Science Fiction, Ghosts, and Detectives - a genre mumble

[steepholm]

‘[Ballard’s] fabulistic style led people to review his work as science fiction. But that's like calling Brave New World science fiction, or 1984.' Robert Weil, Ballard's editor at Norton.

This kind of statement frequently causes snorts of scorn and outrage (one nostril apiece) amongst the SF community, as any reader of Ansible – from where this was drawn – will know. And it’s easy to see why, especially when it is authors who write SF that make it, Margaret Atwood being the most notorious. I think the outrage is justified, on three related grounds:

1. Ingratitude: these writers are biting the hand that feeds them. We all know how sharp that tooth can be.
2. Taking credit where its not due. What could be more galling that to watch a novelist being congratulated on their originality in the literary press, for using an idea that has been part of the SF landscape for decades – and then to hear both congratulater and congratulate dismiss SF as a farrago of flying squids and ray guns?
3. The sheer illogicality of making a special pleading argument that goes like this:

All SF is bad

But look at this example of SF! It’s well written, has deep characterization, is philosophically provocative, etc., and has all the qualities you profess to admire!

I agree that this is a good book. And for that reason I deny that it’s SF at all. As I said, all SF is bad.

I don’t consider myself an SFianado at all, but of course I get irritated by all this too, in sympathy. But I want to get a little beyond irritation, and ask whether there’s anything more substantial behind these arguments?

More under the cut

I’m prompted to ask by two things. One is a letter to the latest Ansible from Fred Lerner, provoked by the quotation above:

It depends upon how you define "science fiction". If your approach is thematic, or based on narrative strategy, then of course most of Ballard -- as well as Brave New World and 1984 -- are science fiction. But if you use the definition-by-provenance approach -- "science fiction is that body of literature produced within the science fiction community" -- then Brave New World and 1984 would be excluded. You may have read my arguments for that approach to definition in Lofgeornost (or in "A Bookman's Fantasy"); I'll just say here that there are a lot of things that can meaningfully be said about the literature that Our Gang produces that isn't applicable to Huxley and Orwell.

Now, I haven’t read Lerner’s article (maybe others have?), but in this abbreviated form it seems like a circular version of the special pleading argument mentioned above: if you decide in advance that Ballard isn’t part of the ‘science fiction community’ then what he writes won’t be science fiction. But how do you decide that? What does ‘science fiction community’ actually mean? If there’s more to this argument, I’d be interested to hear it.

That was as far as I’d got until I heard John Sutherland on Radio 4 this morning, talking about ghost stories. He was arguing for their importance and longevity. After all, Hamlet and Wuthering Heights are ghost stories, he pointed out. And I found myself starting to say to the kettle (for I was making coffee at the time) – yes, well, they’re stories with ghosts, and the ghosts are pretty important, but it seems kind of misleading to call them ghost stories in the way that you might call ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to Ye, My Lad’ or The Woman in Black ghost stories.

Hang on, hissed the kettle – aren’t you making exactly the same move you deplore in those who say that Brave New World isn’t SF?

Well – am I being snotty? To be honest, I don’t know. I’ve been trying to see if I can find any respectable arguments to give my gut instinct a more attractive gloss. It’s not a matter of canonicity or quality, anyway: I’d have no hesitation in calling A Christmas Carol a ghost story, and that’s pretty darn canonical. I’d be fairly happy to call Beloved a ghost story too – and that's a great novel by any standards. (I love M. R. James too, for that matter.)

So, what’s going on? Thinking about it, I can see that I’d also be happier to call Hamlet a ghost story than Macbeth, and happier to call Macbeth a ghost story than Richard III or Julius Caesar, though ghosts appear in all of them. Why so? Is it to do with the centrality of the ghosts? Or the function they fulfil? My first thought was that there might be a distinction between ghosts as external, unambiguously supernatural beings (as M. R. James’ all are), and ghosts as possibly projections of a human character’s conscience or fears – a subtlety perhaps more likely to win literary respect from our psychologically-interested age. But the latter interpretation applies as much to Richard III and Julius Caesar as to the governess in The Turn of the Screw or to Scrooge, so that doesn’t really wash.

