Genres and audiences

There has been a lot of discussion about the genre of science fiction lately--though I suppose there always is.  SF as marketing category, SF as set of reading protocols, SF as exemplifying didactic rationalism, even, heaven help us, SF as literature.

Genre (whether film noir, or jazz, or chili) is a good topic to argue about, because there is no bright-line rule dividing it from other examples of the form.  There is always ambiguity.  It is always, in some sense, statistical, and there are any number of edge conditions that those who favor liminal situations and ambiguity are naturally drawn to.

I've been thinking about genre lately.  I write SF, but don't read a lot of it.  I tend to read mysteries, when I read fiction--and Brain Thief is a mystery novel, perhaps before it is a science fiction novel.  But, at least at this point in my attempt to get some clarity, bootlegging yet another genre into the discussion probably is not helpful.

One thing about genre is that you can't understand it without understanding who consumes it.  And the audience is only implicit.  You can watch any number of Busby Berkeley production numbers or Disease of the Week movies without really being able to figure out who they were made for. And every artist is conscious of his or her audience.

And, no matter what its literary pretensions, there is a core audience for science fiction, a rationalist, slightly Aspergers, system-loving, covertly romantic, optimistic group. The core group consumes vast quantities of its favored product.  It's not the same audience in 2010 as it was in 1950, but certainly has some long-term similarities with it.  For example, this audience has always enjoyed communicating within itself.  It has new methods of doing it, but the drive has always been there.

I think understanding this core audience and its responses is the first step to understanding this genre.  When someone claims Margaret Atwood, say, has never written science fiction (she's said this herself), what he really means is, what Atwood has written does fulfil this core audience's needs.  It doesn't matter if the book is set in the future or whatever.  The core audience has a need for mental integration, for underlying system, for extrapolation, for daring and romance, for sacrifice and visual drama, that that particular book does not provide.

This is not the key or the solution.  But without taking the audience into account, and discussing only what is on the page, it's easy to go wrong.  It's the first step to understanding genre.

Comments

[Mark Tiedemann]

A Big Time Editor once (not that long ago) asked to look at a novel I'd told him about. This Editor wanted a Big Fat Space Opera. I pitched an idea that he thought was good and I wrote up the first 100 pages and outline and sent it to him. I had the vastness of space, secret plots, inscrutable aliens, and at the center a vanished planet Earth (snatched right out of the solar system). He rejected it, telling that it was not, in fact, Space Opera. When I ran down the list of all its components and asked How Come, his answer was telling.

"You're writing a novel of character. That's not space opera."

Now, this struck me then, and still strikes me, as just the flip side of the mainstream complaint about SF being incapable of sustaining character-based narratives, but right or wrong this was the bias this Editor brought to the discourse. If the story is too much about the character, something about that pulls it away from the main ground of SF (in this case specifically space opera). Atwood and her ilk believe they write about character and the context is secondary, even tertiary---which explains why they often do SF milieus so badly: they aren't paying due attention to the world. The irony, of course, is that by using SFnal tropes, a lot of readers, usually critics, can't see past the altered landscape to what these authors are doing with character, leading to critics like Sven Birkerts denigrating Atwood in "Oryx and Crake" and declaring that SF will never---NEVER---be Literature with a capital L because of the excess attention to premise at the expense of character.

This is by and large an absurd argument, but one stemming from the legacy of Henry James that both sides really need to grow up and get over. Still, traditionally, SF (and other examples of what Delany calls "paraliterary" work) is aimed at young people who don't handle "character" well and would rather not be bothered with all that mushy psychological stuff, just give them a rousing plot and maybe a machine to take apart----without, of course, the realization that the only reason the story is worth reading is because of the amount of "character" invested in the story anyway.

This is an issue of so-called reading protocols that actually have little to do with genre and everything to do with maturity---on both sides.