What is Deep Genre?
Kate Elliott June 13th, 2006
What is “deep genre?†Something different to each of us - and you’ll hear from the others soon enough. In fact, I’d bet you’ll get at least 7 different definitions up front (and there are, at the moment, only 6 of us posting here).
I’m pretty sure I read the term “deep genre†in an interview or essay by Judith Berman, but I don’t know where or when, and a quick google didn’t turn anything up.
What I responded to - how the term resonated for me - relates to the other part of my life, that part in which certain relatives, friends, and acquaintances who genuinely would like to read a novel by me just can’t because they can’t relate to science fiction/fantasy. Even mysteries, another well known genre, are more ‘gettable’ to a larger portion of the population. SFF? Too far out. Too genre.
Then why do I not only write genre but deep in genre, with all the tropes and expectations of the field, with (all too often, it seems) little obvious mainstream appeal? What is it that appeals to me, that I react to, that causes me to find most of my stories therein? I got nuthin’ against other types of fiction, they is lovely as the springtime and just as green, but in my case, deep genre seems to be the location where the spring bubbles up.
Or, as Damon Knight once told me, “you write what’s in you to write.â€
I admit, some people call sff “adolescent fiction†or “juvenile fiction†or suggest that “the golden age of sf is 16.†Fair enough. I got started reading at 10 or 11, and I immersed myself in reading sff while in my teens. It really appealed to the things in me that needed talking to in those days.
But at the same time, I’m not going to belittle my adolescent dreams even as I have moved into new territory with advancing age. Genre is deep, and there’s a lot in it - the good the bad the ugly the awful the brutal the sweet the trite the profound the mediocre the pedestrian the competent the lovely the simple pleasure the whole hog.
So - what is genre? How deep does it go? What ingredients go into genre that we don’t necessarily expect to see, and how much more can we expect from it?
Deep Genre is a place to explore what it all means, and to give room for people to talk who take their entertainment and their genre seriously (and with an all-important grain of salt).
Let me applaud you for starting this blog/site. Great initiative!
It is all too easy to use a genre, any genre, as a comfort blanket — and most of all I fear that science fiction will become, or already mostly is, just that.
When I want predictability, I watch COLUMBO. But who wants SF to be like COLUMBO? (Answer: quite a few.)
Thomas M. Disch wrote in ON SF, that readers feel cheated if an SF story does not provide a resolution to the problem/challenge/crisis presented in said story.
Now, to present a crisis in a story and then have the characters throw up their hands in despair, can just be intellectual laziness on the part of the writer.
There’s also the kind of intellectual sloth that makes the hack writer grasp for “handwavium” solutions: ESP often becomes the handy wish-fulfilment device that stands in for actual effort.
What is truly uncomfortable for genre readers and writers alike, is the theme of failure: when characters try and fail. Failure does not fall into the mythical “quest” story pattern; it is closer to realism, or real life.
Genre literature stops being superficially genre-ish and becomes truly mature, when it manages to tackle the theme of failure.
H.G.Wells excelled at this!
In THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, the Martians fail to conquer Earth, and the humans fail to defend it.
In THE TIME MACHINE, the time traveler fails to avert the far future when the Sun goes out.
In THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, the scientist fails to successfully turn animals into humans.
Where are the heirs of H.G.Wells ?
>Failure does not fall into the mythical “quest†story pattern; it
>is closer to realism, or real life.
I don’t read fiction to see the hero fail — if I want that sort of “realism”, I’ll read the news, thankewverymuch.
I think most people (at least Americans, other cultures may have different standards), read fiction for some level of escapism. I may be
stuck in a cube/office all day, but in the evenings I can be
trapsing across the universe, or living in a castle. I don’t
want to experience the disappointments I have in my life in
my fantasy world — I want to explore success, or rather the
trials and tribulations that result in creating a lasting
success (destroying the One Ring, conquering the world/
defeating the aliens).
That could be why we don’t see many writers like Wells today
– it’s not what the public is looking for. Wells was a product
of his time and wrote in a very different time and place. The
A Bomb hadn’t been used (until the last year or so of his life),
IEDs weren’t killing people every day, AIDs wasn’t ravaging populations across the globe (though, granted, he lived through the flu epidemic), manifest destiny was still a *good*
thing, etc. I think as a result of immediacy of all the news
(good and bad) that we experience today, as well as the
cultural guilt we have about our predecessors (whether you’re Catholic and have to rationalize why a Pope wouldn’t help
the Jews in WWII, or lived through Kent State/Stonewall Rebellion/Watts riots, whatever), we’re losing the desire
to have our fiction expore “our” (individual or national)
failures.