To widen my confusion, I’m also asking myself questions such as: can a poem of fourteen lines not be a sonnet? Can a story about a detective solving a murder not be a detective story? Will we hear (or do we already hear) pundits say things like, ‘People often call P.D. James a writer of detective fiction, but that would be like calling Poe, or Wilkie Collins, a writer of detective fiction!’ And would they have a point? (The answer to that one is ‘No’. Actually, perhaps the strange thing is that I haven't heard anyone say this.) What about a book in which a librarian tracks down a borrower who has failed to pay two years’ of fines, and brings him to book? Is that a detective story? Or a librarian story? Or a stalker story...?

I definitely need more coffee.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I've written a poem in fourteen lines that isn't a sonnet. A sonnet has an octet and a sestet, and my non-sonnet had two 7 line things.

Can't help with your other questions...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Some of Shakespeare's sonnets are really just three quatrains and a couplet - but I take your point. The 7+7 division really doesn't feel sonnety at all.

Not that all sonnets have 14 lines, but let's not even go there...

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I think your point about the centrality of ghosts is correct. But it *is* a difficult question -- a recent(ish) book that illustrates the issue clearly, I think, is Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. To me, this is a detective story first and foremost, and only sfnal if you are one of those people who insist that an alternate timeline makes it sfnal. To me, that's not enough, because the sf takes place in the head of the author before the book makes it to the page. It's different from alternate timeline stories where that is a central part of the plot, and where at least some of the characters are aware of/directly concerned in the shift.

For me, I've just never understood the problem -- why shouldn't authors be free to write in more than one genre? And why should they feel constrained to define themselves by one genre? After all, you write fiction AND non-fiction ...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

For me, I've just never understood the problem -- why shouldn't authors be free to write in more than one genre? And why should they feel constrained to define themselves by one genre? After all, you write fiction AND non-fiction.

True, and I don't think there really is a problem, except when claims of generic purity are used to put authors and works down. Some of my best friends are hybrids. But I think it's interesting to examine one's own reactions, and ask whether there's any really useful hidden amongst the habits and prejudices.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I remember twenty-odd years ago two of my friends were arguing in a pub about whether 1984 was science fiction or not, and one of them suddenly said "Look, there's a quick way to settle this. Kalypso, have you read 1984?" "Yes." "See, she's read it. It can't be science fiction."

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Congratulations - you are now officially a shibboleth!

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

I think you can sort-of see a science fiction community of authors; the ones who go to cons, or read each others' work and respond to its arguments or pull out themes from it (so, say, there might have been a "Singularity SF" community for the last 10 years or so) or at least agree they're writing SF. Though since Ballard had stories in Interzone I think it'd still be bloody difficult to say he wasn't writing in an SF community of some sort!

But I don't think that means something written by an author who doesn't hang around with other SF authors can't be SF. I mean, 1984 was set in the future, it's about the effects that a technologically and socially different society have on a person within it- it's quite Le Guin-ish, except bleaker- and it's infulenced later SF dystopias. Saying that "literary" is the One True Way to consider it would seem daft.
(If Atwood acknowledged that she does bloody well write spec-fic and met some other authors doing similar stuff, her SFnal elements might be better and less reinventing of boring old wheels. But that's a whole nother snark.)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

As calimac points out below, I was a bit confused about Lerner, who wasn't excluding Ballard but Huxley and Orwell. I'm still not entirely convinced that what Lerner's talking about is the best way to define the genre, though, even if it's interesting in its own right.

[sheenaghpugh]

I think there is a distinction between a ghost story and a story with ghosts in - in the former case I'd expect the ghost to be pretty damn central to the proceedings. The Moonstone is a detective story; Emma, IMO, has elements of the detective story rather than being one. But all the best novels cross genres anyway, and the best writers are not silly enough to be ashamed of genre elements if the book needs them. Lerner's idea strikes me as plain bloody silly - "if it's produced by someone I consider to be with the SF community it's SF"?

can a poem of fourteen lines not be a sonnet?

