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Genre, awards, standards
Apr. 11th, 2012 11:41 amA while back there was some complaining about the Clarke shortlist, to which response has been varied, to say the least (one spinoff via Catherynne Valente leading to a broad discussion of online fora and sexism, another generating Internet Puppy t-shirts). And there have been the usual complaints about the Hugo shortlist as well.
One of the sub-themes of all of this is the riff that nominations are being given for fan-pleasing characteristics rather than for "quality".
Which, of course, raises the question: how is having a characteristic of pleasing fans not in some meaningful sense "quality"? To deal with that, I think we have to go back to thinking about the implications of "genre".
Genre begins somewhere in the ancient world. It doesn't begin with a pre-defined logical set of categories, nor -- emphatically -- does it ever begin with the first work in a genre. It begins with the second work. We don't define genres by means of rules until we have a lot of samples for critics to work on; we define them by the characteristic that works in a genre are in conversation with previous works. Epic gets defined not by Homer, but by the Nostoi, and the Argonautica, and most especially, for us, by Virgil. The Aeneid picks up some traits of the Iliad and the Odyssey which then become the defining traits of epic afterwards (dactylic hexameter, extended similes, epithets, set combat scenes, beginning in medias res, etc., etc.). The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for elegies, or odes, or the Greek Novel.
For Science Fiction and Fantasy (or Mystery, or Horror) and other modern genres, the same basic principle applies. One of the reasons that it's so hard to define where SF ends or hard SF ends is that what makes a work SF is that it's in conversation with prior SF works, even if only implicitly. Sometimes the binding is tight, as with, say, the relationship between Stross's Saturn's Children and late Heinlein, or Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis and Asimov's (original) Foundation stories. Most of the time it's more general. Most space opera is in some way a response to the Lensman books, even if at several removes. Usually, themes are drawn in from a whole cloud of background sources: works about intrasystem sublight exploration, or genetically cloned servants/slaves, or parallel universes with branching histories all respond to an extend a web of previous works which make use of those tropes.
This is one major reason why certain sorts of "crossovers" don't wear the SF label very comfortably -- works by mainstream authors who make use of tropes (one is tempted to say "appropriate", but the tropes are frequently drawn from nonfiction sources, not from random SFnal ones) without being in that sort of a conversation with prior works of SF. So A Handmaid's Tale, or Jurassic Park, or On the Beach don't integrate really well (although works can be adopted after the fact). By contrast, previously non-genre authors who are well-read in the genre don't need magic passwords to get in, even if they bring in themes which are non-genre along: not only is Out of the Silent Planet in conversation with Wells, but Lewis was a reader of the pulp SF of the period.
The work which creates modern heroic fantasy as a genre isn't really The Lord of the Rings; it's probably The Sword of Shanarra, which proved that you could drop many traits of LOTR while slavishly imitating a restricted subset of them and be a commercial success. (Quests, elves, magic trinkets, halflings, Dark Lords). It's notable how hard it seems to be for fantasy to get away from that subset (not, for instance, picking up Tolkien's heavily elegiac tone): for all of the existence of other potential progenitors (Dunsany, Cabell, Mirrlees) only a limited subset of other strains really took off until fairly recently. (The major competitor was the grittier (thieves, mercenaries, and urban settings abound) and much more episodic sword and sorcery tradition of Conan, Elric, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, etc., which is responsible via cross-breeding, frequently via RPGs which drew on both sources, with the larger scale of heroic fantasy for today's grittier writers such as Erickson, Abercrombie, and Martin). Prior to Martin's breakout in the ake of the HBO adaptations, the really big fantasy sellers -- Brooks, Eddings, Jordan -- all could be slotted fairly comfortably into a slot as "post-Tolkienian". (Martin acknowledges a debt to Tolkien but the nature of his action which draws heavily on different tropes imported from the historical novel makes him more "in dialogue with" than "derivative". You could write a Martin-style book about periods in Tolkien's background -- the Kin-Strife in Gondor, perhaps, or some periods in later Numenorean history, but it wouldn't look much like LOTR.) I see a lot more radiating going on now, but I think that much of it isn't a result of hearking back to lost elements in LOTR or other fantasy progenitors, but rather the effects of cross-pollination with "literary" concerns and with historical fiction.
