Talking About Science Fiction Talking About Itself
by Jason Block
Why does the science fiction genre endlessly try to define itself? Check a forum somewhere in the world and someone will be trying to define what SFF is and what it is not. Not so the other genres, your romance, your mysteries, your thrillers. They are what they are and when they change no one sits around jawing about it. People go to their favorite genre because they know they can get a blast of what they like, and even a few different varieties of it that have evolved over, oh, the last hundred years or so.
The fantasy shelf has none of that reassuring sameness and year to year can change pretty radically. SFF, like Rock Music, blew up in the 60′s and 70′s to encompass a lot of different things, like a green tentacle beast with a brain the size of a small moon, it just started taking whatever it wanted from every other genre and assimilating it, until every other literary trend had been modified and incorporated. Even though you recognize the resulting carnage when you look at it, maybe, you still don’t know what exactly you’re looking at. The cascades of vast Tolkien rip-offs don’t change that, and so much variation invites millions of words of navel-gazing discussion.
So why don’t the other genres do the same thing? Why is SFF the crazy junkyard squid of the literary world? The reason could be that those other genres never needed a revolution. It’s true that mysteries, crime and suspense all came out of the pulps with SFF when everything shifted to paperbacks in the 50′s, but SFF was always the little brother to those other genres. It had to encourage and rely on a band of motley fanatics (I mean, enthusiasts) to keep it going, and if it was ever going to reach a wider audience, it needed to take risks. The less risky genres have always been huge, going back to the nineteenth century, so why rock the boat? Meanwhile the introverted expressions of SFF fandom provided the fertile ground for future innovations. They still do!
Themocracy
[...] of things, instead of trying to define or redefine what SFF is, Jason Block asks why ask why in ‘Talking About Science Fiction Talking About Itself’. Tram Hillyard visits the Writer’s Apothecary and leaves us with ‘Good Characters Are [...]