Jul 17 2008
The Problem With Speculative Fiction
Warning: The following will be more than mildly ranty.
There is a problem with speculative fiction. And no, I don’t mean that it’s corrupting our children, or that it’s taking us away from the real world, or that it somehow decreases our interest in truly good writing. I find these arguments silly.
The problem of speculative fiction is the role it currently holds in the public consciousness. The genre has, for various reasons, acquired itself a bit of a bad rap, much the same way the romance novel has. What can we say about a genre whose own up and coming writers often seem to think that writing in that genre excuses shoddy work, lack of original plots, lack of decent character depth?
No, I’m not an anti-speculative fiction writer. Hear me out, all right?
I never really noticed this issue before my senior year of college. Sure, there were people who found it really surprising that I, scholarly type that I was, would so much as touch a fantasy novel (I lived off the things). Sure, there were people who’d look at me funny when I was reading the stuff. Sure, I’d occasionally hear complaints from my friends about writing teachers who didn’t consider the genre to be worth considering. But then I got into Introduction to Writing Fiction.
What happened there showed me why it is that the genre has issues. Our professor wanted us writing literary fiction. Now, this didn’t bother me any; I consider every piece of fiction I write, unless I’m trying to write badly, to be literary. But she also utterly forbade genre fiction of any sort whatsoever.
This, needless to say, bothered me. It wasn’t enough to make me actively fight it. Passively, yes; I practically made a game out of seeing how close I could get to writing fantasy without actually writing fantasy. I definitely tended to go home and run through long IM rants about being forbidden to play to what I considered one of my strengths. And I still take issues with the fact that, whether she meant it to or not, it tended to cause my classmates to group “literary fiction” and “speculative fiction” into two separate groups.
It wasn’t until the following class that I understood why she had done so. In English 402, our submissions for the in-class workshops were allowed to include speculative fiction of all sorts, with the warning attached that she wouldn’t be able to grade them quite as well because she didn’t understand the genre conventions. This I could work with. Sort of. Until I saw the materials. No offense to my classmates, but I don’t think they wrote speculative near as well as they wrote the standard, and sometimes I wondered if the amount of effort put in was the same. Perhaps I was just being judgmental; I’m not sure.
She told me, after a yet another discussion of whether speculative fiction could be literary, why she’d banned it in the first-level class. Apparently it was a student thing; they’d show up with dubious plots or characterization, things nobody would ever let slide in a literary work, and claimed it was okay because it was “only fantasy” or “only science fiction”. If even our writers can’t take their own genre seriously, what are we? If half of our iconic pieces are derived from the same book, if people are running about doing half-baked imitations of arts that are our genre’s prerogative and then calling them easy, what are we? Are we ever going to get out of this genre ghetto if we can’t take our own work seriously? If we can’t treat pieces in our genre with the same respect and the same critical eye that we expect “literary” fiction to be treated with? If anything, we should be a pickier audience, because along with the standard collections of tired clichés and worn-out phrases, we have an entirely genre-specific collection of things to be avoided. Color-coded magic. Stock races. A lack of willingness to really research our own languages. And then we tell each other that these pieces that have so much room for improvement are brilliant, and as a result it seems like it’s only the “elitists” like me who think they need to improve.
There is so little real criticism, that despite the very delightful and heartening feedback from and connection with the fans, the writer is almost his only critic. If he produces second-rate stuff, it will be bought just as fast, maybe faster sometimes, by the publishers, and the fans will buy it because it is science fiction. Only his own conscience remains to insist that he try not to be second-rate. Nobody else seems much to care.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Citizen of Mondath”
It’s been thirty-five years since she wrote that essay. Can we please render it out of date now?
That’s probably a rant in an of itself (I may have to book it for Monday, I’ve got the weekend filled). I’ll give you an overview, though.
There are three ways to deal with cliches. One is to completely reverse them. This is usually done with individuals rather than groups–the first example that comes to mind is R. A. Salvatore’s Drizzt–but sometimes someone will take an entire race stereotype, scrap it and say “All right, we’re doing things this way instead.” The problem with this is that you’ve still got races defined by one thing, but instead of being defined by their cliche, they’re being defined by being the polar opposite.
The second is to work within them. This one is easiest for people who are trying to write to an audience with definite expectations, as they don’t have to worry about calling forth shouts of “These aren’t MY [dwarves, fire mages, necromancers, what-have-you]!” It is, however, one of the hardest to do well. It’s an introspective process: you take the cliche and try to figure out how these people got to this point. Why are the dwarves short, stubborn subterranean metalworkers with a large capacity for mead? What cultural facets you haven’t seen before might result from these traits? (For instance, along with the mead and the metalworking, you might give them some sort of divination trick based on banding in rock grains, or a love of mosaic art, or–due to their rigidity–an interest in writing a very strict poetry form like sonnets or haiku.)
The third is to keep the image and scrap everything else. Using our dwarves again: Yeah, they’re still the short, stocky stubborn guys in the heavy armor, but now they’re sailors to go with it (they can hold grog with the best of ‘em, their strength means they’ve got the steadiest tiller-hands of anyone, and they’re so stubborn they argue with the storms they’re sailing through). You might even rename them at this point; that sets them farther away from the dwarves they were based on. And really, who needs to know the difference?
Tropes don’t bug me as much as they could; I’ve actually got a side project going in which I explain my game and its convoluted plot and cast using many buzzwords from TVTropes as possible. Might let you read it when I’m finished, if you remind me. (And yes, subversions are fun. What depresses me is stories in which someone could go for a beautiful subversion but chooses to play it straight.)
And yeah, there is indeed a lot of similarity. The essence is good–it’s just that that essence isn’t why they’re bestsellers. Twilight succeeds because it plays to the fantasies of so many hormonal teenagers (but between the ultraviolet prose and the squicky elements in the later books, I wouldn’t touch it with a ten yard pole). Dan Brown makes it because some people just plain don’t want to think, and because people hear the complaints about the controversial elements and want to know what all the fuss is about. Harry Potter you could probably learn a decent amount from–in the early books, Rowling did a good job of getting her world across (though I’m still annoyed that she lost that touch in the later books, and it turned into just another background; keeping the world in focus could really have saved the tone of the fifth).
I suppose what bothers me about some of the books that are supposedly representative of the fantasy genre is that people are too busy reading them to pick up the books they could really learn from. You might get a little bit about romance from Twilight–but you’d get a lot more about it, and a more intelligent portrayal, and considerably fewer stereotypes, from just about anything by Tamora Pierce (and with a side order of worldbuilding, too!), and you’ll get better vampires from Charlaine Harris. You can learn about suspense and conspiracies from Dan Brown–but I found John Nance’s novels on airplanes to be better at teaching me how to maintain tension without blatant audience-baiting and keeping better continuity. (I wonder if I need to start doing book reviews based on what could be learned from reading a given novel?)
And of course, I consider it my job to help anyone who comes here improve their writing. So my question is–what do you want to know?