"Literary" fiction is as much a genre (actually, a set of genres: the Fielding - Austen - James - Joyce - Powell trajectory of the classic novel is somewhat distinct from the Radcliffe - (Emily) Bronte - Collins romance tradition which eventually contributes to both modern romance and mystery genres, and both are distinct from the parodic tradition derived from Swift and Sterne whose recent exponents include Pynchon, Wallace, and Stephenson) as SF is: it's "in dialogue with" a longer list of core works (it's older) including those in Leavis' "Great Tradition" (well, Fielding, Austen and Eliot at least; I don't think many authors these days feel any need to be in dialogue with D.H. Lawrence), plus Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Hardy, Thackeray, Powell, James... These works look a lot like SF from a distance. Unlike epic, the lines go to the edge of the page, they are divided into chapters, and they make use of the same broad types of narratorial models. However, the core characteristics of literary fiction (and in particular the novel) are not those of SF: ideas are less important (Eliot said of James that "James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it"), prose style as an end in itself is much more so, events themselves are downplayed and inner reactions to events take the foreground.
This genetic way of defining genre, of course, allows for all sorts of crossovers. A novel can be in equal dialogue with exemplars from different traditions (it's possible to Imagine a Dance to the Music of Time analogue set on Barrayar, and there is much excellent work being done these days which draws heavily on the developed techniques of the novel while thematically remaining in close dialogue with the SF and Fantasy genres (consider Roberts, Valente, Mièville)). But it's not required for an SF novel to be in much of a dialogue with the literary tradition to be a reasonable nominee for an SF award. Rule 34 would never even be in the running for an award within the literary genre; but pace Christopher Priest, it's a reasonable nominee for the Clarke award, because it's strong in one of the core SF areas (ideas within a particular set of fields) and combines that with good readability. (Clarke's books themselves don't exactly give off literary emanations, hmmm?). Of course, it's frequently a mark of Really Ambitious Books that they do try to use a broader set of referents (whether they succeed or not is a different question), and it's usually a mark of a good author that they edit their prose to a reasonable degree of tautness (I'm looking at Connie Willis here.).
You can (and I frequently do) feel that, well, no, the best SF novel of the year didn't win the Hugo, or the Nebula, or the Clarke. It's also reasonable, sometimes, to emit a what were they thinking? noise when a particularly good novel doesn't even get into the nominees in a year which is not entirely stellar nominees. However, decrying the whole state of the awards because novels with qualities relevant to the literary genre are being beaten out by works without those qualities is not really called for.
One of the sub-themes of all of this is the riff that nominations are being given for fan-pleasing characteristics rather than for "quality".
Which, of course, raises the question: how is having a characteristic of pleasing fans not in some meaningful sense "quality"? To deal with that, I think we have to go back to thinking about the implications of "genre".
Genre begins somewhere in the ancient world. It doesn't begin with a pre-defined logical set of categories, nor -- emphatically -- does it ever begin with the first work in a genre. It begins with the second work. We don't define genres by means of rules until we have a lot of samples for critics to work on; we define them by the characteristic that works in a genre are in conversation with previous works. Epic gets defined not by Homer, but by the Nostoi, and the Argonautica, and most especially, for us, by Virgil. The Aeneid picks up some traits of the Iliad and the Odyssey which then become the defining traits of epic afterwards (dactylic hexameter, extended similes, epithets, set combat scenes, beginning in medias res, etc., etc.). The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for elegies, or odes, or the Greek Novel.
For Science Fiction and Fantasy (or Mystery, or Horror) and other modern genres, the same basic principle applies. One of the reasons that it's so hard to define where SF ends or hard SF ends is that what makes a work SF is that it's in conversation with prior SF works, even if only implicitly. Sometimes the binding is tight, as with, say, the relationship between Stross's Saturn's Children and late Heinlein, or Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis and Asimov's (original) Foundation stories. Most of the time it's more general. Most space opera is in some way a response to the Lensman books, even if at several removes. Usually, themes are drawn in from a whole cloud of background sources: works about intrasystem sublight exploration, or genetically cloned servants/slaves, or parallel universes with branching histories all respond to an extend a web of previous works which make use of those tropes.
This is one major reason why certain sorts of "crossovers" don't wear the SF label very comfortably -- works by mainstream authors who make use of tropes (one is tempted to say "appropriate", but the tropes are frequently drawn from nonfiction sources, not from random SFnal ones) without being in that sort of a conversation with prior works of SF. So A Handmaid's Tale, or Jurassic Park, or On the Beach don't integrate really well (although works can be adopted after the fact). By contrast, previously non-genre authors who are well-read in the genre don't need magic passwords to get in, even if they bring in themes which are non-genre along: not only is Out of the Silent Planet in conversation with Wells, but Lewis was a reader of the pulp SF of the period.
The work which creates modern heroic fantasy as a genre isn't really The Lord of the Rings; it's probably The Sword of Shanarra, which proved that you could drop many traits of LOTR while slavishly imitating a restricted subset of them and be a commercial success. (Quests, elves, magic trinkets, halflings, Dark Lords). It's notable how hard it seems to be for fantasy to get away from that subset (not, for instance, picking up Tolkien's heavily elegiac tone): for all of the existence of other potential progenitors (Dunsany, Cabell, Mirrlees) only a limited subset of other strains really took off until fairly recently. (The major competitor was the grittier (thieves, mercenaries, and urban settings abound) and much more episodic sword and sorcery tradition of Conan, Elric, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, etc., which is responsible via cross-breeding, frequently via RPGs which drew on both sources, with the larger scale of heroic fantasy for today's grittier writers such as Erickson, Abercrombie, and Martin). Prior to Martin's breakout in the ake of the HBO adaptations, the really big fantasy sellers -- Brooks, Eddings, Jordan -- all could be slotted fairly comfortably into a slot as "post-Tolkienian". (Martin acknowledges a debt to Tolkien but the nature of his action which draws heavily on different tropes imported from the historical novel makes him more "in dialogue with" than "derivative". You could write a Martin-style book about periods in Tolkien's background -- the Kin-Strife in Gondor, perhaps, or some periods in later Numenorean history, but it wouldn't look much like LOTR.) I see a lot more radiating going on now, but I think that much of it isn't a result of hearking back to lost elements in LOTR or other fantasy progenitors, but rather the effects of cross-pollination with "literary" concerns and with historical fiction.
"Literary" fiction is as much a genre (actually, a set of genres: the Fielding - Austen - James - Joyce - Powell trajectory of the classic novel is somewhat distinct from the Radcliffe - (Emily) Bronte - Collins romance tradition which eventually contributes to both modern romance and mystery genres, and both are distinct from the parodic tradition derived from Swift and Sterne whose recent exponents include Pynchon, Wallace, and Stephenson) as SF is: it's "in dialogue with" a longer list of core works (it's older) including those in Leavis' "Great Tradition" (well, Fielding, Austen and Eliot at least; I don't think many authors these days feel any need to be in dialogue with D.H. Lawrence), plus Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Hardy, Thackeray, Powell, James... These works look a lot like SF from a distance. Unlike epic, the lines go to the edge of the page, they are divided into chapters, and they make use of the same broad types of narratorial models. However, the core characteristics of literary fiction (and in particular the novel) are not those of SF: ideas are less important (Eliot said of James that "James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it"), prose style as an end in itself is much more so, events themselves are downplayed and inner reactions to events take the foreground.
This genetic way of defining genre, of course, allows for all sorts of crossovers. A novel can be in equal dialogue with exemplars from different traditions (it's possible to Imagine a Dance to the Music of Time analogue set on Barrayar, and there is much excellent work being done these days which draws heavily on the developed techniques of the novel while thematically remaining in close dialogue with the SF and Fantasy genres (consider Roberts, Valente, Mièville)). But it's not required for an SF novel to be in much of a dialogue with the literary tradition to be a reasonable nominee for an SF award. Rule 34 would never even be in the running for an award within the literary genre; but pace Christopher Priest, it's a reasonable nominee for the Clarke award, because it's strong in one of the core SF areas (ideas within a particular set of fields) and combines that with good readability. (Clarke's books themselves don't exactly give off literary emanations, hmmm?). Of course, it's frequently a mark of Really Ambitious Books that they do try to use a broader set of referents (whether they succeed or not is a different question), and it's usually a mark of a good author that they edit their prose to a reasonable degree of tautness (I'm looking at Connie Willis here.).
You can (and I frequently do) feel that, well, no, the best SF novel of the year didn't win the Hugo, or the Nebula, or the Clarke. It's also reasonable, sometimes, to emit a what were they thinking? noise when a particularly good novel doesn't even get into the nominees in a year which is not entirely stellar nominees. However, decrying the whole state of the awards because novels with qualities relevant to the literary genre are being beaten out by works without those qualities is not really called for.
