Genre Matters, If Only a Little

/ JD Byrne / 5 Comments

From time to time, I get a little riled up when it comes to issues of genre. I am, as you can tell, a genre writer. I am also, for the most part, a genre reader. Sci-fi and fantasy is what I like and I’ve got no problem admitting it. Nor do I have a problem with folks who don’t like it. Different strokes and all that.

However, it rubs me the wrong way when people use genre labels as a sign of inferiority. Particularly, it makes me grumpy when people see something that, in spite of all the genre trappings, is so elevated and wonderful that it cannot, under any circumstances, actually be a part of the genre itself. This all flared up back in March with the publication of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant.

Ishiguro is the Man Booker Prize winning author of (among other things) The Remains of the Day. He is “Literary” with a capital L. However, first with Never Let Me Go and now with his latest he’s come to play in what folks would generally recognize as the lands of science fiction and fantasy, respectively. But he really wishes they weren’t (I addressed this at my old blog after watching the film version of Never Let Me Go).

Ursula K. Le Guin fired the first shot, responding on an interview Ishiguro did with the New York Times. Here’s how she describes The Buried Giant:

[it] takes place in a non-historic just-post-Arthurian England. Everybody there has lost most of their longterm memory, due to the influence of the breath of a dragon named Querig.

Ogres and other monsters roam the land, but Querig just sleeps and exhales forgetfulness, until a pair of elderly Britons with the singularly unBriton names of Beatrice and Axl arrive with the knight Gawain and a poisoned goat to watch a Saxon named Wistan kill Gawain and then slice the head off the sleeping dragon.

Sounds pretty fantastic, right?

Ishiguro then says:

Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?

They probably will, Le Guin argues, with good reason and with no need of being ashamed. Yet Ishiguro, it seems, “takes the word for an insult.” More recently, in an interview with Neil Gaiman, Ishiguro expressed surprised at such a reaction, asking “why are people so preoccupied?” and wondering if genre labels were just something created by the publishing industry.

He’s certainly right that genres make things easier for the sellers of books – which includes authors, by the way. But they also make things easier for readers. If I read Book X and it falls into Genre 1, then maybe I might like to check out other things that fall into Genre 1, right? Sure, the genre definitions get fuzzy along the boundaries (go see any of the “what is progressive rock?” debates on the Web for proof!), but some guidance is better than none.

Admittedly, some genre signposts don’t tell you very much. Gaiman makes this point:

I think that there’s a huge difference between, for example, a novel with spies in it and a spy novel; or a novel with cowboys in it and a cowboy novel.

Can’t argue with that. The Big Lebowski isn’t a “cowboy movie” just because there’s a cowboy in it, after all. But it doesn’t really do much to tell you what it’s about. Likewise, a story with a detective as a main character could be lots of different things: mystery, police procedural, domestic drama, comedy, etc. But those two genres do have one thing in common – their stories exist in the real world.

Science fiction, fantasy, and (to a lesser extent) horror stories don’t take place in our world. That’s what makes them “speculative,” after all. Stories told in the real world have to confine to our world – if a key scene requires a character to get from one side of town to the other in 10 minutes she can’t just close her eyes, mumble some Latin, and teleport herself. But in the speculative genres anything is possible. The writer has to develop her world and its rules, but isn’t constrained by how the real world operates. It’s a Rubicon kind of thing – once you cross it, you can’t uncross it.

But genre has nothing to do with quality. There’s good science fiction and bad (cue Sturgeon), good fantasy and bad, good literary fiction and bad (keeping in mind the highly subjective nature of “good” or “bad”). If there’s a stigma about genre fiction it’s largely because writers like Ishiguro (and, at earlier times, Margaret Atwood) and his critics insist that his work is too good to be labeled as such.

That’s my great objection. I don’t care that Ishiguro or anyone else wants to come play with some of the trappings of genre fiction while not buying wholly into the genre’s tropes. It’s perfectly OK to come into our sandbox and play by yourself. That doesn’t obscure that you are, in fact, in the sandbox with us. Don’t insult our intelligence by arguing otherwise.

Weekly Read: The Revolutions

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Arthur Shaw is not the most interesting man in the not-quite-historical Victorian London of Felix Gilman’s The Revolutions. That’s a problem, since he’s one of the main characters in the book. Thankfully, Shaw’s very mundanity – he needs a job and is willing to do just about anything for money – leads him into something very interesting indeed.

Oh, and there’s his fiancé, Josephine, who makes for a considerably more interesting companion.

