writing

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.

State of Play – May 2015 Edition

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

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!

On Flying Cars and Flying Snowmen

/ JD Byrne / 7 Comments

Years ago John Scalzi wrote a post about how his wife, when it came to reading their daughter a favorite story, couldn’t get past the idea of a flying snowman. This didn’t make a whole lot of sense. As Scalzi pointed out she had no problem with a snowman who could come to life, wear clothes,
and talk with children, so why was flying a bridge too far?

The fact is, we all have a point beyond which we simply can’t suspend disbelief any longer. As a writer of fantasy and science fiction I’m doubly aware of that. Some people will happily turn their brains off to enjoy a good story, but if you trip that wire that goes beyond their comfort zone of disbelief, they’ll turn on you. There’s not much you can do about it, except recognize that we all do it and we all do it at different points. In other words, we all have our own flying snowman.

I bring this up not because of some great work of fantasy or science fiction, but because of the seventh movie in the Fast and Furious franchise, which has dominated the box office this year (up to this point). Although I’m a car guy (autocrossing them since 1999) I’ve never been a fan of the series. If I’m honest, I’m not a big fan of action flicks in general, so the automotive overlay does nothing for me. My wife, on the other hand, is a big fan, thanks to her action movie jones and an abiding longing for The Rock, so I took her to see the new one.

It’s not bad, for a big loud popcorn flick that doesn’t aspire to be much more than that. In particular there are some really amazing stunts and some good quips. Can’t ask much more than that. However, there are some points where I reached my flying snowman point. Ken Levine’s line is apparently in about the same place, although he got a bit more aggravated by it:

FURIOUS 7 is an absolute fucking mess! What the fuck was that?! No, seriously! There’s not a fucking frame of this stink burger that’s rooted in any reality. Roadrunner cartoons are more realistic. Is this what the action film genre has become? Mindless idiotic fucking stunts that defy all laws of gravity, physics, logic, and common sense? Hand-to-hand combat where the combatants beat the living shit out of each other and neither is even bruised? They crash through glass walls. No cuts. They hit each other with lead pipes. No blood. Their heads are smashed through concrete walls – not even a mild concussion. What the fuck was I watching? Nobody dies. Cars go over cliffs, roll over seventeen times, are twisted gnarled wrecks when they finally come to a rest 1,000 feet down the hill, and the passengers just wriggle out without so much as a scratch. At least Wile E. Coyote looks disheveled when he swallows a lit stick of dynamite that explodes in his stomach. Not Vin Diesel. Not Jason Stratham. Not the Rock. Creative license is one thing but this is fucking preposterous.

Now, to be fair, some of what Levine rages against as CGI fakery actually isn’t (see, for example, the flying cars of the title). But, he’s right. Furious 7 apparently doesn’t take place in the real world. My flying snowman moment came when Vin Diesel and Jason Statham not once but twice staged deliberate head-on collisions from which each walked away without even a bruise. There’s a fine line between “I can’t believe they did that!” and “I can’t believe they really did THAT?”

My wife concedes the point. She doesn’t argue for the reality of those things, but is more willing to set aside concerns and just enjoy the movie. She’s not wrong, but neither am I. I just can’t go that far. At least not for Fast & Furious.

Star Wars, on the other hand . . .

The defining image of the second trailer for The Force Awakens is the star destroyer crashed on the surface of what JJ Abrams swears is not Tatooine. When I saw that, there was a large part of my mind that immediately started into how impossible it was for a craft of that size to plummet through the atmosphere and crash land more or less intact. But another part thought it was about the coolest thing it had seen in years.

Guess which side wins? That’s because, when it comes to something I’ve loved since I was a kid, my flying snowman threshold is much higher. I’m willing to turn the more rational part of my brain off and just enjoy the awesomeness. Not every part, mind you.

Which is just to say, as a writer and a reader/viewer, you don’t necessarily need to know where the line is, but be aware that everybody has that line and you can’t hope to be certain you don’t cross it.

In Defense of “The Cold Equations”

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

My first exposure to “The Cold Equations,” a short story by Tom Godwin first published in Astounding magazine in 1954, was in a college sci-fi and fantasy class.  I didn’t take the class – my roommate did.  But he shared the story with me and we talked about it quite a bit.

The story, very briefly, is this: a pilot is guiding a small spacecraft to a distant colony carrying medicine to help stop a fatal disease outbreak.  The ship is lean and purposeful, with just enough fuel to do the job with the expected payload.  Problem is, there’s a stowaway – a teenage girl who wants to see her brother, one of the colonists.  After some agonizing, the pilot does what the rules – and the laws of physics, the nominal cold equations – require him to do: push her out an airlock.  For, you see, with the extra weight of the stowaway there isn’t sufficient fuel for a safe landing.  Save the girl, the ship crashes, and all the colonists die.

The ending of the story has caused arguments since it was first published, I imagine.  My roommate and I had a good one, with me taking the side of, “this is stupid, there should have been something done to prevent this from happening.”  It was one of those things that college arguments are built on.

This time last year Boing Boing maven and sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow wrote a piece for Locus Online essentially taking the same position I did all those years ago.  Doctorow is entirely correct, as I was years ago, that things could have been set up differently to allow for a happier ending – one where the stowaway survives and the colonists don’t die of a nasty disease.  But I disagree with him when he concludes that the absence of those things makes the story a failure. Two of his arguments don’t quite sit right with me.

