By Diana Tixier Herald

I’ve always loved Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Historical Fiction, but never thought much about their connections until I ran across a blog written by Howard A. Jones titled “How Captain Kirk Led Me to Historical Fiction” on the Tor.com blog.

Of course, there are also many novels that are claimed by more than one genre, but Jones talks about the cross-pollination between Fantasy and Historical fiction, and he’s right, it has been around for a long time. The setting, the worldview, the politics, the manners and mores of a time and place, are important in both Historical Fiction and Fantasy.

The choices of some publishers also appear to show the connection. Orbit, the Science Fiction and Fantasy imprint of Hachette Books published Jo Graham’s novels Black Ships, but the title is listed as a Historical on HistoricalNovels.info. It is interesting to peruse the listing of authors on that site and see how many Historical writers are known also as Fantasy or Science Fiction authors.

The list of authors known for both SF and Historical Fiction is long in number and time span, including some authors from the Golden Age of Science Fiction as well as those writing today. A partial list includes Esther Friesner, L. Sprague de Camp, Gene Wolf, Poul Anderson, Barbara Hambly, Ursula K. Le Guin, Judith Tarr, Harry Turtledove, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Diana L. Paxson. Mercedes Lackey, Stephen Lawhead, Patricia C. Wrede, and Naomi Novik.

There are some subgenres that are especially effective in combining Speculative Fiction with Historical Fiction. Time Travel, Alternate History and Steam Punk come immediately to mind. The intricate historical details in Connie Willis’s latest books Blackout and All Clear provide a vivid view of life in England during the Blitz. Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker, set in a Seattle that never was, has rich Western styling, and M.J. Putney’s first YA novel, Dark Mirror, set partially in an alternate Regency England, and partially during World War II, brings the Dunkirk Evacuation vividly to life.

Bookmark to:

By Diana Tixier Herald

I’m grouchy about the rebranding of genres and subgenres. Names are powerful things. In fantasy, knowing something or someone’s true name often gives the knower power over the one named. This is even true in science fiction and horror, as the character Melody in Simon R. Green’s new Ghostfinders series describes at one point how she uses the word “quantum” to stop inquiries into exactly how some of her technology works. Rebranding genres and subgenres with new names can be useful. Genres evolve and change, but usually it is only a subgenre that changes, and when the subgenre designation is applied to the entire genre, it changes the meaning.

Paranormal grew out of horror, and kept those who love vampires, werewolves, and other denizens of the dark happy, while horror rode out a crash in popularity. But the two are really more like siblings than parent and child. While they share some common tropes, the visceral impact is very different. Paranormal stories don’t inspire the feelings of fear and dread that horror does, but do feature many of the same beings, only depicted in a kinder, gentler, and maybe even sexier way.

Unfortunately, now when a true horror novel that is really scary is published, it is branded as paranormal if it has a vampire in it. It is regrettable when a really good scary, horrifying book like American Vampire by Jennifer Armintrout is published as paranormal rather than horror. The horror fans who are dying for blood-soaked stories of amoral vampires and murderous monsters will probably not find it, and readers who lust for paranormal stories featuring a heroic vampire with a heart of gold won’t like it.

Urban Fantasy and Dystopian Fiction are two of the hot “new” genres, but all too often (for me, anyway) the names are being used to market good paranormal or science fiction stories to people who think they don’t like those genres. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for putting the books people want to read into their hands, onto their screens, or into their ears, but I worry that those who find a “Dystopian” novel they like will never equate it with science fiction, and therefore miss out on many wonderful stories.

I was recently chatting with several different authors of dystopian science fiction novels, and discovered that some of them had been told their books were being marketed as dystopian because science fiction doesn’t sell. Yes, there is lots of science fiction that falls into the subgenre of dystopian, but throwing out the science fiction designation while hanging onto dystopian is like throwing out the bathtub while trying to hang onto a few gallons of the bathwater.

I also have problems with “Urban Fantasy” being used to denote any story that has paranormal elements like vampires and werewolves. I first ran into this subgenre designation when reading books such as Will Shetterly’s ElseWhere, NeverNever, and other titles set in the shared universe of Bordertown, where short stories and novels featured the intersection of 20th technology using century city dwellers and a world of fantasy with elves and magic colliding. Mercedes Lackey’s Serrated Edge series also fit that bill as well as, more recently, Tanya Huff’s The Enchantment Emporium that is set in downtown Calgary, not the biggest city, but a city nonetheless. Now the designation turns up on novels set in small rural towns if they feature a vampire. I can see Urban Fantasy being attached to Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden Files, because a wizard solving crimes in Chicago does combine urban and fantasy, but a small town waitress from Bon Temps, Louisiana hooking up with weres and vamps, doesn’t strike me as urban, and I’ve always seen most weres and vampires as living more in the world of paranormal or horror than in fantasy.

Okay, that’s enough grumpiness for now. Anyone want to recommend a good book for me?

Bookmark to:

By Cindy Orr

Did Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love inaugurate a new genre? That’s the premise of this article by Marco Roth. He calls it the “neurological novel,” or “neuro novel,” because these books are about mental conditions like de Clérambault’s syndrome in Enduring Love. They’re usually told from the point of view of the protagonist who has the mental condition.

He cites Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia) as other examples…not to mention McEwan’s later book Saturday (Huntington’s Disease). And those are only some of the literary novels. Genre novels like Abigail Padgett’s mystery series about Bo Bradley, a bipolar investigator come to mind as well.

Roth wonders if the rise of this kind of novel, relying heavily on scientific data, signals that we may have “gone beyond the loss of society and religion [which novelist Iris Murdoch observed] to the loss of the self, an object whose intricacies can only be described by future science.” He sees this as a sign of the novel’s “diminishing purview.”

I don’t know about that, but maybe this topic would make a good book display. Any suggestions for more Neuronovels?

Bookmark to:

By Cindy Orr

Cornelia Read on the blog Murderati says that literary fiction lost her in the 1980s. “I can’t stand novels that just kind of drift around about vaporous bullshit and then wander out of the room at the end without a point,” she says. She blames MFA programs for making an artificial distinction between genre and non-genre works in the past couple of decades.

I thought I had a handle on the issue of this evaluative label: if you started your career as a “literary” author, then it’s okay to switch into genre fiction later. Take Cormac McCarthy or Margaret Atwood as examples of this premise. But if it’s the other way around, you’re forever living in the genre ghetto like Ursula K. Le Guin or countless other talented writers.

But then along came Michael Chabon trying to move from literary to genre fiction, and he’s accused of spending “considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.” This writer in Slate says that Chabon wishes for “a culture in which fiction, in whatever form, could permeate the national conversation and be essential to people’s daily lives.”

Wow, that would be terrible, wouldn’t it? Fiction essential in people’s daily lives!

The sheepishness and guilt readers feel about genre fiction has permeated our culture. Alafair Burke decided to do a little study. She searched “don’t like or don’t read thrillers or mysteries” on Google. Then she searched “don’t usually like.”

Guess what? There were many more people who said they didn’t usually like thrillers or mysteries, but they loved this one…or that one…or couldn’t put the other one down. It’s all about the guilt, you see. People don’t feel they can admit wholeheartedly that they like reading genre fiction. But it’s clear that they really do.

This literary vs. genre fiction quality issue holds true in other countries besides the United States as well. In the 1970s, British judges were about to give a science fiction award to Salman Rushdie’s first novel Grimus. At the last minute, his publisher withdrew the book because they didn’t want Rushdie to be labeled as a genre writer. “Had it won,” said Brian Aldiss, one of the judges, “he would have been labelled a science-fiction writer, and nobody would have heard of him again.”

In Canada, William Deverell calls it “our national snobbery disorder,” and Andrew Pyper says that writers’ workshops, the “true growth industry in the ink-based sector” are held responsible for the perception that Canadian literature is “at the cutting edge of blandness.” Douglas Coupland refuses to take Canadian Council grant money because the Council will not support writers who they think are commercial or write in a genre, though Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction is okay…and she openly admits to reading mysteries.

For many years in Britain, says a Guardian writer, the Booker prize was synonymous with baffling and unreadable. For years the judges chose “that bird without wings, the novel without a narrative.” But, partly because the bad economic times have meant fewer first novels, the Booker Prize shortlist this year was full of titles he calls “cracking good read(s), … novel(s) you can lose yourself in, with the childish gratification that good storytelling provides.” And the winner turned out to be Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall—clearly a historical novel.

Another Guardian article looks forward positively and speculates that, since so many people have now been exposed to science fiction through television and the movies, we may now be moving into a period that is “post science fiction.” This, as he describes it, is an era where science fiction writers like China Mieville are breaking down the walls of the genre from within, and literary authors like Michael Chabon and Lev Grossman are working away at them from the outside.

Grossman himself, in a piece about Chabon, says, “This is literature in mid-transformation, the modernist bleeding into the postmodern and beyond. In his introduction to Astonishing Stories, Chabon calls this new high-low fiction ‘Trickster literature,’ and you can almost hear in that label the distant bugle call of a manifesto. And you can almost see the future of literature coming. Looks like it’s going to be a page turner.”

But in the same essay, Grossman uses the loaded words “highbrow” and “lowbrow.” It seems he won’t risk being seen to be “lowbrow” until he’s sold a few more novels—he didn’t acknowledge that he wrote the genre novel Codex, for instance. It would be terrific if we eventually get to the point where a good book is a good book no matter what the genre, and writers are not afraid to acknowledge their roots. But a few are defiant…

I think maybe Laura Lippman may have said it best, “Who benefits from the debate, that’s what I want to know? Not genre writers. Not readers. So it must be the literary writers who keep beating this dead horse. Such pieces always make me feel as if I’m an ill-behaved dog running amok in the great marble temple of literature. ‘Stop her! She’s peeing on the floor! She’s drinking out of the toilet! She won’t play by the rules — except those tired genre conventions that mark her work as second-rate. Ohmigod — she’s humping Nadine Gordimer’s leg. Get her out!’”

