No Apologies! A Defense of Why Speculative Fiction Needs No Defense (Part 5)

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Literary sommeliers’ failure to acknowledge speculative fiction is a classic case of not realizing the forest for the trees because of cognitive dissonance that comes from bias. 

If you don't believe me (maybe you think they're just too smart to make the kinds of mistakes I'm accusing them of) watch how the irony comes through with absolute clarity from even a cursory glance at the canon.

Because buckle up kiddos. Much of the best literature in the English language is speculative.

The term “speculative fiction” was coined by Robert Heinlein. At the time he intended it as an exact synonym for science fiction, and didn’t even intend it to include fantasy. But like most coined phrases and the cranky old white folks who coin them, the word got away from his prescriptive ass, moved out, carved out a life of its own, and did things its parents wouldn't approve of while singing Billy Joel's "My Life."

It grew and changed despite what he wanted. People can be so pesky about ignoring curmudgeons who claim fiat over semantics. While there are still some Heinlein purists and some contention about precise meaning these days, speculative fiction describes a number of sub-genres mentioned earlier [science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, hero (or superhero) fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, alternate history, and possibly even more] and tends to encompass any kind of fiction where there is something "out of the ordinary" or "unrealistic" happening—something that couldn’t really happen, didn’t happen, or hasn’t happened yet.

In a sense, any time an author is saying “what if” in an impossible way it falls under the auspices of speculation, and speculative fiction. We will ignore the GLARING irony that this is essentially what any fiction does and that only NON-fiction is not in some way speculative. (I mean do people think Victorian Realism with it's alls-well-that-ends-well denouements and bad people--always disfigured physically--getting their comeuppance is even a little realistic?) Any fantastic element, be it technology yet to be invented, magic, or creatures that never were fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction in modern parlance.

Some try to limit the word’s scope to narrow various communities of readers--recently the die hard hold outs of "Only Sci Fi and Fantasy have basically been forced to put a few more chairs at the table because of the popularity of young adult distopian literature.  Others cast the umbrella far and wide, pulling in even magical realism, literary fantasy, and sometimes surrealism. (I suspect even our lit sommeliers will have to grudgingly admit that waking up to find out that you have turned into a cockroach does lack a certain realistic je ne sais qua about it--oh Kafka you genre hack!) 

~snotty voice~
Sorry, I don't read books where magical things happen.
It's not real literature.

Regardless of what sub-genre’s are included or excluded from our list, or why, there’s a bit of a linguistic shell game going on with speculative fiction and the gig is up.

The term “speculative fiction” enjoyed a modicum more respect in literary circles for a time, being used by snotty writers who didn't deign to write science fiction or fantasy (even though that's exactly what they were writing); however, most of speculative fiction’s traditional sub-genres generally carry the full stigma, and it seems like the literary community is starting to catch on to the semantic switcheroo.

Regardless of terms, lit snobs are running into the trouble of whether speculative fiction genre is a descriptive term or a prescriptive one, and the ramifications of trying to have it both ways. (Here's a hint: they can't.) If they use it to describe fiction with certain supernatural, preternatural, or theoretical elements within it, they have to accept that good fiction can be genre. If they use it to describe only trope-laden writing, they're going to have to release their knee-jerk prejudice of these elements as there are plenty of fresh, innovative writings that contain said elements. Their attempts to use terms however they goddamned well feel like it lack intellectual rigor and integrity and, to be blunt, comes across as exactly the petulant elitism it is.

While we might kerfluffle over the exact meaning of how the word "speculative" ought to be used, let’s keep using the Wikipedia conventions to get a sense of how it IS used. Let us also acknowledge (as our sommeliers seem to have conveniently ignored) that speculative fiction has been around for much, much longer than its current label. In much the same way as things reflected electromagnetic waves of 520-570 nanometers long before the angel begged to be allowed to call it “green,” speculative fiction has been around before it had a term to denigrate define it. If we look back through the canon literature we can find it replete with examples of speculative fiction.

And this is where the sommeliers get into big, big trouble.

The fountainhead of English literature is a story of a superhero vs. a horror monster. Beowulf's inhuman skill, prowess, and even breath-holding ability remind one more of Professor Xavier’s mutant condition than the human condition. He fights horrific monsters who embody the most terrible fears his culture can imagine, each with descriptions so grisly and horrid that they feel like they belong on the pages of a Stephen King novel. Easily this could be classified as heroic fiction, superhero fiction, horror, or supernatural fiction.

In the Green Knight our intrepid hero gets into a head chopping-off contest...AND HE LOSES—not exactly the pinnacle of realism.

Le’Mort De’Arthur has all the elements of fantasy, even at the time Malory wrote it.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are rife with gods and demi-gods.

Plato’s Republic is utopian fiction.

Gilgamesh is another tale of a superhero in a world of monsters.

Spencer’s The Fairy Queen was actually written with the express intention of creating speculative fantasy as a political allegory.

Shakespeare had fairies, ghosts, magic and still we would go so far as to suggest that perhaps he had a thing or two on the insightful side to say about the human condition and may even have written "real art."

Dante described an impossible journey through an impossible place—realism was not on the menu.

Easily two thirds of anything within the canon from before the Age of Reason is speculative fiction. But ask anyone in the literary community if the canon is filled with genre, and they would find the question absurd.

Of course there are more modern examples as well. Lewis Carroll created a very fantastic setting across two of the most well known books of all time. (Though placed in something called the “nonsensical genre,” these books arguably contain speculative elements--journeys, quests, dragons, talking animals, magic.)

Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein would be considered science fiction by any bellwethers today.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was always writing about dark and foreboding forces just beyond the realm of possibility, and “P’s Correspondence” is basically alternative history.

Mark Twain wrote repeatedly about time travel—is he a genre hack?

And this is to say nothing of more modern authors who wrote, or write, almost exclusively within speculative fiction like LeGuin, Poe, Orwell, Bradbury, and Clarke. Each has given us literature of tremendous value. And perhaps one of the most confusing case to people who attempt to define speculative fiction by its elements and all genre as sub-par writing, is the case of H.G. Wells. If we do widen our semantic net to include magical realism, literary fiction, and surrealism we must suddenly have Kafka, Marquez, and Esquivel—all strong, literary writers. But propose to literary sommeliers that these authors are genre and you might be run out of town to banjo music.

The question really isn’t why the literary community won’t let speculative fiction sit at the big kid’s table; the question is did they seriously think that by simply declaring that they were real and serious literature, they would fool the world? Did they seriously think no one would notice that over half the canon comprises a type of literature they say has no value? Did they seriously believe that we would fail to realize that when speculative fiction is good, they give it other names like “magical realism” —perhaps one of the most patently ironic names for a genre ever—or “literary fantasy” (as they have labeled Murakami...since he continues to have dimensional travel, fantasy elements, AND is probably going to win a Nobel Prize for literature one of these years). This whole charade of literary fiction is like the little kids at Thanksgiving putting on airs and insisting that their sippy cups are champagne flutes and that actually they are the adults.

Play your cards just right and "minority" becomes "elite."

These question of why this is happening is interesting, and the answer is more so. The term “genre” didn’t become a dirty word until the post-war era. The upper-middle class has struggled hard in the modern age to maintain its control over the “rules” of polite society, and for what should or shouldn’t be taken seriously.

They want to tell you how to talk, how to eat, how to converse, how to argue, how much body hair is okay, how to spend money, how to dress, how to bathe, how to debate, and of course, what to listen to, what to watch, and what to read. The last bastion for the bourgeoisie to claim they have the lease rights on what makes for propriety is to control the very conversation itself--as they have across many of the arts.

Is it any wonder that few new art forms are considered “real art” in their own generation and that their most stanch critics come from the upper middle class (usually of established academia)? Is it any wonder that with the incorporation of millions of new voices, Bloom and company STILL cannot seem to separate literary canon from the voices primarily of dead white males? And in much the same way that social justice has pointed out that the “tone” argument is just a way to maintain the status quo, so have many speculative authors realized that their struggle for acceptance is equally rooted in a judgment about what is valid that comes from a very specific power stratum, and a very specific demographic, and a very specific class. By controlling the “rules” it is entirely possible to rig the outcome, and so by defining “what is literature” the literary world has been able to keep the genre of literary fiction in power.

I'm not racist, sexist, ethnocentric, heteronormative, or anything like that!
Heterosexual, white, men really are the best writers.

And why not? Of course this is the case given the timber of the discourse. It becomes impossible for speculative fiction to “redeem” itself when none of its good examples “count.” Its illustrious tradition within the canon is conveniently ignored. Any modern examples of good speculative fiction are relabeled as literary fantasy or magical realism or just given a pass.

If you take away everything good, of course what is left is going to be...not good. A two year old can keep up with that concept. And then, of course, literary folk get to keep pointing at genre as inferior writing, and they have ensured that they will be correct. Further, when non-genre fiction is NOT held accountable for all the crap it produces, the issue of confirmation bias is compounded. No one is gathering up all the examples of mediocre gritty fiction in halfway houses with homophobic dads.

On to Part 6

The Mailbox: Good Books and Racists

Will going through traditional-publishing help your book be higher quality? Was Kipling a racist?

[Remember, keep sending in your questions to chris.brecheen@gmail.com with the subject line "W.A.W. Mailbox" and I will answer each Friday.  I will use your first name ONLY unless you tell me explicitly that you'd like me to use your full name or you would prefer to remain anonymous.  My comment policy also may mean one of your comments ends up in the mailbox. .] 

Samantha asks:

I've read in a like four different places that one of the benefits of traditional publishing is that your work will be scrutinized backwards and forwards. Given some of the crap that gets self-published, maybe that's not such a bad idea. Even the five star books are crap–it's just the writer's friends doing a bunch of fake reviews. I want the book I put out to be good, so maybe traditional publishing is better, no? What do you think?

If you want to write a better book Samantha, no one is stopping you. It's not like when you go to submit self-published books the Microsoft Paperclip comes up and says, "It looks like you're trying to self-publish a novel. Would you like to add some horrible grammar mistakes," or an error message that says "We have detected that this is your eighth draft of My Greatamerican Novel. Please revert to your first draft before publishing."

The only thing stopping most people from writing a better book is their egotacular sense that they are already fucking perfect or their pants-wetting impatience to be published before they're ready.

Can I just pause for a second and say that I'm glad to be off the hate mail barrage of Blogust. I know it gets a lot of traffic, but what usually happens is that the hate mail is about me, and I'd much rather answer questions about writing.  I am not so choleric when I'm not returning fire. So thank you for having a question about writing.

I'm out of traditional publishing for my own reasons, but for others there are pros and cons for both. However, the ability of the traditional publishing to put out better quality work is a bit of an "ad hoc ergo proctor hoc" fallacy. There are reasons to do traditional publishing, but this one is pretext.

Because of the cost of printing, writing has often had a strange seat among art and entertainment. Most arts there are expressions for amateurs, semi-professionals, professionals, and the extremely successful. Community playhouses, local theater, troupes, and Broadway all have different levels of skill and talent even if everyone is serious about their craft. You can easily be known as a local painter and even scrape out a living without the slightest world renown. Musicians can get gigs and get paid in local bars, small venues, and big regional venues long before they do album tours or have a fan from the other side of the country. Only writing has seemed to have a dichotomy where the artist is either published or not. (Of course, the reality is that there are small presses–most operating locally–but the perception of publication as that rubicon of quality is undeniable.)

The sense of this dichotomy has persisted even after printing costs dropped in the sixties, seventies, and especially eighties making smaller and smaller print runs possible–thus less and less financial risk. Even as the dichotomy became more and more of a continuum.

What computers have done is to restore writing as an art form with a full continuum of quality much like music experienced a decade ago. Now everyone can put their work out there and hoof it to promote themselves. Yes, that means that not everyone is spectacular (I'm sure not!) but even mediocre writers can carve out a niche with some fans and do their thing. Bloggers exist from the amateur making the price of a movie once a year to the slick famous writers pulling down six figures. Writing has become more like the other art forms where you can still perform in front of an audience and make a pittance while you improve your skills.

Does that mean there are some crummy books out there. It surely does. But anyone who reads a lot already knows there are some pretty shitty published books out there complete with typos and missing punctuation and everything. While traditionally published books tend to be a little better, there is no guarantee. I remember my friend Jason and I used to pick up a dollar's worth of the worst looking books we could find from the 5¢ table at the used book store and see who could find the one that was the worst.

Loser had to buy the winner a Super Big Gulp and four games of Ninja Gaiden.

(By the way, I can't think of any customer generated rating system that isn't notoriously "ballot stuffed" by friends and family [or hired shills for bigger stuff] of the creators. It's not just Amazon or Goodreads book reviews. I find ignoring the stars and reading the non-hyperbolic reviews is usually most informative about the actual product.)

If you want to write a good book, write a good book. There's nothing stoping you but your own impatience or hubris. Put it through multiple revisions. Have it professionally content edited. Hire a copy editor who makes three figures an hour to comb through it for the typos you missed (instead of your friend who's an English major). Get lots of feedback from many different people who read a lot (and then take it to heart.) Go medieval on its ass.

Because here's the truth and there's no way of getting around it; you would have to do all that revision anyway. There's a myth that publishers will assign your recently shat out word babies an editor and it basically isn't true until/unless you are already established author (and even then it's not like they do it out of generosity–their cost will be folded into your contract negotiations). You'll have a copy editor look over the galley proofs with a fine-toothed comb, but that's only after you've gotten through all the layers of rejection.

If you don't hand them a cleaned up, multi-drafted work, they won't say "Let's clean this up because fuck; I just know there's genius under all these layers of missing commas and wrong homophones!" They will just say "This shit is the shittiest shit on shit street in Shitsville."

See that's where perception and reality diverge, Samantha, and why we have that sense of a book as either being "Worth Publishing™" or not (instead of a continuum like other arts). The publisher isn't working with you to help you create that better book. They just approve it or don't. It's more like gate keepers act as a hazing process.

Books that come out the far end of this process tend to be better quality not because of anything the publisher did, but because each time they were rejected, the writer went back and worked harder to improve the work. (Books right on the edge of possibility sometimes get a few thoughtful suggestions from a publisher or agent and encouragement to resubmit a later draft, but most just get a form letter. "No. Fuck you. Your book sucks. Go away.") The writer is still the one doing all the revision and hiring editors and doing all that work.

The problem is that non-traditional publishing lets a writer bypass that rejection and go for the instant gratification. Who wouldn't want to just push a button and skip all that fucking self doubt and work? Well, if it turns out if you want to be a good self-published writer, you have to resist that temptation and haze yourself. Unless you have deplorable impulse control (by the way, no one who sits down and writes a freaking novel has deplorable impulse control), nothing is stopping you from producing work of higher quality.

But it's not the publisher making your book be better. It's like those kids stories where the power was inside the character all along. Except...like....with writing and shit.

Eli writes:

My friend keeps claiming Rudyard Kipling was racist. Can you set him straight.

My reply:

I'm afraid not, Eli. He's been dead a long time. I'm not sure anyone could set him straight even when he was alive. He seemed pretty strident in his assumptions about....

Oh you probably meant set your friend straight, huh? Okay.

Yes I can see how that would be an easy mistake to make, what with Kipling writing White Man's Burden and all. Plus the vast collection of work he did portraying other cultures that are so infamously ethnocentric they have actually lead Edward Said to the genesis of an entire school of literary criticism which could essentially be called EuroAmericans Are TOTES FUCKING Racist. Even though Just So Stories are quite literally the introductory go to example for post colonial theory of sneering imperialism, I'm sure it's just a big misunderstanding. The fact that Jungle Book is an allegory for Britian's incursion into India that literally uses humans staring down animals and cowing them with their civilizedness, and at one point a British railway builder shooting a crocodile into three pieces with an elephant gun is, I'm sure, just coincidence.

Of course he's racist, Eli. Kipling's writing is basically the quintessential example of how racism can be unconsciously condescending and not necessarily hate-filled. The best thing we can say about him is that back in Kipling's day they may not have called it racism. They just thought it was pretty self evident that white people totes fucking ruled and that they had a duty to teach backward people how to live their lives properly. Even as he satirized U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, his larger body of works pretty obviously indicates that he really did feel it was Europe's duty to show everyone else how to live and lift them out of poverty and ignorance.

He might not be racist in the "Get away from me you dirty savages!" way that many people of his time were, but rather in the ethnocentric way that doles out value judgements on another culture through the lens of one's own. (This is why modern anti-racist movements literally talk about "decolonizing" your thoughts/words/behaviors/government/economics.)

Just because there's a gap between white supremacists burning crosses on lawns and well meaning but clueless folks telling people of color how they ought to live does not make the latter un-racist. It's just racist in a slightly more invisible way. (Although it is largely only "slightly more invisible" to white people).

In fact, most white people (or folks with internalized colonial attitudes) still haven't learned this lesson today. You can look around and see how the way non-white cultures dress or the type of music they like used as justification basically for killing them. The entire justification of right wing fiscal policy has ideas baked into it like: "Those people just want to live off government handouts." And liberal areas have their versions as well––a more refined sense of what SORTS of people belong in the neighborhood. All of this often said by folks who think they can't possibly be racist because they haven't committed any hate crimes.

Culturally we falling into the trap of realizing that racism is bad, but not knowing what racism IS.

Kipling's attitudes may have been a sign of the times, and Kipling may have been more open minded than some of his fellow countrymen, but he's pretty patronizing and judgmental and ethnocentric and imperialist and yes, racist.

I'm afraid you owe your friend a Super Big Gulp and four games of Ninja Gaiden.

Call For Submissions: Y.A. Stand Alone Book

The adults-only book with this same title is...
quite different.

What is the best young adult fiction book?

So, a thing happened in these last two days.

On Tuesday, I announced that Y.A. would be the subject of the next poll, and in just these forty-eight hours, I've had about a dozen people tell me how excited they are about the poll, but that they're not sure how on Earth they're going to keep it down to a few submissions.

So I decided to break up the Y.A. polls a bit.

This month we will do Y.A. stand alone books. Next month we will do Y.A. series, and in November we will do Y.A. authors.

September: best stand alone Y.A. book. 

As many, many, many YA books are eventually given sequels it is not necessary that your nomination be a stand alone book, but simply that you are only nominating the one book.

Thus, if you thought The Hunger Games was the best Y.A. book ever, but you thought that Mockingjay was a cash-cow, bullshit, slapped-together, story with contrived premises and shoehorned characters that was easily one of the worst books you've read since White Teeth, you can nominate JUST The Hunger Games.

Also, if you really like a series as a whole (like Divergent), I encourage you to wait until next month when the poll will be Y.A. series.

The definition of "young adult fiction" is pretty elastic. It is not kids books and it is not adult books but it's pretty tough to define exactly where either of those demarcations begins or ends exactly. Even the most iconic and best selling young adult series of all time (Harry Potter) arguably starts out as a children's book (and a case could even be made that Deathly Hollows is an adult book, not a young adult book). So, as usual, I'm depending on you all to use your best judgement in the nomination process.  If you nominate The Tommyknockers or Green Eggs and Ham you obviously missed the point but if you think an advanced Roald Dahl or easy Steinbeck novel is Y.A., I'm not going to argue.

If you feel very strongly about what is or isn't Y.A., you are welcome to open a discussion in the comments but I would ask that you play very nice with the people who have made nominations that you wouldn't. Nothing pours cold water on a possibly awesome conversation like "Clearly you don't even know what Soandso even MEANS..."

The rules:

1- You may nominate two (2) books. (If you nominate more than two books, I take your first two nominations and ignore the rest cause I'm a megalomanic on a power trip who insists you have reading comprehension and follow rules.) If you have "a dozen favorites," I would recommend waiting for a few days to see if some of them don't get nominated by other people first. If you can't possibly limit it down to two books you may try bribing me with sexual favors, but I'm actually pretty picky, so it really helps to look good in a pleated skirt.

2- As stated above, this is about individual books, but they can be books in a series.

3- You can second as many nominations as you like, and in fact, you should. Given the interest in this poll, it is highly unlikely that I will be able to take every nomination, so only the ten or twelve with the most "seconds" will be going on to the poll.

Please don't forget to make your nomination as a comment on this post rather than as a reply on the social media where I cross post the blog. I'll take them from any medium, but you are much less likely to get a second if you just reply to this on G+ or Facebook.

The Flames of Blogust

So we failed to hit Blogust's goals.

We weren't even close.

But before Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me" had even finished its piano/keyboard duet intro and before I had pulled out a tumbler glass to get busy drinking myself into oblivion (which is no easy task when one doesn't drink, despite the phenylethylamine in hot chocolate), Blog strolled in.

"Oh for fucks sake," Blog said. "Are you fucking kidding me?"

"What?" I asked, plugging in my electric kettle.

"You're not even thinking of moping are you?" Blog asked. "Because this post-failure pep talk thing is going to wear thin as a cliche to your audience if you keep using it every time you fail at something. Besides we already had the whole poignant failure moment with the Cool Runnings clip and the Inception music and everything. What was the point of that if you're going to get all maudlin about it anyway?"

"I'm just sort of pissed at how much we missed by," I said. "Over ten thousand."

Blog sighed. "It's like talking to a wall sometimes. If I had a head, I'd be shaking it."

I pursed my lips.

"Okay look," Blog said. "Last four or five months around here have been 32, 33 thousand right?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Kind of disappointing, really. Looked like a plateau," Blog said.

"Right."

"Well in one month you came within spitting distance of 40,000, you wrote some awesome articles, you started a couple of major undertakings. You didn't have a single day under 1000. So you didn't hit your goal. We both knew it was ridiculous. The point is that in trying you kicked ass. Writing is not a hail mary hobby. It's always about working the ball down the field.

"More importantly, you also learned a valuable lesson about the line between quantity and quality and how more isn't always better. Churning out articles didn't make you feel like a creative writer, it made you feel like a content writer. So now you've learned something really important about how you always worry about writing more. Fuggedaboutit. Use that insight to write my entries at a more reasonable pace. Don't worry so much about the day off or the jazz hands days and focus on nailing it when the real articles land."

I nodded. "I guess that's true, huh?"

"You bet your left testicle it is. Now stop being melodramatic and drinking hot chocolate with whipped cream. September is already three days old and I need you at your fighting weight before I start smacking you around to get me a million hits by the new year..."

No Apologies! A Defense of Why Speculative Fiction Needs No Defense (Part 4)

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There is no need for lovers of speculative fiction to be apologists for there is a strata of speculative fiction that is good--even very good, literary, and possibly "the best writing you'll ever read in English." This strata is not particularly rare or hard to find either. There is no need for fans to cry obsequiously: “If you but dig through the mountain of crap, quality exists. Diamonds in the rough are there if only you look hard enough…” There is no call for such a disclaimer that most is bad but some is good. Indeed, the literary world misses the boat by only looking at a genre’s worst contribution, and they are fools to do so.

I apologize for Fahrenheit 451.
Would it be too ironic if I burnt it?

Every genre, indeed all fiction, and actually even all forms of art, have within them a continuum of quality. It isn't exactly shocking to see such a continuum within speculative fiction.

“Realistic” fiction is no stranger to flat characters. Realistic fiction is no stranger to tropes. Realistic fiction has settings that do nothing to add to the story. Some realistic fiction is good, considered, and exemplary of its craft and other realistic fiction is hastily produced and of little worth to humanities (except for possibly the observations of lots of such work for general trends).

Art in general has the same continuum. Television, film, theater, painting, and sculpture all have quality examples and poor examples of work. Therefore, of COURSE genre fiction has poor quality, and bad examples.

This is not a remarkable observation.

The problem is focusing on this poor quality work to the exclusion of everything else. The problem is failure to acknowledge poor quality in all art mediums—including the vaunted “literary” fiction—and treating genre like it is somehow special in this regard. The problem is ignoring genre fiction's contributions to great writing, literature, and even canon.

Genre has given us The Maltese Falcon, The Moonstone, The Tropic of Cancer, Blood Meridian, Brave New World, 1984, Invisible Man, Animal Farm, Slaughterhouse Five, Wuthering Heights, Lady in White, A Christmas Carol and so much more. I realize these titles in no way influence modern western literature, but they....

Oh wait. They do.

No one conveniently forgets the Raymond Carver when they’re talking about minimalism. No one would describe minimalism only in terms of its worst, late-eighties emulators. Why then are they comfortable with forgetting great speculative fiction when examining the latest slap-dash 10-page filler piece for the September issue of Asimov magazine? Indeed, if we rounded up all of the worst minimalism we could find from every source, and CONVENIENTLY left out Carver, Wolff, Lish, Beattie, and a few others of note, we could probably make a stunningly good case that all minimalism is always atrocious writing.

See how that works? I can do it too.

No one is defending this.
Staring maybe, but not defending.

Let's make sure we understand that no one is suggesting that a conversation discussing quality would not be worthwhile. Speculative fiction fans routinely castigate their own for prose quality. Though many (correctly) point out that J.K. Rowling got nearly an entire generation hooked on reading, only the most rose glasses fans don't know her writing has some deep troubles. It is the subject of considerable amusement in the reading world that during the last week or two before the release of Deathly Hollows, a copy of the book was leaked online, but readers were unable to distinguish whether it was genuine or second rate fan fiction.

Don't even get me started on the uncharitable things said about Stephanie Myers's writing.

No one is defending the dregs of speculative fiction, and no serious writer or student of craft merely wants to be given leave to write at non-engaging level because they've made the setting be....IN SPACE.

But... (and this is a big but)

There is a real and genuine harm being done by our well-intentioned sommeliers by hyper-focusing on the worst that speculative fiction has to offer, ignoring the best, and wading into the discourse with raging confirmation biases and knee-jerk prejudice. With their selective vision about genre fiction, the sommeliers have set themselves up to always be right. Their “proof” is irrefutable because they ignore any examples that disprove them. Their own offerings unassailable because they cheerfully ignore the gallons of ink spilled on mediocre and bad writing with their own genre, and they ignore the best that speculative fiction has to offer.

The problem is the corner they have painted themselves into with this kind of rank elitism and blatant lito-centric value judgments. In declaring genre inferior, they have pitted themselves mostly against semantics.

And examining those semantics reveals how absurd their position is.

Especially facing trends of 21st century authors to defy genre, sommeliers myopic prejudice in this regard has become particularly...(what's the nicest way to put this?)....idiotic. In recent decades, the presence of a speculative element—be it a monster, a space ship, or an inhuman power—automatically makes a piece "genre," which to their minds means that it cannot be good. After all, they argue, look at how much bad speculative fiction there is. Realism trumps! And while this is prejudice is damaging in and of itself, it requires a complementary perception to be complete and that truly demonstrates the power of this prejudice to create blinders that are as justified and defended as the blinders surrounding racism or sexism or homophobia. (Again, I want to point out that this illustrates a behavior pattern of prejudice in action and is not meant in any way to establish a moral equivalency to bigotry.)

It's not enough to only focus on the bad in something. If you really want to be judgmental, you also have to ignore the good. If you ever want to see a Creative Writing instructor with a no-genre policy lose their shit, ask them what “genre” means specifically, listen carefully to their definition, and point out exceptions to their criteria in the reading list they gave you for the class. (Or maybe this is just me.)

Because here's what happens: when lit snobs see magic and supernatural entities within excellent literature, suddenly it is no longer speculative fiction. Suddenly it gets a pass.

Ain't nothing here but us grittily realistic oracular witches.

If it’s modern fiction, it is usually relabeled as “magical realism." Fantasy that lit snobs like becomes "literary fantasy." Even the dreaded science fiction" gets relabeled as "futurism" (just ask Atwood fans).

This is where the blind pathology of prejudice and rank confirmation and disconfirmation bias comes into the literary community’s relationship with speculative fiction. This is where its fans and writers have the most legitimate right to be outraged. It’s bad enough to focus on the worst of a genre’s contribution as exemplary, but the sin is compounded when the best of a genre’s contribution is reclassified, or isn’t counted at all. In many ways it is analogous to so many other kinds of stereotyping and prejudice (racial, sexist, sexuality-based) where only the examples that fit preconceived notions of what to expect are “counted” and the rest are forgotten, rationalized, or otherwise converted into token non-examples.

The literary community is particularly guilty of this prejudice. Rather than simply admit that there is good science fiction and bad science fiction (or fantasy or whatever), they twist themselves into pretzels trying to create new categories so they can go right on claiming that all science fiction is bad. You might think students of humanities ought to know better than to behave in such ways, but if anything they just have more sophisticated and well expressed rationales to justify what amounts to the highest order of knee-jerk intolerance.

I wish I could even say that this is always an unconscious manifestation of human failing. Sadly no. Sometimes this is just lit snobs being giant dillholes. Sometimes these actions are absolutely deliberate and conscious and jerkwadian to the extreme.

Kazuo Ishiguro, a multi-award winning author who wrote Remains of the Day, wrote a book called Never Let Me Go, which is about...

[spoiler alert]

[seriously walk away if you've never read Never Let Me Go]

[totes not kidding; it's a good read]

[Just go down to the paragraph below the next picture.]

...the young adulthood of a group of clones before their organs are harvested. It's a great book. There’s symbolism, theme, setting, marvelously powerful character development, and a sensational social critique behind the allegory of what is literally going on.

However, Never Let Me Go is, a speculative fiction novel. It has human clones, organ harvesting, medical technology that is way beyond where we are now, and it takes place in the 90’s on an alternate timeline. This novel isn’t “realistic.” Yet because Never Let me Go is good—because it had deep subtext, social critique, symbolism, strong characterization, and was written by an MFA with a fistful of “literary” awards—there has been a strong reluctance to define it as genre.

Clones. Organ harvests. Crazy advanced medical tech. Alternative 90's timeline.
But that doesn't make it SPECULATIVE. Come on!

Well why not? If speculative fiction means “Presence of speculative elements” why wouldn’t this novel count?

Sadly, the reticence of lit snobs about Never Let me Go is no isolated incident surrounding a single author. We see this trend time and time again especially as genre-bending becomes more and more compelling to our contemporary, powerful writers. If a work of speculative fiction is good, it dodges the label of genre.

Ask a typical “no genre” creative writing teacher if a ghost story is genre, and they will say yes because ghosts aren't realistic. Ask them if Toni Morrison writes genre, and they will say no with a condescending shake of their eyes and a "what-a-sweet-idiot" smile that lets you know it is only their fear of harassment complaints that keeps them from patting you on the head. Ask them to explain Beloved, and with spittle flying from their lips, they will tell you to leave their classroom if you’re just going to be difficult. (Really.)

Ghost stories are speculative.
Unless they're really good.
And then they're....um.... Fuck you; see me after class.

On to Part 5

Poll Result: Best Multi-Author Poll

Good Omens took an immediate lead and never let go. I may have to give it another chance (fourth time? fifth? I never seem to get past the first fifty pages). I will also have to check out The Mote in God's Eye as I'd never even heard of that before this month.

While I was a bit sorry to see so many ties and crazy close races unbroken in the lower half of the poll, posts and calls for more votes didn't seem to be having much effect, so I finally called it and posted the results. Clearly our resident Pratchett fainboi never did manage to rally the troops, or The Long Mars would have gotten much more love, so you can take these results without the grain of salt needed in the last few months.

Massage your raised upper forebrain for Young Adult titles you would like to see on September's poll. I'll be calling for nominations on Thursday.

Burning Man Debriefing

I survived!

I'm home from Burning Man, which means I have showered, eaten something that wasn't pulled out of a cooler and sniffed to see if it had gone off, and slept blissfully in my own bed, but it doesn't mean much more than that. I still have to unpack, and the Hall of Rectitude has four days worth of messy super heroes to clean up after.

But when it comes to my readers, I just can't quit you, so I pause in the process of the massive de-dusting and catch up to give you a quick life update.

• If the artistic goal is to feel alone in a crowd, this year was an unmitigated success. The loneliness went up to eleven, and I experienced it early and often. Despite being a very difficult Burn for me on a mental and emotional level, it was phenomenally crucibleish (it's totes a word). I got more out of the sense of isolation this year than I ever have before. Arguably even more than I could handle. Lots of deep introspection...and then lots more.
• The benefit of this is that I think I'm ready to start a major piece of fiction about Burning Man. It's an idea I conceived two years ago, got ready to write last year (but then, suddenly....baby); however, now I have really spent some time in the head of the character, and I'm ready to get to work. It will probably take me at least until next year before it's ready (and 2015 might be ambitious) but I feel more focused and less distracted than last year.
• Every year I take my Kindle (wrapped up in plastic baggies to protect it) or a book and never end up having time to read. This year I took one paperback figuring that it was probably unnecessary, but what the hell. I ended up in camp due to a misunderstanding and I was waiting for someone I thought was going to be back "any minute now" for the entire day. I realized that I have been so busy, I haven't really done much binge reading lately, and I vowed to set some time aside for that.
• I had the most surreal language/feminist moment at Burning Man (so naturally I must share): I thought going to be one of my friends (who knew my proclivities) saying "It's okay for you to look, Chris," when she had on nothing but fishnets and underwear; however, it actually happened the next day in the line to the porta potties when a woman caught me trying very hard to look at anything but her, she struck up a conversation with me and we talked for a while about male gaze and unwanted attention, and the line between dressing to impress and wanting to be admired but not leered at. She asked me if I would like to stare, and I think I blushed and nodded or said "Uh-huh" or something stupid. She responded, "I *want* you to objectify me." I quickly (and clumsily) changed the subject to how that word probably actually meant GRAMMATICALLY objectify rather than some sense of treating them like a physical object and how if she wanted me to objectify her, it made her the subject of that desire and might destroy the universe as easily as dividing by zero. She didn't let me get away so easily though, and playfully insisted I tell her how hot she was in very...explicit terms. I was probably a deep shade of purple in the middle of a graphic description of oral sex before she finally let me off the hook with a very huge hug (and a bit of a wiggle). This is just shit that happens out there. Like...every hour.
• There is always one more piece of art you haven't seen. Always.
• The weather (after Monday, of course) was almost impossibly mild this year. Seriously, I feel bad for people who think that's how it's always going to be. We didn't even really get more than those calm breezy dust storms and then only a few.
• Sleeping three to a double size bed is possible (and in my case, not nearly as risqué as it sounds like it should be), but the person on the edge is going to have dreams that they are Tyrion Lannister in the Eyrie Sky Cells for pretty much the entire night.

We'll kick back up Writing About Writing's update schedule in earnest starting tomorrow.