It may be a case of where it’s okay to explore failure when
it’s not likely to happen, but it’s too d*mn depressing to
explore when it’s a likelihood?
However, that doesn’t mean that I want my SF/F to be “false”.
The characters, the setting, the “smells”, need to ring true for
me to like the story. I feel cheated by the author when
everything feels like an epsiode of STNG (all clean, pretty,
and we know only the red shirts will die) — the impression
I got from reading Eragon, or a lot of romance novels.
I want gritty realism in the setting, characters, culture, etc.
But I want to know that there’s hope.
But if you already have hope, do you need SF to provide it?
Is there a difference between a narrative that is a tragedy, and a narrative that is simply about failure?
Tragedy is famously cathartic. I’m not sure a narrative about failure - per se - necessarily is.
Failure can be told as tragedy OR comedy.
(For example: imagine that THE HITCH-HIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY was rewritten as a tragedy. :))
Consider also failure along the way, as opposed to failure in the end. Consider also failure in an original objective, balanced with success in something else. It is the writer’s task to provide satisfaction to the reader. But satisfaction can take many forms.
Carol
Ah, yes, my answer when people ask, “Why don’t you write romance or mystery so someone will actually read all those lovely words?” I don’t have time to write what doesn’t bubble up. And where’s the fun?
>Is there a difference between a narrative that is a tragedy,
>and a narrative that is simply about failure?
I think there is a definite difference, though I’m having a hard
time articulating why. For ex, MacBeth. At some level it’s about justice and redemption ofterred (but not taken). But I wouldn’t
read a modern novel (typically) with roughly the same plot line. Maybe it’s because MacBeth focuses on the process and (grand generalization here) a lot of modern novels focus on the end
result?
>Consider also failure along the way, as opposed to failure
>in the end.
Agreed — that’s in line with my thinking about the “trials and tribulations in route to the success”.
It seems that what Dani wants comes down to limitations on fiction, excluding possibilities. The possibility of failure may be introduced, but it’s a tease, like the villain in a romance novel. You know all along that she will never marry him in the end, because the possibilities have been limited, the failures excluded.
This strikes me as a pretty good way of excluding the better half of fiction from any genre.
See, limitations are exactly what SHOULDN’T apply to science-fiction. Isn’t it supposed to be the literature about intellectual speculation?
But if you start putting restrictions on it — you can’t write this, you can’t write that, you mustn’t upset readers — that can strangle the genre and turn into mere thrillers.
It’s not that I only want downbeat SF. But it shouldn’t always try to go for the expected and predictable. I want to be surprised by SF, I want the sensation of the rug being pulled from under my feet, cracks in the sky, everything I took for granted turned upside down, awesome new vistas…
…in short: Sense of Wonder.
“What I responded to - how the term resonated for me - relates to the other part of my life, that part in which certain relatives, friends, and acquaintances who genuinely would like to read a novel by me just can’t because they can’t relate to science fiction/fantasy.”
– this strikes me as a bit odd. SF and Fantasy are, in fact, among the largest subsectors of fiction sold. George R.R. Martin, for example, isn’t exactly toiling away in an obscure little corner. If people read fiction at all, they’re quite likely to read in our genre.
Maybe so, but it has happened to me a remarkable number of times.
I got no problem with individual readers preferring comfort fiction. Why not?
My objection is really only if someone suggests that people ought to only read comfort fiction or ought to want to read a novel about failure. In the end, people will read what works for whatever it is they’re reading for, surely?
The question is - are works that might be read not being published because of a perceived lack of audience? How much is censorship, how much market, how much the gestalt of the day, the changing fashion for different tones of fiction?
btw, I like the idea of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy written as a tragedy. But somehow I still see it as a comedy.
” In the end, people will read what works for whatever it is they’re reading for, surely?”
I totally agree. I am curious to know what people “get” out of reading fiction, specifically science fiction (which I write).
Maybe it varies with age. A very young reader might be more eager for adventure stories, an adolescent reader might be drawn to stories with challenging or radical ideas, while an old reader wants familiar stories. Which is OK.
However… no other genre offers so much elbow space for doing the unexpected. I worry that we keep forgetting that: as writers, to challenge ourselves — as readers, to let ourselves be challenged.
