Is Science Fiction Still a Distinct Genre?
Over at Mondolithic Studio, they rightfully dismiss the silliness of the “Is science fiction dead?” question and ask perhaps a more pertinent one: “Is Science Fiction Still a Distinct Genre?” They then go on to answer that question…
I think what confuses some people is the fact that Science Fiction isn’t really a distinct genre unto itself anymore. It’s mutated into dozens of sub-genres and movements, liberally exchanged genetic material with Fantasy and social satirism and burrowed into the internet in the form of hundreds of thousands of scifi and fantasy-oriented blogs, galleries, fanzines , vlogs, podcasts and short story webzines.
I don’t believe this “mutation” into sub-genres is new – science fiction has always been a great platform for writers to present a vast number of stories, styles and themes – but I do agree that sf can be many things.
But isn’t this is just another spin on the even more popular “What is SF?” question? As enjoyable as it is to talk about the definitions of science fiction, I think that, from a reader’s point of view, the discussion is academic. “Science Fiction” is a convenient label for people to use to drive them to the right section of the bookstore. Whether or not something adheres to anyone’s particular definition of science fiction is much less important than whether they found it enjoyable. People are reading fiction as a form of entertainment and, in the end, that is what they care about.
What’s your opinion?
[via Posthuman Blues]
Related posts:
- Science Fiction Genre Explained
- Rothfuss on Genre Fiction
- Why Do You Read/Watch Science Fiction?
- Speculative Fiction Genre Chart
- Has Fantasy Overtaken Science Fiction?
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For me it deals more with familiarity. The more familiar you are with a genre, the more you realize that it has sub-genres and room for flexibility. Science Fiction (as well as fantasy) has always had sub-genres and perhaps the interesting thing about innovation is that more and more sub-genres are popping up (and new genres are being coined). Now more than ever, we have work like hard science fiction for example, while political science fiction has been around ever since works like 1984.
Ultimately every body of work might not conform to a specific genre as it draws upon various themes and topics. What story doesn’t incorporate a certain element of romance/love? What story doesn’t have conflict? What story is devoid of religion?
Perhaps one significant difference in this decade as compared to the two previous ones is that we’re treating text more post-modern and writers are trying out different stuff and not afraid to cross boundaries and mix genres.
The existence of subgenres does not mean a genre does not exist; the mystery novel manages to soldier on even with the vast gap between cozies and hardboiled. So that argument is silly.
What Mondolithic Studios is missing, I think, is the historical sense that there is more than one thing that gets called “science fiction.” When we have this conversation within the genre, we’re mostly using that term to refer to works written by writers familiar with the history of the genre and published as science fiction. But there are plenty of writers — Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Martin Amis, Cormac McCarthy, etc. — who use pieces of science fiction for their own purposes, writing books that we in the genre sometimes claim and sometimes shove away. Those other things are science fiction, too — or at least “sort-of science fiction.” There have been more of them over the past decade or two, as the post-war literary generation dies out and a younger crowd experiments with genre. And the existence of pseudo-SF in the mainstream can make it look like SF has “conquered” or “been subsumed into” (depending on your stance) the mainstream, but that’s really not what’s happening.
Mondolithic also misses the point that all of the hybrids described in that post already existed, in the SF genre, long ago. Social satire? Check out Sheckley, Brown, and the other Galaxy writers. SFnal fantasy? Look at de Camp & Pratt’s “Harold Shea” stories. All of those supposedly new mutations have long histories in the SF genre; Mundane SF is just a dour Newer Wave with blander ambitions.
We’ve got a big tent here, and all the things that fit under it don’t always play nicely together. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a tent.
My opinion is virtually the same as yours. I do think some vague notion of genre can be useful as an author in creating a consistent world-feel, but mostly it’s a label to help us find the books we’ll enjoy.
The question that one seems to wonder about after having heard this one so many times leads to another one:
“Why do science fiction fans love thinking about these questions of definition?”
Is it that sort of shared scientific mindset that makes us want to pick apart and define the thing we love? Is it literary insecurity? Is it both? Do fantasy or other genre fans ever wonder the same thing?
After hearing this question asked so many times, it begins to seem like a specific phenomenon within SF. Everyone has slightly differing answers, even if they agree on most things, ie. “there’ve always been a lot of genres and the lines dividing them have always been blurred.” Maybe a really complete answer would fill a heavy textbook. This question being asked over and over, in addition to spawning the slew of deliberation and discussion, ultimately leads to another question:
“Why do science fiction fans love thinking about these questions of definition?”
Is it that sort of scientific mindset which leads us to SF that also makes us want to pick apart and define the thing we love? Is it literary insecurity? Is it both? Do fantasy or other genre fans ever wonder the same thing?
I apologize for the tangent but I wonder about this more and more these days.
As an unpublished writer in the middle of writing my first novel, I was just looking at various small presses yesterday online. Almost all of them, in their submission guidelines, say something like “We don’t accept genre fiction like horror, fantasy and science fiction.” So, as long as writers are still discriminated against for writing the lowly genre of science fiction that many presses won’t even consider for publication, I’d say it’s still a genre.
Of course, there are some works where the writer might think she’s writing science fiction but could probably get away with submitting it as literary fiction, and the publisher so ignorant of sf that they won’t even consider it will look at the book proposal, not see any aliens, and not even realize it’s a sf work. But one of the things I like about sf is the strong sense of solidarity among sf writers, and I personally wouldn’t want to sneak an sf work under the radar of an anti-sf publisher; I would feel like I were betraying the sf community. Therefore, my options as an sf writer are limited to sf publishers.
Genre, indeed.
I agree that one aspect of the genre’s identity is shaped by those who reject material with that label. The shape of the ghetto.
I also tend to think that everyone has their own slightly different definition or feel for the genre, depending on which books and stories made the greatest impact on them. So I personally dislike the “What if?” or “Thought Experiment” or “extrapolating from known science” types of definitions, because what I like most about science fiction is it’s philosophical world views (universe views). I, thus, define science fiction as fiction written from the perspective of a science-based world view; For me this spans, or connects together, what I like about Wells, Asimov, Bester, Herbert, Dick, Niven, le Guin, Kessel, Gibson, Simmons, Butler, McDonald, etc. This fiction looks at the world in a very different way than most of what I’ve been taught to call “literary” fiction. And when the “literary” writer writes something that looks like SF, I think it’s the world view of the piece which will most effect whether I can accept and enjoy it as SF.