This London is one where the kind of quasi-scientific spiritualism that was popular in our reality was not just popular, it was actually true. In particular, Arthur and Josephine find themselves bound up in a group trying to astral project to other planets, particularly Mars. Doing this requires not only the right people (sort of – the group gets less selective as things progress), but massive calculations produced by a massive machine with countless human parts. Babbage’s engine writ large.

The book takes a while to set all this up, which is either fascinating world building (for me) or dull sluggishness (for others). Things really kick into high gear when one of the astral flights is interrupted by Arthur, leaving Josephine trapped – in spiritual, if not physical form – on one of the moons of Mars.

What Gilman does next is a clever sleight of hand. The book focuses on Arthur for a bit and how he and the rest of the society plan to get Josephine back. Just when you think she might be nothing more than a damsel in need of rescue, the POV shifts and we’re treated to Josephine’s lengthy observation of (and, eventually, interactions with) the Martians and their society. This is the best part of the book, harkening back to the days of science fiction before science itself killed off the chance of finding life on Mars. Reminds me of some of the more esoteric parts of The Martian Chronicles.

Naturally, a rescue mission is mounted and while it has its own charms as an adventure story, it can’t match the peak that is Josephine’s experience with the truly alien. But all stories must end and I’d be lying if I said that the ending ruined all that came before.

So Arthur might be kind of dull. Don’t let that put you off. He’ll lead you into some very neat places.

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Come Say Hi This Saturday @ Tamarack

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This weekend, Tamarack – the showplace for West Virginia arts and crafts located outside Beckley – is hosting a West Virginia Writers Weekend. It runs both Friday and Saturday.

I’ll be there on Saturday (June 27), from six in the morning until about six in the evening. I’ll be selling books, signing books, talking with readers about writing, and probably doing some actual writing (still working hard on the second draft of The Endless Hills).

In addition, at 11:45 – just before lunch! – I’ll be doing a reading of one of the stories from The Last Ereph and Other Stories.

It’s free to the public and should be a lot of fun. See you there!

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Weekly Watch: Breaking Bad

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A little while back I confessed that, although I had enjoyed the first season of Better Call Saul I had not seen a minute of that show’s mothership, Breaking Bad. It wasn’t that I was unaware of it or avoiding it out of some hipsterish notion of cool. It just got past me (why must there be so much good TV on at the same time on the same night of the week?). But I read the hype and knew the show’s reputation. Now I’ve gone back and done my due diligence. Did it live up to the hype?

Abso-fucking-lutely.

I usually try to push back against the hype on things like this, at least a little bit, but, damn, I can’t really do it here. Breaking Bad is everything great storytelling should be, tightly plotted and filled with well drawn, memorable characters. Moreover, it uses the visual and audible aspects of television in ways that most shows never dream of.

If you’ve been under a rock for the past few years, Breaking Bad is the story of Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who turns to cooking methamphetamine (with the help of a former student turned junkie and small-time dealer, Jesse Pinkman) for money after being diagnosed with cancer. What plays out is Walt’s fall into ego-driven evil, as he finally finds personal satisfaction in his nearly pristine blue meth. It’s a reverse of the typical redemption arc where the bad guy comes good. Walt begins good (sort of) and goes very very wrong. It’s not uplifting stuff, but it’s riveting.

It’s not perfect, of course. It drags at times (particularly when it involves the long but inevitable rehab of Walt’s DEA Agent brother-in-law). Walt is occasionally too much James Bond or McGyver. And the entire premise – that ultra-pure meth would be that much more valuable – is dubious. But those are minor quibbles and, in the case of the last one, a great dramatic device for springing Walt’s ego upon us.

I suspect Walt might agree with that other great thinker, Zaphod Beeblebrox, that if “there’s anything more important than my ego . . .I want it caught and shot right now.” Starved for personal reward and nagged by the staggering success of former business partners, Walt repeatedly passes up moderately safe ways out of his life to as to continue his ego stroking meth cooks.

Equally important as a character, although it’s not played by any particular actor, is the War on (Some People’s) Drugs. Not only do we see both sides at play, but we see how inevitable it is that the drug trade continues on all the time. One of Walt’s ego problems is that when he tries to get out he finds out that others are selling blue meth that’s not as pure as his. It’s a personal insult. But dealers are going to sell whatever they can to those that want to buy, of which there will always be a supply. A war on what is essentially the human desire to soothe their lives will always be bound to fail.