>It seems that what Dani wants comes down to limitations on
> fiction, excluding possibilities
That wasn’t what I meant. I was responding to a comment
from AR — which in rereading it just now, I realized I’d
misread his comment and was really responding to
something he hadn’t said.
Stories that contain failures, especially if they go into why
the failure happened, how the characters respond to the
failure, etc. — that’s the guts of a story (plot 101). What I
was responding to, was what I thought AR had been
saying — which was more around “there should be more
books where the end of the book was about failing.” That’s
not my cup of tea. In my escapism, I *do* want the heroes to win (or have a measure of winning) in the end. I have no
desire to read books that would be, for me, depressing.
So, that said… I’m more likely to purchase books from
authors that have themes/endings/styles I prefer. That may
be a “d’oh” statement (from the consumer point of view),
but I think it is a side topic to what we’re discussing here –
how do authors who want to write deep genre
find/nurture the audience that appreciates that style of
writing (and therefore make it profitable for the author
to keep writing that way)?
>Maybe it varies with age
Maybe. Or maybe life situations. I’ll be the first to admit, I’ll
read “comfort authors” (like Alis — whose books I wouldn’t
call “comfort books” :-)) and sometimes popcorn books (like romance novels) when life has me truly stressed out. (similar
to a 3 yr old who wants to re-read the favorite story night
after night after night becuase they *know* how the story
will end).
And other times, I’ll go for new authors/genres/etc.
A few years ago I started reading a book by Rohinton Mistry called, I think, A Fine Balance. In it a set of people are struggling to manage their lives, against terrible odds.
About two-thirds of the way into the book, a small, indeed seemingly insignificant, encounter occurs. As a writer, I suddenly realized that this was the first domino whose fall would precipitate the collapse. That now every bad thing was going to happen that they’d been struggling to prevent. I admit it: I stopped reading, put the book down, and never finished it.
I just didn’t want to go there. Somehow, it seemed more like hopelessness than tragedy. But I wouldn’t say that the author shouldn’t have written the story. I suppose I felt a bit manipulated by the writer, and perhaps I could have accepted the bleakness of an ending if I hadn’t seen how the writer had set it up and played it out.
When I object to limitations, it is not to limit the choices of readers, but to limitations placed on a genre, and thereby the writing and publishing thereof.
Boundaries can serve several purposes. Genre necessarily involves definitional boundaries. We set off one genre from another, we set genre fiction off from the generality of fiction.
But boundaries and limits can also be barriers, like prison walls, to keep works from escaping some pre-defined area. They can be barriers to publication, when editors employ them to reject works that don’t fit the preconceptions. Genre publishing is particularly prone to this limiting tendency, and this in the end limits the reader by narrowing her universe of choices.
Lois, yes, I think in genre - as well as other aspects of our lives - we get taken in by expectations that can end up limiting us, although they won’t necessarily do so. Publishing is no different.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s a factor of too much choice. At the grocery store, I will tend to buy something I know I already like rather than chance a new product which I might not like. It depends on how overwhelmed I feel on any given day, I suppose, how far I’m willing to push beyond what I already know.
The way we make choices affects all this.
Pushing boundaries in an internet world:-
Personally I like “the good ends well and the bad ends badly” escapism. However I do not see why my preferred reading should limit authors in an internet world.
The Arctic Monkeys first released their music via the web as did Gnarls Berkeley and both are doing very well in the UK.
There are parallels betweenthe music and book industries. The musicians publish on the web (amongst other reasons) because sidelining the corporations allows them a greater degree of artistic freedom. What is stopping authors doing the same?
Yes publishers might say “we will only publish escapist literature”….but then these days are you restricted to publishers?
I think I am with Dani on this one. Yes just another reader….so I guess my opinion may not count as much as an author?
I think what most authors may not realise, is that if you write a truly “great literary” book, then it may not be lapped up by the public.
I have aruged this with some friends, and if you look at the number of people who read say Shakespeare or Charles Dickens or some such, in their free time, I think you will find the number is very much down to those few people who really enjoy literature. Most people, will only read those books once (usually at school) and never read them again.
Then you get these other sort of people, who after talking with them about a book, I always end up thinking “Yep, another status symbol added”. Its like they are reading it to say they have read the classics. Some do take it seriously, read it, understand the themes and what they are dealing with. For many though, its a status symbol to show they are cultured. (Ugh - how fake!)
So if a fantasy author was to win the booker prize….sure they would get massively increased sales, and maybe it would be classed as a good book. The question is though, would you the author want those type of people as your readers? There is no loyalty there, no real enjoyment I don’t think. They are just reading it because its won a prize and makes a great talking point.