First, after setting forth all the ways that the story sets up the pilot’s dilemma, he writes:

It is, then, a contrivance. A circumstance engineered for a justifiable murder. An elaborate shell game that makes the poor pilot – and the company he serves – into victims every bit as much as the dead girl is a victim, forced by circumstance and girlish naïveté to stain their souls with murder.

* * *

‘The Cold Equations’ is moral hazard in action. It is a story designed to excuse the ship’s operators – from the executives to ground control to the pilot – for standardizing on a spaceship with no margin of safety. A spaceship with no autopilot, no fuel reserves, and no contingency margin in its fuel calculations.

That’s an odd accusation for a fiction writer to make.  Fiction is the ultimate contrivance.  Writers move pieces around and put them together in particular ways to tell particular stories.  That’s why in a legal drama the hero isn’t just defending an innocent man charged with murder, but his brother, or why the cute girl the guy hooked up with the night before isn’t just in the same line of work, she’s the main rival for the new account.  It can be a cheap way of ramping up the conflict, but it’s hardly unheard of.

Obviously one can critique a story for being overly contrived and unrealistic, but we are talking about a short (10,000 words, about) tale set on a spaceship.  There’s not a whole lot of room to explore the facets of this universe that don’t focus on the central conflict.  It’s a story about the rather obvious, yet compelling, theme that space is a dangerous place and it doesn’t care about the humans caught up in it.

The second argument is more implicit than explicit, but it comes up when Doctorow cites the litany of means the story could have used to avoid the tragic ending, from better engineered spaceships to better medical care at the distant colony in the first place.  All of these are true, of course – something could have been done.  But that misses a key point – is it unreasonable to think that in the universe of “The Cold Equations” such things might not happen?

Assuming the story is set in a future period of our own history it certainly isn’t.  History is riddled with tragedies that occur when some entity cuts corners on safety.  I don’t even have to look beyond West Virginia to find plenty of examples – mine explosions, the Buffalo Creek flood, the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster.  All caused because safety was sacrificed for something else, either profit or political expediency.  Or just plain dumb assery.  Is there any reason to think the powers that be in the universe of “The Cold Equations” are better human beings than we are now?

After all, there was a sign warning unauthorized personnel not to enter the ship.  Is it too harsh to say anybody who ignored that sign got what she deserved?  Yeah, but that wouldn’t stop people from saying so.  Scour any Internet comment section in the wake of some tragic accident and there are plenty of people willing to blame the injured for their predicament.  Again, there’s no reason to think citizens in the universe of “The Cold Equations” would look at the incident any differently.

In the end, Doctorow’s main criticism of “The Cold Equations” seems to be that it’s not set in the best of all possible worlds, one where everything possible to prevent such a tragic event from taking place would be done.  But that world is a fantasy, one harder to believe in that most of what’s on sale in the bookstore.  Perhaps one of the reasons it’s endured all these years is that as readers we know it’s all too plausible.

On Influences

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

In the introduction of his new short story collection, Trigger Warning, Neil Gaiman writes that “We authors, who trade in fictions for a living, are a continuum of all that we have seen and heard, and most importantly, that we have read.”  This is undoubtedly true of everyone, not just authors, but is has a particular resonance for creative types.  For one thing, talking about influences is a good way to suggest to readers or listeners what your own stuff might be like.  Except it doesn’t always work that way.

Years ago, when I first started putting music online, I was filling out a profile on the website that included a place for “favorites” that had influenced me.  I dutifully laid out an array of my favorite musicians – Genesis, King Crimson, Mike Keneally, Frank Zappa – and then realized that the music I was making didn’t sound a damned thing like any of that.  Regardless, somewhere deep in my brain, the synapses triggered by “Firth of Fifth” or “Watermelon In Easter Hay” were leading to the electronic bloops and blips I was pooting forth.

And so it is with writing.  On the front page here I’ve got a list of links to favorite writers.  It includes old favorites, like Asimov and Adams, and more recent discoveries, like Atwood, Martin, and Banks.  I like to think that some of those folks, at least, have had a profound influence on me.  But does that mean what I write sounds like them?  I hope not.

Part of that is because I’m not sitting down trying to write like anybody else.  I suppose if I just wanted to make some quick cash I could try to whip out an imitation Scalzi or Le Guin. But, aside from whether or not I could actually do such a thing, I write because I want to tell my own stories with my own voice.  I don’t want to sound like anyone else. Yet, I freely admit that what I do is backed by the work of so many others.

More so, by this point in my 41-year old life, I realize that my brain is such a mush of influences that it would be hard to pinpoint any one of them when it came to a particular story. Everything I’ve read, heard, or seen goes into my stories. Don’t believe me? Check some of the titles in The Last Ereph and Other Stories. If you’re a progressive rock fan, a couple might ring a bell. It’s fruitless to try and figure out what the accurate mix of things is.

Which is only to say that if you look down the links of favorite writers and think, “I like those writers, too” and “I hope he sounds like them,” you’re probably setting yourself up for disappointment. Without those expectations, however, I hope you’ll find an enjoyable reading experience, anyway.