause I say so!’ But if there was a nuclear war, why don’t the people have radiation poisoning? And if there was a disease, why didn’t it affect humans? It’s lazy science fiction!”
To which the commenter pointed out, rightly, that Cormac McCarthy doesn’t give a crap if he’s writing good science fiction. My usual response to that is that it is science fiction, whether he wants it to be or not, because it happens in the future. Ditto Never Let Me Go and Handmaid’s Tale.
But maybe Usual-Response Me is full of it. Maybe that’s the difference between science fiction and literature that happens to take place in the future or an alternate universe: one cares about the science and logic parts of the worldbuilding, and the other is more interested in setting up a neat premise for the exploration of human motivations or “the human spirit.”
(I don’t mean to suggest that SF is all about nifty! technology! and not at all about characters. I’ve been known to launch into big arguments with people who suggested that, even if they weren’t talking to me at all. (Oops.) In fact, I think the best science fiction is about both logically consistent worldbuilding and exploration of character, and for whatever reason the interplay of the two interests me more than plain “non-genre” “literature.”)
What do you think? Talk genre with me! It’s my favorite!
Pingback: More babbling about genre
“I think what I want is for the author to have written the exposition chapter in her head.”
You nailed it. If he or she hasn’t done that, it so shows (PC CAST)! On the other hand, too much is too much! Monster Blood Tattoo – that guy spent FIFTEEN YEARS imagining his world. Yikes.
@Paula: I think what I want is for the author to have written the exposition chapter in her head. I don’t need to read it, I don’t even need the characters to know it, but I need the worldbuilding to be internally consistent so that I can piece together my own history and have it hold together.
I certainly don’t shelve my science fiction in a separate section from other fiction, but I do think genre has some value in recommending books to kids. They tend to be less sophisticated about themes and style. (More on this in the post I’m going to write any minute now, or possibly tomorrow.)
But if we’re being honest, mostly I just like geeking out about categorization. I’m a librarian, after all!
I kind of love a post-apoc that doesn’t do the exposition chapter (“Earth-that-was could no longer sustain our numbers, we were so many…” give me a break, JOSS).
Ship Breaker is an excellent example of a catastrophe only hinted at.
But I tend to rebel against genre definitions, and I tend to discourage them when I talk to young people. Crime and literature are not mutually exclusive, humor and SF coexist all the time, and there are tons of books that are both horror and SF, and sometimes mystery on top of that, and then there’s the rare item that is horror, SF, mystery, and Literature as well. And where do you shelve THAT?
I say lump em all in together. Do you really still send people to the Western section when they’re looking for Larry McMurtry? Nope.
I’d rather discuss themes in books, and look at how they are expressed in a variety of settings, and by authors who write in different styles.
I.e. Dark Life is a frontier novel set in the post-apocalyptic future, dealing with the politics of self-determinism and medical ethics. I’d throw that up against Little House on the Prairie.
It’s a great discussion!
Sam or Deborah, if you have (or get) PDF or online copies of those 2 articles, I’d love to read them.
(I haven’t read _The Road_ either, but might have to after this.)
@deborah: In the Venn diagram of genre, I feel like that exclusivity overlap happens in the other direction with fantasy-horror. “It has witches, but those witches dismember people and there’s lots of blood, so it’s horror, not fantasy.”
People say “it had a coming-of-age so it’s not science fiction”? Buh?
I’ll have to read those articles! (Especially the cloning one. Boy, do I have things to say about that.)
@yomikoma: Yes, I think that’s a good way of putting it. The Road is literature or horror or something other than SF, because “reason” isn’t the point. (To go back to the original example, which is getting increasingly shaky because, let’s remember, I haven’t read the book. :) )
I’m trying to think of a good counter-example (something I would unquestionably call SF in which reason or an explanation is not privileged), and I can’t yet. Anyone else? I’ll keep pondering…
To me, part of the interesting thing about science fiction is that science, the search for and expansion of knowledge, is involved. If something strange is happening, either there’s a reason for it or the characters are trying to find a reason. So, for example, _Feed_ is science fiction rather than a horror zombie novel, and the _Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality_ fanfic is science fiction rather than fantasy.
This is really funny, because in class on Thursday we were specifically talking about definitions of “science fiction” and who gets to define it and what they mean. We were referring very heavily to the two articles
Hilary Crew, “Not So Brave a World: The Representation of Human Cloning in Science Fiction for Young Adults”, Lion and the Unicorn 28:2, April 2004
Farah Mendlesohn, “Is There Any Such Thing as Children’s Science Fiction?: A Position Piece”, Lion and the Unicorn 28:2, April 2004
and looking at the authors’ definitions of science fiction. At one point in the Mendlesohn piece, she says “Science fiction, even at its pulpiest, has always claimed to challenge
the intellect,” and I challenged my students to explain who this “science fiction” is, and exactly how it was claiming to challenge the intellect. (Disclaimer: I admitted I was being unfair to the Mendlesohn piece, which quite openly defines itself in its title as “a position piece”.)
Definitions of science fiction seem to be very much “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it.”
We also talked about how fantasy tends to get defined ore inclusively — “it had witches so it is fantasy.” But science fiction is defined exclusively — “it had rocket ships, but it also had witches so it is not science fiction.” Or, if you are going by some of the many other definitions of science fiction, “it [talked about relationships/didn't stress societal change/didn't stress technology/had romance/had a coming-of-age] so it isn’t science fiction.”
@beth: Ok, that’s fair. (Such are the dangers of commenting on things I haven’t read!) But I still think it’s an interesting way to think about the Literature genre vs. the SF genre.
In The Road, the characters have no idea and no room to wonder, they are too busy struggling to keep moving. I can accept that as a SF reason to leave out the explanation.