Genre Soup, Part 2
Orson Scott Card’s craft book How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy begins, interestingly enough, with a discussion of genre. He specifically discusses the boundary between sci-fi and fantasy, but what he says could as easily apply to a discussion of “literary” versus “women’s” fiction or (horrors!) “chick lit”:
…common wisdom has it that more males read science fiction while more females read fantasy. The result is that the quarrels between fantasy and science fiction often take on overtones of the war between the sexes. And that’s only the beginning of the ugliness. Serious science fiction writers have actually published letters or articles in which they regard fantasy as somehow a threat to “good” science fiction, sometimes because fantasy seems to be crodwing science fiction off the bookstore shelves, and sometimes because too many science fiction writers are being as “sloppy” or “sentimental” in their writing as fantasy writers are. Then serious fantasy writers respond with a passionate defense of their own field–and snide remarks about science fiction as an expression of the adolescent male love affair with machines. … the fact is that … science fiction improves when it borrows the best techniques of fantasy, and fantasy improves when it borrows appropriate techniques from science fiction.
Card goes on to discuss the real (and publishing world, which is also real) distinctions between the genres, and asks writers to identify which they’re writing. As he says, “…there is a time when the division between science fiction and fantasy really matters–and that’s when you’re writing the story. He suggests that writers “think of the genre boundaries not as obstacles, but rather as dikes and levees that hold out the river or the sea.”
Genre cuts both ways–it can be an ally, setting the creative restrictions needed to bring a story world into full fruition. But it’s also a trap in some ways, especially in automatically excluding certain writers from consideration by the literary establishment because of what they write.
So what about a writer like Margaret Atwood, whose work is both literary and sometimes science fiction? Or a Neil Gaiman? Which categories work best? Which awards and accolades? Why? I’m still not clear.
While I puzzle over that, here’s one more from the incomparable Michael Jackson. We want you back Jack: