I’ve been thinking a lot about genre lately. Also talking a lot about genre; I touched on the line between sci-fi and fantasy here on Suvudu a few weeks ago, and I recently talked about the inextricable links between fantasy and horror in a guest post on Joshua Palmatier’s blog. And I’ve been talking about genre in more general terms with my wife, as well as a few other authors.
And it got me thinking about the various genres in ways that I never have before, and I discovered something interesting. Specifically, when those of us in fandom talk about specific genres, or about the concept of genre in general, I’m not entirely certain that we’re all talking about the same thing.
Because “genre” isn’t nearly so well defined as we think it is.
What do I mean by that? Well, the fact is that “genre” as a concept actually encompasses two completely different defining characteristics–characteristics that, frankly, are not necessarily linked.
Some genres define the type of story being told. When one talks about “mystery” as a genre, what does that tell you? It says nothing about the setting, or the technology level, or the types of characters involved, or the time period, or anything else. It tells you only what kind of plot (more or less) you can expect: One in which some major aspect of the story is secret–usually, but not always, the identity of the villain–and which will be revealed, to the reader, the protagonist, or both over the course of the story.
Same with romance. You can have historical romance, modern romance, paranormal romance, whatever. The “genre” of romance tells you, to an extent, what kind of story you’re going to get, but not the where, the when, the how, the who, or the why.
But genre doesn’t always tell you what kind of story you’re getting. Sometimes, the identification of genre is purely aesthetic.
Let’s take fantasy, my own personal favorite playground. Fantasy doesn’t have a specific story “type.” When you hear a novel is a fantasy, that doesn’t tell you specifically what kind of story you’re getting. It could be an action/adventure story (most S&S fantasy is, but not all). It might be a mystery. It might be a romance. Heck, it could be urban, or historical, or “second world” fantasy. You have no idea what type of story it is. What you do, from the use of “fantasy” is that it’ll have certain types of aesthetics. It’s going to involve magic of some sort, and quite possibly non-human protagonists. If you know what type of fantasy it is–epic, S&S, urban, whatever–you likely have at least a vague sense of what the setting’s going to look like.
But here, it’s all about the where and the who. The story? The story could be anything. Terry Pratchett writes fantasy that is also humor, satire, and sometimes includes a mystery. Neil Gaimen writes urban fantasies that are often also horror, and Robert Howard’s S&S was sometimes also horror. My own The Conqueror’s Shadow is a sword-and-sorcery fantasy; it’s got a mystery at its core, and some elements of humor and horror, but you wouldn’t know that just from me saying “It’s a fantasy novel.”
As I touched on in my sci-fi vs. fantasy column, Star Wars is a perfect example. Is it science-fiction? Well, if you define sci-fi purely by having the tropes of space ships and energy weapons and the other aesthetic tropes of the genre, sure. On the other hand, if you define fantasy by the inclusion of magic–and let’s face it, the Force is basically magic–then Star Wars is that, too.
(To my wife, Star Wars is sci-fi, because to her, sci-fi is primarily an aesthetic. To me, Star Wars is a fantasy in science fiction’s clothing, because I feel the inclusion of a form of “magic” is more central to the definition than the trappings. But I don’t pretend that either of us is necessarily “right.”)
How about Babylon 5? That series includes telepaths and even telekinetics. How is that different from the Force, really? And yet B5 is certainly considered harder sci-fi than Star Wars by most fans (or at least most I’ve ever spoken to), because those aspects are presented in a more pseudo-scientific and less mystical framework.
Or what about the recent popularity of steampunk? Is steampunk a genre? Or is it purely an aesthetic by which you can tell stories of any genre (sci-fi, fantasy, romance, etc.)? I have no answer to that; there are debates raging elsewhere on the net on this very question.
In his foreword to Andrew Wiener’s novel Station Gehenna, Isaac Asimov writes “A science fiction story must be set against a society significantly different from our own–usually, but not necessarily, because of some change in the level of science and technology–or it is not a science fiction story.” While I don’t necessarily agree with that definition–I think it’s somewhat limiting–it’s definitely an interesting claim. By making such a proclamation, Asimov is stating that the aesthetics of sci-fi do not, in and of themselves, a sci-fi story make; only certain types of tale actually qualify.
Ultimately, we’re asking the notion of “genre” to convey to us two utterly distinct concepts of categorization–what the story looks like/includes, and what the story is. And as long as we’re doing that, as long as “genre” essentially has two separate meanings and purposes, then I don’t think that even the most well informed and die-hard fans are ever going to be entirely certain as to where the lines are.
Maybe that doesn’t matter–I’m open to the idea that our efforts at categorizing fiction into given labels is itself unnecessary–but either way, I find it fascinating that so many of the terms we use to define the very core of the hobbies and entertainments that we all love, are potentially impossible to accurately define.
The problem with doing away with labels is that people find it hard to function without them. After a while it gets tiresome to have to explain the same things over and over, so you fall back on a label as shorthand.
The real issue with labeling right now, as I see it, is how it is used as a pre-emptive marketing tool — the label is thought of as a kind of container into which any number of products are created and dumped, for a prospective target market. The long-term effect of such a thing is that much less thinking about how to find an audience for products that don’t have an obvious, built-in market for them.
Much in the same vein as Serdar is saying, genre is much more a classification of ‘intended audience’ than it is of the style/aesthetic/plot of the book. Many authors and publishers use them as marketing techniques to essentially grab the readers they are looking for.
Pynchon, Palahniuk, and Christopher Moore, as examples, all write within ’speculative fiction’ (as Neal Stephenson calls the true SF), but for whatever reason, you would be hard pressed to find them amongst the ranks of Ringo, Gaiman, or RR Martin. Some authors want to separate themselves from the SciFi/Fantasy crowd. Unfortunately this may perpetuate, if not be the cause of, SciFi/Fantasy as being looked as less literary in society and by association, the book world.
Flip side of the same coin, newer novels by William Gibson and many of Gene Wolfe’s classics barely fit into either definition of fantasy or SciFi. Yet go into any book store, and there you’ll find them. It’s a matter of where the authors and publishers want to be seen. What crowd they want to mix with. And more importantly which readers they want browsing their shelves.
The readers themselves are as much to blame. If we weren’t all as self censoring as to limit ourselves to our own little sandboxed genre, classifications may mean more than a marketing scheme. I’m as much to blame for this as anyone: browsing the SciFi/Fanstasy section easily twice as thoroughly/frequently as any other fiction section in the store.
That being said, genres as we see them today have taken steps away from the Ivory tower, worried less about the definitions of classifications, and more focussed on the practical applications.