Category Archives: Reading

Looking for the Colonized/Decolonized in Speculative Fiction

The other night I was talking with an author (who happens to be a person of color and a first-generation American) about colonialism and whether views about previous invaders/colonizers change over time. While I am lucky enough to have grown up in an area that was ethnically diverse, as a white person born in the US to parents who were not immigrants, I won’t ever have the same view of the world that he does. I’ve always been able to find common ground with people who are not white, as individuals, since we all have parents and siblings and first loves and bad breakups and so on in common. You know, regular people stuff. But I realize that I don’t quite understand the experience of hailing from an oppressed people, as a general concept. Not deep in my bones and blood, not understand it because I lived with it or know it like I know the color of my hair or the shape of my fingers.

This matters partly because I know and care about people of color and I don’t ever want to behave or think in a way that’s dismissive to them. It also matters because I am a writer of SF/spec fiction that assumes a future with more representation for people of color. I have to be aware that I’m creating stories which portray a variety of characters, including people that I have no direct personal experience of being. For the same reason that I sometimes have male readers check stories which feature a male main character – because I want to be sure that it’s coming across the way that I meant it – I want to learn as much as I can about the colonial experience in order to accurately render those characters in my work. I may never have perfect understanding, but that’s no reason not to try to learn.

My fiction reading is actually diverse and getting more so over time, so what I’m looking for at the moment is essays, blog posts, discussions, etc, on colonialism, decolonialism, and post-colonial viewpoints in speculative fiction. Continue reading →

A Better Class of Genre

I think that way that we, as booksellers and publishers and reviewers and readers, use the descriptive labels we have to define “genre” is wrong. What we commonly consider to be major genres, aren’t.

Simply put, there are two kinds of genres: one set describes an aspect of the plot or characters; the other set are much broader terms that should be used as adjectives. They can be used together, but using the umbrella terms alone doesn’t give enough description to accurately place the story within the context of surrounding literature.

The major umbrella terms, which I’m calling metagenres for the purposes of this discussion (because they don’t describe a genre as much as they describe a class of stories, or settings, which also have other genre lables) are Fantasy, Science Fiction, Westerns, Literary Fiction, Alt-History, Historical, Horror, and Weird. There are probably others but these are very common. If you think about it, none of those labels actually describes a story enough to tell you what it’s about. All a story has to have to be Science Fiction is an element of fictional science. Fantasy requires some kind of magical element, a Western is set in the American old West, Horror is meant to be scary, and a Weird story has a strange or occult element, meant to disturb the reader in some fashion. Literary fiction is fiction without a speculative element. Historical takes place in the past, and Alt-history stories take place on a world similar to ours but that evolved differently. That’s it. That’s all. Those labels cover much of fiction, and yet, they tell us almost nothing.

But as adjectives, tacked on to other genre labels, they better fit the stories we’re discussing. Just as calling something an “apple” isn’t as descriptive as calling it a “green apple”, but calling something “green” tells us very little about the object we’re looking for. Calling a story “romance” tells you that it centers on a relationship between two or more people. The story may have other elements but what’s important is that relationship. A reader will pick it up to experience the joy and longing and romantic tension between the characters. Compare that to “scifi” – right, that just means it has science in it. What’s it about again?

We don’t know. But if your romance is set in space, you can call it a SciFi romance, and suddenly you have a much better idea of what the story is about. The romance is with a vampire? Ok, call it paranormal romance, and you’re all set. Story has dragons? Fantasy romance. Love interest is a cowboy? Western romance. A Shoggoth? Weird romance.

What other genres describe parts of the plot? An adventure story is focused on action, moving forward, exploring, brave new world/frontier mentality. Military stories are centered around characters in the military, following or rebelling against orders, being part of a unit, some battle, some interacting with the government. Spy stories are similar but usually have a solitary character being a lot sneakier. Detective stories involving solving a mystery, whereas noir stories may have a detective (and may not) but are noted for being setting in a noir world, where the character either dies, or fails to solve the problem, or solves it but nothing changes. Humor stories are funny, and will end in a light-hearted and happy way. Thrillers show characters trying to escape from danger or unravel a mystery but also imply that the answers are kept from the reader too, so that they and the characters figure out who the bad guy is at the same time.

There are more, of course, but don’t they give you a much better idea of whether you want to read a story than any of the broad metagenres do? And by putting a genre lable with a metagenre label, you get very well defined categories… think Military Fantasy, Weird Noir, Erotic Horror, SciFi Adventure, and so on.

We need genre labels to sell books to new readers without giving away the whole plot. We have to have accurate labels in order to make sure that what we’re selling is what the reader wants to buy. They have to be able to trust us, trust our recommendations. It also helps us as writers to be able to describe our own stories – if we can clearly define it to ourselves, it gives us a better idea of whether we end up with the story we meant to write.

I’m not sure if breaking it down this way is the best answer. I do think it’s better than simply saying, “Oh it’s fantasy,” or “Oh, that’s science fiction,” which all too often can be said in a dismissive way, as if the book isn’t good enough for the reader, or the reader isn’t smart enough for the book.