While I came late to Breaking Bad proper, I read a lot about it while it was on the air, or shortly after it wrapped up. I noticed how images, phrases, and other parts of the series were seaping in the culture. It’s a TV show, right? So, of course they did. When a parent freaked out at finding Breaking Bad action figures on a store shelf somewhere, I chuckled and rolled my eyes.

But now, having watched the whole thing, the impact of the show on the culture kind of disturbs me. People know that, whatever its dramatic qualities (which are substantial), the show is basically about horrible people doing progressively more horrible things. Given that, things like producing a Breaking Bad vodka or Aaron Paul’s repeated attempts to capitalize on being Jesse Pinkman or the plans to open up a real Los Pollos Hermanos really rubs me the wrong way. It says something about our popular culture and the nature of celebrity and I’m not sure it’s good.

None of which takes away from the achievement of Breaking Bad (including Paul – Pinkman is, perhaps, the most sympathetic character, who consistently struggles with what he’s done and has so little idea of a better life that he can’t take any chance to find one). It is one of the gems of the current Golden Age of TV.

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What Does “Being a Democracy” Mean, Anyway?

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We tend to think of types of governments in stark terms. A democracy means a nation run by the consent of the governed, right? But how does that work in the real world?

David Frum had a column in The Atlantic recently wondering what the world might have been like had the Allies lost World War I. It’s less an interesting experiment in alternate history than another facile argument for further American intervention in the Middle East, but he does kind of stumble into an interesting question when he unpacks Woodrow Wilson’s claim that the “world must be made safe for democracy”:

Not ‘democratic’ – ‘safe for democracy.’ Wilson wasn’t promising to impose democracy on Imperial Germany. He was promising to defend democracy from Imperial Germany. The First World War had not begun as a conflict between democracy and authoritarianism. Great Britain was not a democracy in August 1914. Tsarist Russia certainly was not. Ditto Japan, Italy, and Romania—all fought for the Entente, none had governments elected by more than a small fraction of the population. Even in France, the most democratic of the original Allies, elected leaders did not fully control the government (never mind that the Third Republic ruled over a vast colonial empire and denied the vote to women).

Of course, that description is equally true of the United States at the time, which disenfranchised most folks that were adult white men. Nonetheless, if someone’s voting on who runs the place, isn’t that democracy? It’s a far sight more democratic than a monarch who rules because God says so (or “some watery tart lobbed a sword at you”) or a dictator who holds power by sheer force. What’s the tipping point?

And if there is a tipping point, do any modern societies actually meet it? After all, “universal” suffrage isn’t truly universal. Most countries, at least, restrict the franchise to citizens and to those of a certain age. But the young and the alien (assume, for purposes of this argument, legal and fully documented) are subject to the authority of the government just as much as anybody else – does cutting them out of things make the system less “democratic?” What then of places where felons or the mentally infirm are banned from voting, sometimes for life?

Beyond those restrictions there’s the very real question of apathy. If, as Frum posits, most of our allies in World War I weren’t democracies because only a “small fraction” of the population could vote, what of when only a small fraction of eligible voters actually bother to participate? Only 58.2% of eligible voters cast ballots in the last US presidential election. Put another way, just over 129 million people cast votes – in a country with a population north of 320 million. When only 40% of the governed people vote, is that really a “democracy” under Frum’s test?

And that’s just the presidential election, which tends to attract higher turnouts. What percentage of the governed populace is actually voting in races further down the ballot? As a for instance, 453,659 West Virginians voted in the 2014 election that sent Shelly Moore Capito to the US Senate, out of a population of over 1.8 million. In other words, about a quarter of the state’s population voted in that election. Is that truly “democratic”?

Obviously, a lot of this is pure semantics and the political science equivalent of figuring out the right dance steps for angels on pin heads, but there’s more to it than that. We often do our worst when we’re motivated by the mythology we’ve built around ourselves. Confronting reality might make us think twice about going off half-cocked on various crusades.

In other words, if we’re going to lecture the rest of the world about the values of democracy, we better damned well make sure we’re practicing them ourselves.

Weekly Listen: A Spark In the Aether

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The subtitle for The Tangent’s latest album – it’s eighth – is “The Music That Died Alone Volume 2,” referencing the title of the band’s debut. Of course, the music it’s talking about – progressive rock – has never died, even if it did (to paraphrase Frank Zappa) “smell funny” for a while. But it’s thriving today, if not commercially than artistically. That’s due, in no small part, to The Tangent.

As the name suggests, The Tangent grew out of what was supposed to be solo project by keyboardist Andy Tillison. It grew into a real band for a few albums and has since morphed into a kind of revolving cast of players carrying on the band’s proggy project. Tillison is the central character (duties having expanded at times to include lead vocals and guitar), driving The Tangent on with his desire to bring fresh slabs of classic prog to the 21st Century.

Tillison’s never been coy about this. The first album uses a Hatfield and the North song (incorrectly titled, but whatever) in the middle of an epic. A Place in the Queue has a liner notes directing unsuspecting young readers toward Tales from Topographic Oceans (the prog equivalent to luring children into your van with candy). Hell, he even wrote a novella to go along with Not As Good As the Book which involves a far flung future and, naturally, Yes. Tillison is prog down to his bones.

On A Spark In the Aether, he lets it all out. Not only musically, but lyrically as well. Witness the epic “Codpieces and Capes,” which takes on the general slagging that prog has taken from the music press, concluding that those who fobbed it off as pretension were “so wrong” (but, in a bit of humor, “they were probably right about the rug.”). That being said, the album covers lots of ground, from the rocking title track, to jazzy ambience, and even some funky bits here and there.

The centerpiece of this album, however, is “The Celluloid Road,” which is a view of modern American through the lens of someone who’s never actually set foot here (although that doesn’t accurately describe Tillison). In other words, it’s less about how we actually are than how we project ourselves to be to the rest of the world via film and TV. It’s always interesting to hear how the rest of the world views us. In this case, it’s how the rest of the world views the way we view ourselves. It’s both amusing and a little disheartening. Said funky bits show up here in the “San Francisco” section (which mostly deals with it being destroyed in various movies – and this was written before San Andreas!).

This isn’t a Tangent masterpiece, but I’m enjoying it a lot more than Le Sacre du Trevail, which I found to be really dire and depressing. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of fun. So come on in and prog your brains out. Don’t forget to bring your cape!

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Pulling a Town Out of Thin Air

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Getting Moore Hollow ready for publication this fall made me think back to this piece from my old blog. Moore Hollow is set in West Virginia, but not in any place that actually exists on the map. Jenkinsville and Vandalia County were pulled straight from the ether. Maybe that’ll change someday.

One of the cool things about writing fiction is you get to make up stuff as you go along (it’s sort of the nature of the game).  Not just characters and what they do but, often just as important, where they do it.  You can build entire worlds and nations in your mind, not to mention cities.  I’ve even made some maps (crude, but effective – I’m not a cartographer, after all) of the world in which my Water Road books are set, as well as another world I’ve yet to write in.  It’s all quite fun.

But imagine that you could create a town out of thin air, as a fiction, only for it to pop up in real life?  Now that’s really cool!

Consider the strange case of Algoe, New York (not to be confused with the planet Algon, where an ordinary cup of drinking chocolate costs 4 million pounds).

Back in the 1930s, it wasn’t unusual for mapmakers to steal each other’s work.  After all, if a map reflects realty and someone copies the map, don’t they have a defense to plagiarism by arguing that both the original map and the alleged copy accurately reflect reality?  How can that lose?

Turns out, map makers got savvy and began including some fictional places to trap would be copyists:

That’s what Otto G. Lindberg, director of the General Drafting Co., and his assistant, Ernest Alpers, did in the 1930s. They were making a road map of New York state, and on that out-of-the-way dirt road, they created a totally fictitious place called ‘Agloe.’ The name was a mix of the first letters in their names, Otto G. Lindberg’s (OGL) and Ernest Alpers’ (EA).

The trap set, it appeared to work, when the town of Algoe appeared on a map made by none other than Rand McNally a few years later.  Case closed, right?  Big check from Rand McNally to Lindberg and Alpers.  Not so fast – Rand McNally offered a defense: there really was a town called Algoe.  In fact, the official county map showed an Algoe General Store in that location.  Checkmate, cartographic honey pot.

But how’d that happen?

Good question. Here’s the ironic answer. The owners had seen Agloe on a map distributed by Esso, which owned scores of gas stations. Esso had bought that map from Lindberg and Alpers. If Esso says this place is called Agloe, the store folks figured, well, that’s what we’ll call ourselves. So, a made-up name for a made-up place inadvertently created a real place that, for a time, really existed. Rand McNally, one presumes, was found not guilty.

Then the store closed. It isn’t there anymore.

Having said that, according to the NPR story, Algoe held on for years on Google Maps until it, again, vanished into thin air recently.

So, want to have an impact on the world?  Make a map and give it a fictional town.  It might come to life without you even knowing about it!

