M. Darusha Wehm

Science fiction and mainstream books by award-winning author M. Darusha Wehm

genre

One Trick Ponies

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Most people know me as a science fiction writer. That’s not terribly surprising, given that I’ve got four SF novels out, plus a bunch of SF stories in various markets. I’m active in conversations about SF in various online locales (Google+ is a hotbed of great discussion lately) and I’ve attended SF-themed conventions as a participant and speaker.

If the above isn’t a description of a science fiction writer, I don’t know what is.

But.

I’m not just a science fiction writer. Aside from the fact that I’m not just a writer, I write things that don’t even come close to being classified as SF. Not wanting to get into a “this is SF, this isn’t” argument, I definitely write outside my most recognizable genre.

I started writing seriously as a poet and I’ve had classic haiku published recently. I’ve got a mainstream novel cooking away in edits and I’m getting into straight-up mystery writing. That’s just what’s going on now – who knows what I might do in the future.

Plenty of writers don’t stick to a single genre, and there are certainly anecdotal stories of well-known writers being hamstrung by their readers’ (or editors’) desires to make sure they keep doing what they’ve always done, rather than what they want to do. Which is a shame.

Genre shouldn’t be a cage, whether gilded or rusty barbed-wire. As writers we need realize that one genre-based readership isn’t necessarily going to be interested in our work in other areas, but that should not stop us. Working in other genres is a way to create new readers, plus it keeps us excited about our work. A win-win.

So what do you write that’s not what you’re known for?

Where is the Serious SF?

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I read this article, Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost the Future by Jonathan McCalmont (found via Ian Sales) a few weeks back and have been mulling over what to say about it. It is long… very long and somewhat inflammatory. I am fairly certain that a lot of SFF writers would get pretty angry at what McCalmont has to say here.

That said, I think anyone writing seriously in SFF should read the whole piece and think about the issues it raises. McCalmont has strong opinions about what is wrong with SF today. I know that many people don’t think anything is wrong with SF today and my intention is not to argue that point. However, this article talks about a perceived sense of disaffection and irony in mainstream SFF nowadays.

I’m drawn to articles like this for two reasons: one) I want to write better, more serious, more complex SF and two) I personally find that, as a reader, I’m disappointed that the kinds of stories I like aren’t being published and critically lauded that often these days.

I say that item two is a matter of personal preference, but McCalmont argues that it’s a result of current SF’s “exhaustion” – essentially that writing about the world as it is through the lens of the world as it could be is just plain difficult, which is why it isn’t being done very often.

His first point is a refutation that writing about a plausible future is impossible because that future is already here.

The most common account of why science fiction no longer attempts to engage with the future is that the future is now deemed to be out of bounds. The world, we are told, changes so quickly that any attempt to predict the future would necessarily be out of date by the time the book was released.

I agree with McCalmont that this is a total cop-out. Sure, writing about any near-future that is based on the current state of the art is tempting the fate of having one’s “predictions” come true or be invalidated. But, so what? It’s fiction and its purpose is, at least ideally, to shine a mirror on the world in which we do live. Part of that world is rapid change, new technologies and obsolescence  Coming up with future-proof stories shouldn’t be the goal.

McCalmont then takes umbrage with the blurring of genre lines. Here, I am in two minds – as I’ve argued earlier, genre to me seems to be a bit of an artificial construction. That said, I did feel a stirring of agreement at this complaint:

The most obvious manifestation of science fiction’s exhaustion with the future has been an intentional blurring of the line between that which was traditionally thought of as science fiction and that which was traditionally thought of as fantasy. As Kincaid puts it, this “is a notion that has clearly taken root with today’s writers since they consistently appropriate the attire of fantasy for what is ostensibly far-future sf, even to the extent of referring unironically to wizards and spells and the like.”

(The article he’s referring to here is Paul Kincaid’s critique of Year’s Best anthologies – another worthwhile read on this subject.)

I think that the problem isn’t so much the lack of strong genre identity as it is a lack of seriousness of purpose to the storytelling. I think McCalmont is wrong when he argues that one leads to the other:

 …in order to produce such a story, a writer must reach the conclusion that genre boundaries and expectations are things unworthy of being taken seriously. The problem is that, once writers began treating genre boundaries with a degree of ironic detachment, they found it rather difficult to be serious about anything at all.

I don’t see the inherent connection there. Denying the validity of strong genre lines does not require the denial of other serious content. McCalmont even goes on to talk about genre-blurring books with strong socio-political aspects.

(I suspect that McCalmont is, like me, generally turned off as a reader as soon as supernatural elements appear. However, fantastic elements can be used in a rigourous, serious story. Zoo City by Lauren Beukes is a fine example.)

Ultimately it is that lack of seriousness that is the crux of McCalmont’s (and my) complaint. There is certainly a market for escapist fiction, and there’s nothing wrong with writing it or reading it. But there is something wrong with it being the only work that is available or lauded. And escapism does have the (I hope) unintended consequence of letting us forget the real consequences of actions. Just as death is merely an inconvenience in a video game, there are no real political and economic consequences of fictional societies that hand-wave away where all that fun stuff comes from.

While the idea of an escapist fantasy that allows middle-class white people to escape their historical responsibility is about as politically dubious as contemporary science fiction gets, the fundamental mechanics of the Nostalgic approach to science fiction are largely value free as they are principally about building a fictional past that fits with how people feel about the present.

and

In contemporary science fiction, the traditionally disenfranchised are encouraged to write as long as their stories do not remind us of the historical inequalities that marginalised these writers in the first place.

For me as a writer, it is a constant challenge to create a universe which is plausible within the constraints of physics and the current technological state of the art, yet “other” enough to be a vehicle to comment on some aspect of the current human condition. What draws me to SF is the ability to use a what-if scenario to examine contemporary issues in an entertaining rather than didactic way.

It’s a careful balance between pure escapism and political screed, and it’s not easy to strike that balance the right way every time. I know I fail and I’ve read writers much better than me who fail, too. But we still ought to try.

The challenge facing contemporary science fiction is to widen the cracks and to peer through the fractured veneer of neoliberalism in an effort to see what could one day come to pass.  These futures, though speculative, must always remain anchored in the present moment as the real challenge facing science fiction is not merely to create a possible future, but to create the type of possible future that is currently deemed unthinkable.

…

We are living in a science fictional world and this means that science fiction is in a unique position to help us to make sense of a dangerously unstable world. By rediscovering its ties to reality and using old tropes to explore new problems, science fiction can provide humanity with its first draft of future history.

Where Has All the Science Gone?

Image Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

Among the people I follow online, there’s a lot of F* Yeah, SCIENCE! talk. From the way my internet looked a few weeks back, nothing happened in the universe except a rover landing on Mars. Folks I know talk about space, genetics, geology etc. like some people talk about fashion designers or movie stars.

But, the flip side to this is that there’s also a lot of talk about science and rationality being dismissed in the culture at large. SF author Peter Watts made a somewhat inflammatory post about this over on his blog, but it’s a topic that raises its head all the time in my circles.

I’ll come back to this.

On a seemingly unrelated note, writer/editor Ian Sales recently went on a tear about the Hugo awards (the annual fan-voted SF/F awards). While I agree with him on some of the category issues, the main thrust of his argument seems to be twofold: a) there aren’t enough “real” (ie. hard) SF stories on the ballot and b) it’s all a popularity contest.

Both of these points are, I’d say, answered by the very nature of the beast – the Hugos are voted on by the readers. So they are designed to reflect what’s popular*. And what’s popular isn’t hard SF.

Why? Could it be part of that divide between the pro-science crowd and the anti-intellectuals? I’m not sure I believe there is such a pronounced divide, though I have to admit that as a fan and author of hard SF it is disheartening to see how completely fantasy and soft SF have taken over the field. Sure, there are still hard SF stories out there, but overall it’s not what’s selling.

So what is it about science that gets some people so excited, but turns everyone else off? How come people seem to be more interested in reading about magic than technology?

* Interestingly, many of the Hugo winners this year were also Nebula winners. I guess hard SF isn’t that popular with SF writers either.

A Post-Genre Future or Read Any Good Books Lately?

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Chuck “Hilarious Potty-Mouth” Wendig has a good piece up about the shifting value of genre labels in fiction. He’s not the first person I’ve seen with this idea; Charles Stross talked about this back in May.

I’m particularly taken with Wendig’s notion of More Granularity:

Think of fiction as having aspects or elements (and those of you who game in the RPG sense will see the value of this) — a piece of fiction might have a “time travel” aspect, a “tragedy” aspect, a “detective” aspect. One novel might be “serial killer / robot / erotic love triangle.” Another might be, “dinosaur / noir / bioethics.”

It seems clear to me that in other than the most basic of genre plots this is already what’s going on in genre fiction. Really great mystery stories are about a lot more than just figuring out whodunnit – they’re also romances, war stories, alternate histories, literary fiction, buddy stories… the list goes on.

The point of genre has historically been, both Wendig and Stross argue, to help readers find things they’ll like. Judging a story based on its genre is something I think most of us do, usually to our detriment as readers. There ought to be a better way — and there is: recommendations.

Some of the best books I’ve ever read were recommendations from friends. I was an SF anti-fan for years, until I was handed a copy of The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. It’s Space Opera, but so much more. It was the more that enchanted me — and it’s that more that’s the common aspect to all the books I’ve ever loved, regardless of the label on the shelf where they’ve been placed in the bookstore.

I still get recommendations, both directly from folks I know and also indirectly from my connections on Goodreads. But there is certainly a way to harness technology and networking to make a more robust recommendation system. Wendig has an idea, referring to the story aspects discussed earlier:

Think … of a Pandora-like app that searches your e-book library and uses these very axes and aspects to help you discover new authors and stories. I want that! And I think we need it, too.

Someone need to make this. Seriously.