But you tell me. I want your opinions. I am working toward a more thorough explanation of genre and even if I don’t agree with you I want to be sure I considered all the options.

Current State of the To Be Read Pile, April 2012

I read some of the books from my November 2011 list, I got rid of a few I knew I wasn’t that interested in, and I gave a handful of titles away to people who really wanted them. Of course, since I then had room on my bookshelves …

The following list is broken up into a few categories, and the ones with an * after them are the books I’ve started but never completely finished. As of now, here’s what I have left to read:

Fiction, Short Story Collections:

  1. The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, ed. by Kelly Link & Gaven Grant *
  2. Strange Men in Pinstripe Suits & Other Curious Things, Cate Gardner
  3. My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, ed. Kate Bernheimer *
  4. The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle (facsimile of the original 24 stories from THE STRAND MAGAZINE)
  5. The Book of Cthulhu, ed. by Ross E. Lockhart (one story, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s “Flash Frame”, first appeared in Cthulhurotica, which I edited) *
  6. The Living Dead, ed. John Joseph Adams *
  7. The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics, ed. David Kendall *
  8. Evolve, ed. Nancy Kilpatrick
  9. Other Worlds, Better Lives, Howard Waldrop
  10. Pretty Monsters, Kelly Link *
  11. The New Weird, Ann & Jeff Vandermeer *
  12. Year’s Best SF 15, ed. Hartwell and Cramer *
  13. Brave New Worlds, ed. John Joseph Adams *
  14. Shock Totem #2 (2010)
  15. The Past Through Tomorrow, Heinlein *
  16. Push of the Sky, Camille Alexa *
  17. Tales of Ten Worlds, Arthur C. Clarke
  18. Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison
  19. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
  20. The Decameron, Boccaccio
  21. Stories From the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling

As you can see, I tend to read collections a bit at a time and then move on to something else. Continue reading →

More from Folklore: Aesop’s Fables

We’re moving on to The Conference of the Birds (link goes to Wiki) in tomorrow’s class. Before I switch gears, I wanted to share some facts and thoughts on a misunderstood genre of writing: Aesopic fables.

The word “fable” comes from the Latin ”fabula” (a “story”), itself derived from “fari” (“to speak”) with the -ula suffix that signifies “little”: hence, a “little story”.

Aesop’s fables have grown from an early group of Greek stories – attributed to a single source – into a genre, describing a type of stories, regardless of author. We now refer to this body of stories as the “Aesopic tradition”. Fables are generally short, insightful, tales, meant to convey a message in only a few sentences. There are several parts to a fable, not all of which are required but most of which appear over and over again. These include:

  • the moral, with or without an explanatory promythium or epimythium
  • using animals or gods as main characters
  • often explains acts of nature, such as why an animal is of a certain color
  • not (originally) meant for children

A promythium is an explanation of the fable’s moral placed before the story, just as an epimythium comes after the tale. It became very common to add these notes to fables, particularly in the middle ages, in case the reader didn’t get quite the same message that the author intended. When a fable doesn’t have these notes, it’s said to have an endomythium – the moral of the tale is inside the story, and we’re supposed to know what it is.

These moral messages go back to the beginning of fables and speak to the point of having a fable in the first place. Early scholars talk about the original Aesop, who cannot be proven to have existed at all but who may have lived in the 6th century BC, as an angry, sarcastic, stumpy, misshapen, dwarf of a slave*. He was born deaf and mute, but – after helping a priestess – was granted speech as a gift by her goddess. He promptly used his new gifts to denounce his master, the slave system, and pretty much everyone and everything he ran into. He told allegorical stories in order to explain his meaning to people he assumed weren’t as smart as he was, and eventually so angered the people of Delphi that they framed him for stealing in order to have an excuse to shove him off of a cliff. Moral of that story: being smart and clever won’t help you if you’re still an ass to everyone around you.

His stories lived on long after he did, through the oral tradition. Socrates and Aristotle wrote about him; Babrius wrote his fables down for (possibly) the first time; and Pheadrus, Hesiod, Epicharmus of Kos and Phormis all wrote their own fables. The tradition carried on through the middle ages (the Church had several of its own fable writers), found popularity again in 17th century France, and into modern day. There’s significant evidence that the fables didn’t originate with Aesop but that he was himself carrying on an earlier Sumerian tradition of story telling using animals**, but it’s Aesop who gets the fame.

Continue reading →

Folklore: Great Story Collections

Last week I started back at the University of Pennsylvania, after a year off. I’ll be finishing my last semester this Spring, and graduating with a BA in History of Art in May.

In addition to the math and biology lecture class and bio lab I must take to graduate, I also got to pick two others to round out my semester. I went with World Music (I’m writing a paper for that class that I’ll probably post here when it’s done) and Folklore: Great Story Collections. With my work in anthologies it seems like a perfect fit, and I love classes that have interesting reading lists.

Continue reading →