NOTE: This post originally appeared on my old blog on April 1, 2014.

State of Play – May 2015 Edition

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After a long holiday weekend seems like as good a time as any to bring readers up to speed one what I’ve been up to.

This past weekend I had my first chance to get out and meet the public as an author:

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Big thanks to Empire Books & News for having me and to all the folks who stopped by. It’s a bit of a surreal experience, like sitting in a fish bowl watching the world go past, but also kind of fun.

I’ll be back out in world next month for the West Virginia Writer’s showcase at Tamarack in Beckley. That will include a reading, which should be different. I haven’t stood up and read something to crowd since, what, high school? Still haven’t figured out what to read, either. More details forthcoming or, as always, check the appearances link for that info.

“The Destiny Engine,” is now complete and is currently trying to find a home. It’s a steampunk-style reworking of a Grimm fairy tale, “The Aged Mother.” Once its finds its niche I’ll let you know where to find it.

Moore Hollow, a novel set in West Virginia about disgraced journalists, crooked politicians, and zombies (maybe), is still set for release this fall. I’m working on finding an editor right now, after which I can move on to getting a cover.

But right now, my main focus is on finishing the second draft of The Endless Hills, part two of a fantasy trilogy that will be out next year. For me, a second draft of a long work is a complete rewrite. Essentially, I imported a process I use sometimes at work when multiple attorneys contribute to a brief and everything has to be synthesized to make it read with a single coherent voice.

In the case of the novel, I take the first draft and retype it, paying more attention to the line-by-line details. A first draft, for me, is about getting the who did what to whom, where, and why down on the page. The second draft is where I can focus more on details and making sure the whole thing works as a coherent story. After that come more drafts produced by laborious close reading while wielding a red pen.

I’m about a sixth of the way through the first draft now, so there’s still much work to be done in The Endless Hills.

Until next month!

Weekly Watch: American Crime

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With a name like American Crime you’d be forgiven for thinking that the ABC show, which just wrapped up its debut 11-episode season, was another in the long line of TV shows about heroic cops nabbing bad guys. They’re popular for good reason – even I, the criminal defense lawyer, am not immune to their pull – but we hardly need another one on TV.  Good thing, then, that American Crime isn’t like anything else on TV.

That’s down to its creator, writer/director John Ridley, last seen collecting an Oscar for the screenplay to 12 Years a Slave. Rather than focus on the crime itself and the “solving” of it, the show takes one crime – a murder (nearly a double murder) in a nondescript California town – and shows how it impacts those caught up in its wake. Not only is that the focus, but Ridley showed that he didn’t really care about any traditional resolution to the case at all.

As a result, the focus is on several families dealing with the impact of the crime – the victims’ parents, the sister of the main suspect, the foster family of his heroin addict girlfriend, and the would-be family of the state’s first main witness. Issues of race, class, ethnicity, and gender bubble through the season, spurred by the stress brought on by the murder and its prosecution.

Amongst all these, the most fascinating was the Gutiérrez family. Tony, the younger of two children, unknowingly gets caught up in the fringes of the murder – he lent a car to a guy who was involved, but had no idea of it at the time. At the urging of his father, he cooperates with the police. This leads to him being arrested, charged as an accessory (mostly as leverage, it appears), and sent to juvenile detention. What happens from there is as heartbreaking as it is inevitable – treated like a criminal, like a thug, Tony becomes one, committing his own heinous act once released.

American Crime doesn’t look like anything on TV, either. A lot of the editing and camera work is intentionally disorienting (often we focus on the person being spoken too, rather than the speaker) and keeps you on your toes. Breaking Bad (Which I’m working through now, finally) may have been cinematic, but not like this. The closest precedent I can think of is Homicide: Life On the Street, which introduced TV to the hand held cinema verite style. Given that the technical flair is done in service of a bunch of fantastic performances and American Crime was always a fascinating, if grim, watch.

All that being said, the show’s greatest asset was also its greatest weakness. By stubbornly refusing to deal with the facts of the case itself, it was difficult to fully comprehend why the various parties involved were behaving the way they were behaving. How are we to judge the initial suspect’s reaction to being imprisoned and being turned into a political prop without having some idea whether he actually did it? He knew, after all. The end result is a fascinating exercise, but it rings a little hollow.

Regardless, I know the show didn’t have wonderful ratings, so kudos to ABC renewing it for a second season. With a new case on the horizon and a second chance to tweak the formula, I expect something even better.

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