Yes. But it can't avoid engaging with the sonnet, because any reader will at once think "sonnet", so if it isn't one, it needs to not be one and yet have 14 lines for a reason (I know what I mean, even if it doesn'r appear to make much sense...) I'd call it a deliberate non-sonnet.

[deborah]

a deliberate non-sonnet

What an interesting idea. Personally, I would take out the "deliberate", because who knows what the poet was intending, but you are right that a 14 line poem will engage with sonnet preconceptions whether it's a sonnet or not. How very Reader Response -- I like this.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

Yes. But it can't avoid engaging with the sonnet, because any reader will at once think "sonnet", so if it isn't one, it needs to not be one and yet have 14 lines for a reason

Yes. Just that, exactly.

[deborah]

cqs says that he dislikes fantasy and loves science fiction, therefore book that he loves are science fiction, QED. This leads to much hilarity when he is defining, I don't know, The Curse of Chalion as science fiction.

More seriously, I think there are two things going on. One is the (I think) bogus question of quality. All science fiction is bad so George Orwell didn't write science fiction. All anime is bad so Miyazaki doesn't make anime. All romance is bad so Georgette Heyer and Jenny Crusie haven't written romances. All children's literature is simplistic so Scott Westerfeld books are incorrectly marketed to children.

At best, this argument shows a massive ignorance of the field about which one is speaking. At worst, it shows an incredible snobbery. "I don't want to admit to being one of those people, the ones I denigrate and mock for their plebeian reading/viewing/listening tastes, so I have to explain how the thing I like is different from the things they like." I certainly admit that I've done it myself, and as I've gotten older I've come to understand that what actually is going on is more a matter of exposure and crossover appeal. Anime happens not to be a genre which appeals to me, but Miyazaki makes movies which have enough crossover appeal with genres which do appeal to me that their high quality is accessible to me in a way that high-quality anime movies without that crossover appeal are not.

But there is a secondary question of genre. Genre tropes are more substantial than just "contains ghosts", or "contains a love story". When I claim that Anansi Boys reads to me as young adult, clearly I was recognizing something in the story structure and writing style, because the book doesn't even have an adolescent hero. There's a reason that the m/m erotic original fiction written by both amateurs and professionals who are on the periphery of the fanfic slash community is often called "original slash" instead of "gay erotica"; it follows the genre conventions of a different group of stories.

But the "good books aren't science fiction" crowd fall down under this definition as well. Handmaid's Tale, 1984, Brave New World, Never Let Me Go: all of these books absolutely follow the conventions of science fiction. Some of them have crossover appeal and crossover genre, I admit. Handmaid's Tale certainly also follows the genre conventions of feminist fiction, for example. But each of these stories has the character types, the reveal structure, the thematic structure, the narrative pattern, and basically the entire New Critical toolbox of science fiction patterns.

Hamlet, on the other hand, doesn't do this. There's a structure to a ghost story, and we all know it. For one thing, a ghost story is intended to frighten the listener into their particular way. And ghost story is ultimately about the ghost in a way that neither Hamlet and Macbeth is. They're not entirely absent of those ghost story conventions. For example, the ghost leads Hamlet into tragedies he wouldn't necessarily have found for himself, and Macbeth is arguably living in a ghost story although the story we are watching is not the ghost story he is living. This isn't a question about quality or some untouchable genre-free purity of Shakespeare. They could be absolutely terrible plays and their stories would still not be ghost stories.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that: I think you're pretty much right, all the way down the line. I shall of course have to go away and see if I can pick it apart all the same, though.

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

Everything I was going to say has just been said more eloquently by gnomicutterance, from the cqs formula to children's lit being slammed regularly by random idiots saying the [rare] ones they like shouldn't be marketed as CHL. Whee!