“I was reading H G Wells the other day and ……”
Once you stop being the latest fashion, then people will turn away from you again.
As for the original authors post, I will say this. I am always FASCINATED by people who say they cannot relate to fantasy or sci-fi, and yet they will read a religious text and revere it. Want magic and miracles, why not read the Mahabharat or the Bible or the Torah? Maybe you want witches and super powers but not in such a serious way….how about some Shakespeare - Macbeth (three witches at the beginning), Midsummers night dream (Turning him into an ass)…….
The basis of fantasy that most people find objectionable, is that its unreal or they cannot relate, and yet these same people will rave about Shakespeare (who constantly used magic throughout lots of his books).
Emperors New Clothes syndrome……
I may not be the most well read person in the world, who has read all the classics, but I am honest in my assessment of a book. If I think a book is boring or rubbish, I will slate it. So for instance, Lord of the Rings - the first book was the most labourious and boring book I have ever read. For me, it felt like reading a text book on the order of Gray’s Anatomy….the second and third books pick up, but the first one is a drag. On a counter note, I thought the Hobbit was great!
On the other hand, Margaret Atwood’s Blind Assassin was amazing, but in a different way to what I normally read. Horrible ending, but somehow she kept me reading right till the end. Now I regularly keep an eye out for her books (Oryx and Crake - definetly fantasy/sci fi but because she has done the whole booker prize and so forth, no one calls it that).
See - its a sheep mentality. People reading it because they have been told its good and so like a good sheep, they follow the herd. If asked, oh this was a great book. Ask them why, what they find great about the book and often people won’t know or cannot talk about the book etc.
Anyone here who has seen Newsnight Review on BBC2 (UK reader here) will know the way critics talk…talking about ordinary books, but trying to find deeper deeper meanings. Yet when they talk to the authors, its never that deep, always about small things. Its a fascinating contrast - they never talk about the themes with the author (because they don’t want to be told they are reading too much into it or being told they have gotten it totally wrong), and so stick on small obvious things.
So if any authors find themselves being told “Its unrealistic or they cannot relate”, find out what these people read and point that its all fantasy mostly. The reason they don’t want to read it, is because it does not add anything to their “status”. They cannot talk about it with others because they feel they will be looked down upon.
Proof of this is just look at the most popular movie ever made: The Star Wars series…sci fi ALERT!! Hello!!! How can you not relate to sci fi/fantasy and yet still watch Star Wars! Check out the current Hollywood trend of releasing comic book heroes - a form of fantasy.
So sad that people are reduced to this - worrying about others will think of what they have read ……
k1 said:
No, k1, your opinion counts every bit as much. Maybe even more, because you’re the customer.
Well, one might look at Booker Prize winners J. M. Coetzee and John Banville, both of whom have written fantasy novels (Waiting for the Barbarians and Ghosts, respectively)…
Honestly, I think that’s how literature works. One can choose to call it sheep herding, or one can choose to call it viral marketing. Guess it depends on your opinion of the work in question.
Hi all,
A friend recently asked me if I knew about this blog, and I didn’t until that point. Nice! I frequently do use the term “deep genre”–here’s what I usually mean by it. That isn’t an argument with your definitions and discussions here, which I find pretty interesting.
From down deep,
Judith
Welcome Judith!
That is a remarkably clear and concise formulation of the “deep genre” notion, and it ought to be embroidered in linen and held up here as a banner.
What particularly interests me [I have been working on this, but it never comes out right] is the writerly aspect of the “signature tropes and conventions”, as opposed to the marketing aspect. The author can exercise no influence or control over marketing and thus can not be held responsible for what is on, say, the cover. But I have noted that the signature SF or fantasy tropes, forex the space ship or the dragon, are not in fact what distinguishes the genre from the nongenre treatment. It is not the subject matter.
Atwood will write about cloning and bioengineering, perfectly standard SF tropes, yet claim her work is not science fiction. It isn’t that she doesn’t really understand what science fiction actually does, it’s that she is making the claim: my work is not genre. If subject matter were the sole determinant, it would be SF, but Atwood’s claim implies it is a non-genre SF, and that this is not a contradiction. When Audrey Niffenegger writes the life of a time traveler, the subject matter is perfectly sfnal, but it is regarded by the literary world as a literary work.
Again, much of this can be attributed to marketing, but this is not what I want to consider. What I want to consider is the distinction whereby the same subject matter can be written in a way that makes it genre, or in a way that makes it non-genre. What distinguishes genre fantasy from non-genre fantasy, when the subject matter is the same?
Some of us once had a discussion in which the claim was made that a work could be distinguished as genre or nongenre simply by the style of the prose, that there are recognizable genre prose markers. When the theory was put to the test, however, the actual results were inconclusive: excerpts from genre works were identified as literary, and literary works as genre. Certainly we can all identify genre-colored prose, but I think it is also clear that genre works can be written in a perfectly transparent prose style.
So your statement that “Deep genre is in the way in which the writing relates to genre conventions–in straightforward, often literal, sometimes naive ways.” casts a light on the subject from another direction, that I would like to explore in more depth. Because it would seem, if this is indeed so, that genre by its literal nature would tend to exclude the sort of thing we were discussing in another thread here - symbolism, metaphor, allusion: precisely the elements that give any fictional narrative what I would might call “depth” except that here the term would only result in confusion, so I might say “dimension” or perhaps “weight.” But it would refer to those elements which, for me as a reader, make a work worth reading, and especially worth rereading.
Which would suggest the conclusion that the more genre a work is, the less interesting it must be. And that, I must believe, is what we do not want. At least, it is certainly not what I want to see in fiction. Because if a place like this has a purpose, I think it must be to explore ways that fiction can be deeply genre, yet also deeply worthwhile and interesting at the same time.
Judith, that’s a wonderful description of deep genre. And so are Lois’s descriptions, and Kit’s and Alis’s . . . and Atwood’s (from the literary end, trying to disassociate herself from the perceived limits of genre tropes).
I keep wanting to simplify because to get too complicated melts the my cool, glittering vision of deep-genre; that is, every time I try to define more speficially the exceptions flame up and I’m left with the frustrating sense of trying to shape water.
So I fall back to that idea of perceived limits of genre tropes. My particular deep-genre subset includes the books I find myself rereading because the first reading took me by surprise, breaking the invisible ‘rules’ binding genre trops for so many–and second, because I discover, and savor, new things each read.
Genre, for me, uses the fun tropes that drew me to genre in the first plae in the expected ways (ways readers have liked for ages, thus I know writer not only think of them as tried and true, but sometimes don’t realize they can be used more than one way. Like the early Tolkien-influenced writers who couldn’t see a story without elves, without the bad guys over east and the west being the magical Elysium, and of course there had to be a quest for some object. And there is nothing wrong with that–mant readers, like the hobbits, prefer reading about things they already know. There can be comfort and satisfaction in knowing at first introduction who the bad guys and good guys are, and where the story is going to go, especially these days, when the future–like, tomorrow–seems so uncertain, so full of dangers that we cannot fix.
But for other readers, these books are fun once, but not twice, because there is nothing new said. The writer follows the well-worn path of the trope right to the expected ending. Throwing in extra glitter (tortured heroes being the current popular one; graphic horror and shock being The Thing fifteen years ago; humor and deliberately mundane contrasts, or Power Women versus the Evial Priests in Red, in the late seventies through the eighties) doesn’t change the tracks, only redecorates the wagon for the trip.
Gwenyth Jones takes the familiar trope of the alien, but her aliens are not people in rubber masks a la TV aliens, or embodiments of Evil to serve mainly as target practice for our soldier heroes (thus bypassing any moral questions); they are so alien it’s difficult to get a grip on their motivations and ways of thinking. This aspect doesn’t make her books popular with the majority of genre readers who want the aliens to be more familiar, but it makes for a good read that plays with one’s assumptions about what makes us human. And what could happen to make us not human. So I think of her as deep-genre.
Judith, thank you for stopping by. I wish I could remember where I read or heard you use “deep genre” because it obviously made an impression on me.
I very much like your definition - in my own way, that’s much of what I was trying to get at.
Lois, while I am naturally interested in the marketing aspect, I am more interested in the writerly aspect of “deep genre” - or these signature tropes. I don’t think the more genre a work is the less interesting it will be. We could extend that definition to many types of writing, and say that certain types of mainstream novels veer toward being disinteresting because of the topics they pursue or the manner in which they pursue them - I don’t think it is the tropes but the execution.
Of course, I have to think that.
Meanwhile, I still know people who can’t read sff because of the tropes, or the manner of writing, how it is approached. Or something.
It’s the nature of that “something” I want to get at.
To me, the entire enterprise can be boiled down to the question: how can a work be both genre and good?
I do not want to see the one sacrificed for the other, I want both, in the same work.