I hope we’re moving into an era where a genre label is merely a helpful guide to people looking for something good to read, and the word “genre” ceases to be a pejorative term. But I’m not holding my breath.

At any rate, there’s an overwhelming amount of discussion on either side of the genre wars. Anyone want to write a book?

Bookmark to:

The blog Historical Tapestry has a great running series on why readers (and writers) love different kinds of historical fiction. Here are a few of their entries. For many more, visit their Index.

Why I Love…

Learning more about why readers love reading different kinds of things can be a great boost to your readers’ advisory skills. Give it a look.

Bookmark to:

Does it seem like most new titles in Fantasy are sequels extending the same idea instead of inventing something new? Robert Jordan’s book titles may seem to grow along the shelves like some crazy unstoppable plant, but is that just a mistaken perception?

Valentin D. Ivanov attempted to answer these questions by analyzing statistics taken from the Locus Online Notable Books Database. His results were published in Strange Horizons this summer.

So what’s the verdict? Take a look at all his tables and analysis to draw your own conclusions, but here’s a quick summary:

So if it seems like series are taking over your fantasy shelves it’s because they probably are.

Bookmark to:

by Cindy Orr

Lev Grossman, book critic of Time magazine, says his new novel The Magicians, which is being marketed as literary fiction, wouldn’t have been possible without the publication of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. The fantasy genre seems to be migrating into literary fiction lately…or is it just that the best authors of each of the genres has been overlooked in the past merely because of their genre label?

What seems to make the difference is that if an author’s first works are marketed as literary, then it’s okay with critics when they “lapse” into genre. Take, for instance, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, or Haruki Murakami, who have all won genre awards.

But while the genre community is quite willing to embrace literary works, excellent writers whose early titles were labelled “genre” get no respect in the literary world. Consider Ursula K. Le Guin, John Le Carre, or Raymond Chandler as examples of this phenomenon.

Is the fact that current “literary” writers are working in the genre arena changing the view of those who denigrate genre writing? That’s the hope, but too many of those who belittle genre fiction use unfair arguments such as the common trick of comparing bad genre authors to the best of literary authors.

So what we seem to need is for more “literary authors” like Michael Chabon, Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood to continue their trend of experimentation in the genre world. And maybe, just maybe, some day critics will acknowledge that genres deserve some respect.

Bookmark to:

by Cindy Orr

I’ve been struck lately by articles on “literary authors” who have adopted the mystery genre. These articles are based around the publication of Thomas Pynchon’s new crime book–Inherent Vice. The piece in the Wall Street Journal says some hardcore Pynchon fans are upset that his new book is “lightweight.”

Pynchon’s body of work is small, including V (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006) in addition to the new title. He is known for dense, complex books which are filled with erudite information from many fields. His best known work—Gravity’s Rainbow—won the National Book Award, and was recommended unanimously for the Pulitzer, but the jury was overruled by the Pulitzer Board, which called the book “unreadable,” “turgid,” “overwritten,” and “obscene.” No prize was given that year.

So now he’s writing in the noir tradition. What does it all mean? Newsweek asserts that “literary novelists, the very people who usually scorn genre writing, have been slumming with noir for the better part of a century.” Some who have written in the genre include William Faulkner (Sanctuary) and Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy), Norman Mailer (Tough Guys Don’t Dance), Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men), and Denis Johnson (Nobody Move).

So what happens when literary authors try to write noir? Nothing good usually. As Newsweek reports it–it’s not the mechanics that make it good, it’s the emotional core of the story that needs to ring true. And that’s not as easy as some “A-List” authors might think. The bottom line—try these writers instead—”Writers such as James Ellroy, Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, Donald Westlake, Walter Mosley, Laura Lippman, James Sallis, Megan Abbott, and George Pelecanos have managed to infuse crime novels with a quality of writing not seen since the days of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain.”

Bookmark to:

Author Lois McMaster Bujold struggled with the meaning of genre in her keynote speech at Devention 3 last fall. Her take: a genre is “any group of works in close conversation with one another.” This, she says, is her definition from the writer’s point of view. From the reader’s point of view, she says, it’s all about thinking about genre as a “community of taste.” Then, the third definition is genre as a marketing category, which publishers use to sell books.

“Science fiction,” she says, “is a literary form that is young, small, and geekish. Fantastic writing is old as the scriptures. Science fiction, by sharp contrast, emerged in the 1920s from down-market electronics parts catalogs for teenage radio enthusiasts.” “Early science fiction writers and editors imagined that they were selling popular fiction about science and technology. They were mistaken. That was a user-interface artifact. The platform was selecting a fraction of the population willing to consume radically imaginary works through print; that demographic partially overlapped with science wonks. Scientists never printed science fiction.”

Bujold says she is fascinated to see how different communities of taste view the same book. “If romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency,” she says. She deliberately tried to balance the romance with the science fiction in her book The Sharing Knife. In her speech she explores the “mutual rejection” of the communities of taste for romance and science fiction. Interesting stuff. Take a look here for the rest of the story. It’s a very thoughtful argument.

Bookmark to: