The State of Genre Fiction

First off, just so we’re all clear, it’s still December 26 in my heart. I’ll just have to update before twelve tomorrow.

Here’s the post: Genre fiction sucks these days. I was at the bookstore the other day, and so much of it is so derivative. It’s ridiculous. All the fantasy is high beyond belief(I might use the term “stoned” fantasy to describe how high it is), and all the SF is either the same antihero-cyberpunk fluff or Lucasian space opera

Genres are terrible. There need not be a division between SF and fantasy. It helps; obviously Neuromancer and The Belgariad are in two very different categories, but there are also plenty of books that straddle the line between the genres. But the thing that really makes me angry about genre fiction is the subgenres. Not so much in fantasy, because that’s always high fantasy or something that gets lumped into SF, but science fiction itself has got space opera, cyberpunk, steampunk, speculative, war SF, just to name a few. That’s stupid. All that does is narrow the choices a creative person can make to the point where it has to fall in one of those categories or get totally sidelined.

And the worst part of all this is that the big authors, like Orson Scott Card and Gene Wolfe, really do challenge the definitions of the two big genres. I mean, that isn’t bad – it’s fantastic, actually – but the people who read it and are inspired just write something that’s basically fanfiction. They take whatever feel that the author they read from created and duplicate it in a diluted form. It snowballs, catches on, and soon enough we have a new genre.

Say I became a famous writer and wrote a book that takes place in Medieval Europe. Theocratic, culturally stagnant, begging for a Renaissance. However, in this version of history they have spaceships which were deposited there thousands of years before by who-knows-what. The Pope retains strict control over the ships, and everyone but a few nobles have no idea how to work them, or that they’re anything other than a gift from God. Therefore, the state of feudalism is preserved, and the atmosphere of the Dark Ages remains, despite the fact that extraterrestrial travel exists.

This novel is a hit. It’s well-written, popular, intelligent and innovative,  hailed as a landmark in the history both of science fiction and fantasy. I write a few sequels, and the craze builds, until I end the series and write something else.

Then it all goes wrong. The series either gets lumped in with high fantasy and a bunch of Lord of the Rings WITH SPAECSIHPS OMG novels come out, or the SF community gives it its own subgenre and it becomes obnoxiously popular. People, rather than being inspired to write similar but different fiction, latch onto it and write dozens of novels that are almost exactly the same with a few minor tweaks. And then there’s always the option that it’s just too weird to be economically copied, so it gets put onto a pedestal and shut away somewhere, like Shadow of the Torturer.

That needs to change. Genre fiction, despite its façade of being the creative, original area of fiction, is little more than a sea of derivative knockoffs. It’s supposed to be about creativity, imagination and innovation, not leeching off somebody else’s brilliance.

~ by pieboy on December 27, 2006.