[gair.livejournal.com]

Oh, steepholm, I love you. This came up on my flist on the same day as a very annoying and ill-thought-through fifty-commented rant about how it would be CRAZY to call anything fanfic that wasn't produced, I don't know, in the twenty-first century on Livejournal (if you're interested in how to justify your opinions about genre, incidentally, it seems you can do it by going BECAUSE THE CONVENTIONS ARE DIFFERENT - which is much like BECAUSE THEY'RE WRITING FOR A DIFFERENT COMMUNITY a la Ansible - and then insulting everyone who disagrees with you: that would have shut your kettle up!). But you are, as ever, so much more interesting.

I don't know why Hamlet is not a ghost story! It's like the difference between YA fiction and (adult)-fiction-with-a-teenage-protagonist, innit, that strange and shifting conjunction between content and genre/form...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I don't know why Hamlet is not a ghost story! It's like the difference between YA fiction and (adult)-fiction-with-a-teenage-protagonist, innit, that strange and shifting conjunction between content and genre/form...

It's a puzzler, isn't it? Oh well, I guess if it was easy we'd both be out of a job.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

This is the kind of fascinating post I expect to see from you.

In wondering if Fred Lerner's definition is circular, I think you're missing something. This is his argument, schematically:

Thematic: Huxley, Orwell, Ballard all IN

Provenance: Huxley and Orwell OUT; Ballard IN

You seemed to be wondering on what grounds Fred would exclude Ballard from "the SF community," but he is in fact not doing so. The "SF community" can be roughly defined as "that group of people who know what you're talking about when you say 'the SF community' in Ansible." From the point of view of writing SF, the SF community includes those writers who are aware that what they're writing is SF, who write for SF markets, and who, most importantly, are writing their work in awareness of, response to, and conversation with the body of self-aware SF that has come before them. Many SF critics, Justine Larbalestier among them, have noted that classic SF magazine stories are not meant to be read in isolation, but as part of a huge conversation and exchange going on in the pages of the magazines.

Ballard was part of that conversation and that community (and he cheerfully acknowledged this), which makes him SF by that definition.

Fred's article, which I have, basically distinguishes between those who can collectively create the definition of SF - writers, editors, publishers, even readers whose tastes in what to write, publish, and buy shape what is happening in the field - and those who should only be observing the definition - critics, historians, bibliographers - whose attempts to impose any strongly idiosyncratic definition of SF on their work would be arbitrary and basically useless to anyone but themselves.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the summary of the article, which is very interesting. Also, you're quite right - I meant to write 'Huxley' rather than 'Ballard' as being an example of someone Lerner would exclude from the SF community. I'll fix that in a minute.

This leaves me a with a couple of questions, which I'd be interested to know whether Lerner (or you) can answer. First, what about the founding writers of SF, who were writing before an SF community in the sense you describe it really existed? Does Jules Verne count as SF? Wells? (Any definition of SF that excluded these would pretty much rule itself out of court, I'd have thought.) Second, is SF a genre sui generis in this regard, or would Lerner apply analogous definition to detective fiction, romance, YA fantasy, etc? And if not, why not? Is there something about SF that makes it more communal in nature than other genres?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Aha - I see you were answering my questions even as I was asking them!

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Separately: Your discussion of the definition of "ghost story" seems to call for a citation of Brian Attebery's definition of "fantasy" in Strategies of Fantasy. Instead of drawing a line, he adopted an approach of defining it by zones of increasing centrality, i.e. degree of similarity to a Platonic central point. This can roughly be done by compiling a list of characteristics of that archetype, and checking off which ones the work in question has. Those which have only a few can be thought of as in the outer fringes, as works which only have something in common with the genre.

You can do that with Shakespeare's plays as ghost stories, and I'd agree with your rankings. And I'd note C.S. Lewis's argument that Hamlet doesn't make much sense if you read it as "a man who has to avenge his father"; it works much better as "a man who has been given a task by a ghost," which raises all the existential questions of reliability (how does he know the ghost is telling the truth?) and obligation (what imperative does he have to disrupt a well-run kingdom?) that the other reading doesn't.

As for the detective stories, I consider it quite reasonable to say that some authors (I presume that P.D. James, whom I haven't read, is one) are writing genre detective stories, i.e. are part of the "detective-story community" akin to the SF community, while Poe and Collins predate the existence of this community. This can express itself in the rules about the provision of clues, the hiding of the solution, and fairness to the reader thereby - which the genre fiction writers abide by scrupulously (or they did when I was last aware) but which Conan Doyle, for instance, did not. Nobody is more central to the detective-story canon than he, but his stories don't follow the "rules" of the genre, and therefore there's a line you can draw around certain works which excludes his.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thanks - this is very useful, and the whole question of the importance of writers in community is one that I'm glad to see getting more attention these days. I'm still not convinced that it's the best way to define a genre, however. As your example implies, some lines would exclude Conan Doyle, Poe and Collins as detective story writers - and when you get to that point it just seems perverse. (I think it may be Attebery who points out, in criticizing Rosemary Jackson's theories of fantasy, that a definition that excludes The Lord of the Rings as a fantasy - because it's not subversive enough - has more or less undermined itself from the start, and I'd have thought the same could be said here.)

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Collins does get hailed as the first detective story writer - or the first crime mystery or... But surely he postdates Poe.

I suspect many people are making a quality judgement when they say something is or isn't (transcends?) genre. For me the point is utility - how useful is it to read Hamlet in terms of ghosts rather than, say, revenge?

I could envisage us claiming something as sf (PD James's Children of Men? Works by Atwood?) and then saying, it isn't very good.

Note also how geniuses have artistic unity but hacks are formulaic.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I like your pragmatic approach. And yes, the quality judgement in applying or withholding the SF label is usually pretty explicit. The same is true of the 'genre' label in general - hence the arguments about whether 'the literary novel' is a genre itself, or defined by its very lack of genreness. (Which always reminds me of the English upper classes claiming that 'they don't have an accent'.)

[aryky.livejournal.com]

In my moments of deepest despair at the capitalist system behind the present-day production of art, I have episodes of thinking about genre as purely a marketing category. This is obviously a naive view - one assumes that the distinction between lyric and epic poetry did not appear in a marketing context - but, given that genre is fuzzy and marketing categories are less so (although certainly there are books that have been shelved in more than one section), I think there is something to it in terms of people's apprehension of genres for which they don't typically seek out books in that marketing category. People who don't head to the speculative fiction section of the bookstore every time they go to the bookstore think that anything not in that section must not be speculative fiction; whereas a publisher who gets the exact same manuscript from either a famous mainstream author or someone whose previous books have mostly been shelved in the SF section may make a completely different decision about what the most effective audience would be to market that book.

And genre, as opposed to marketing categories, is very fuzzy indeed. As for 1984, quotations I've come across in my research include Harold Bloom - "Its very genre will be established by political, social, economic events. Is it satire or science fiction or dystopia or countermanifesto?" - and Sue Lonoff - "To some readers, it seems not to be a novel at all; it is a fantasy [I had not realized this was mutually exclusive with "novel"] or satire or tract for the times, a history lecture done up as prophecy." I think Lonoff's argument ends up being that the genre of the book is "nightmare" - which I certainly had not realized was an actual genre. I recently came across a somewhat tricky juxtaposition between 1984 and Archer's Goon where my first thought was that I could explain away the differences as a genre difference - but then I realized that the difference would be difficult to express - 1984 is satire with an overtone of science fiction versus Archer's Goon being fantasy with an overtone of science fiction? I'm not even sure that's right!

Then I just had the conversation last night with my brother about how it would be impossible to make Hexwood into a movie because the way it treats genre would make it extremely difficult to market - and I think that Hexwood's genre games are blatantly necessary to the kind of narrative it's telling - that there are certain kinds of narratives in which an understanding of genre and the uses of genre are fundamental to one's understanding of the narrative - which is why, as DWJ has pointed out herself, children's books and YA often allow more scope to authors than other marketing categories (I don't know what to say about children's books and YA as genres).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Marketing is definitely an important element in all this, and one I hadn't thought about, though I think some of what you say chimes with the comments people have been making about reader expectation. You can change Macbeth into a detective story simply be expecting it to be one, as James Thurber showed.

Though - yeah, I'm not sure how I'd characterize the generic difference between 1984 and Archer's Goon either! I think the latter is as much a satire of local government as the former is a satire of totalitarianism. But perhaps more Horatian than Juvenalian? Best I can do!

[intertext.livejournal.com]

So many brilliant comments here, my brain is exploding.

Much of this seems to boil down to the whole question of tradition and originality. Atwood wants to get credit for an original idea; SF readers claim that the ideas she presents in her work are old hat in the SF canon. But what if she's not familiar with the SF canon? (not that I think it's likely that someone of Atwood's intelligence could be unaware of at least the zeitgeist if not works in particular). Maybe that's what that distinction about SF being written by someone in the SF community refers to - being a reader as well as a writer.

We (in the SF/fantasy reader community) tend to value works that engage in a discourse with the tradition, and we get stroppy when we see works that (we think) clearly reflect tropes from the tradition that go unacknowledged - like how tiresome it is that JK Rowling claims she's never read a lot of the children's fantasy that "clearly" informs her work...

And (now my brain is going off on another tack) - isn't there some kind of distinction between those who write purely according to convention - eg the formula romance, "cosy" detective novel, space opera, etc - and those who attempt to elevate the genre, to go beyond it, and focus on elements other than the plot tokens... I think rather than columns, we need a Venn diagram, with one circle being the formula genre works, another the so-called "literary works" and the middle being where they intersect, where you would put genre writers with literary cred (like Ursula Le Guin) and literary writers who slide over into genre (like Atwood, Ishiguro et al).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think a lot of the annoyance does come from that kind of ignorance, real or feigned. It's justifiable stroppiness too, imho.

The Venn diagram idea is nice, and corresponds to what a_d_medievalist and sheenaghpugh say about crossing genres, I guess. Those intersections are often the liveliest place on the Petri dish of literature. I'd be less happy with any idea that one can 'transcend' genre rather than mix genres, however (not that you're suggesting that, I'm just digressing), insofar as it implies that some kinds of writing - e.g. the "literary novel" - are free of generic convention.

[intertext.livejournal.com]

It's justifiable stroppiness too, imho.

I think so too! And I think there's a certain responsibility on the part of editors... I was thinking about this whole "community" idea in reference to the academic community and scholarship. For example, as an MA student I wrote a seminar paper on V Woolf's Orlando, and was thrilled with my own brilliant discovery that you can trace the ideas in A Room of One's Own there. Well, I got an A for the paper, but not an A+, and noone would suggest publishing it because that idea _has_ actually struck one or two other people in Woolf scholarship. I came up with it on my own, but if I wanted to publish I would have a responsibility to investigate the other scholarship and go beyond it.

Wouldn't it be great if fiction writers did the same thing, or that editors had that guts to say, "um, Peggy, this is great, but, you know it has been kind of 'done' before..."

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't it be great if fiction writers did the same thing, or that editors had that guts to say, "um, Peggy, this is great, but, you know it has been kind of 'done' before..."

All too often the thing that's been done before is exactly what publishers want! They like to talk about looking for the 'next big thing', but as a glance at the post-HP, post-Dan Brown markets shows, they're actually after the last big thing...

footnote on the genre mumble

[calimac.livejournal.com]

David Wake on Fred Lerner in A263: 'Oh, oh, oh ... if you follow the logic of the definition-by-provenance that SF must be produced from within the SF community, then how can Brian Aldiss say that Frankenstein was the first SF novel? It wasn't written within the SF community because it didn't exist. The argument follows for any first SF book and an SF community can't start until the first novel is produced. From our bootstraps, it's all undone. The only way to create SF is by writing an SF book from within an SF community and then sending it back in time. Or for the SF community to travel back in time to Switzerland and bang on the door saying "Mary, where's our book?"'

Re: footnote on the genre mumble

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

:-) If only he'd read the interesting discussion here first! Still funny, though.