Right now, the science fiction genre is a “big tent…” That is, a lot of different stuff goes into the Science fiction section of a book store, and very little of it is actually SCIENCE FICTION.
But, the same thing can be said of a lot of other sections of the bookstore… Romance has a lot of fantasy fiction in it… mystery/suspense has a lot of horror, and/or SF in it. And don’t get me started on the fiction section – Literature with a capital L has plenty of SF/fantasy books in it.
I’m sure it all seems quite ridiculous from a writer’s perspective… Publishers want boxes… want categories, and then once they have a category, they proceeded to expand the category until its not recognizable any more. From a reader perspective, this is a good thing… It provides the safety of going to a section of the bookstore where you know you will find what you are looking for, but also allows you to stumble across something just on the edge of your comfort zone.
I’m not sure how man Philip Roth readers, or Michael Chabon readers would be comfortable looking through the science fiction section for alternate history, but a good number of those readers had no trouble reading the very SF-nal books by those mainstream authors – So sometimes, it is simply about what section of the bookstore it is in.
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Let me tell you, it’s great to be a fantasy writer. The sky’s the limit. Imagination is my oyster. I can do anything I want. I don’t have to obey the constraints of politics or physics. I can ignore the boundaries of biology and geography. I can imagine bold and exciting new worlds and populate them with amazing races. I can push my readers to the limit, expand their horizons.
Genre has never been high among my criteria for selecting a book to read…or to write. I’ve never understood people who say they like broad categories of things, any more than I understand people who will watch any movie with a particular actor in it. Even the best actors are sometimes in bad movies, just as a book in any given genre may be junk.
Howdy,
If you ever want an eye-opening view of humanity, how we function, and our shaky relationship with reality as it truly is, take a class or read about perception. It’s a fascinating subject, one of my favorites, really. I could go on and on, but I’ll give you the short version. Our brains process quite a lot of information (through our senses) every second of every day just to keep us from walking into walls. Even so, there’s far too much information for our brains, as impressive as they are, to sort through at any given moment. We can’t keep up with the visual data alone. So, short-cuts are wired into the very core of the system. We make assumptions and guesses all the time without knowing it. We have to. Our brains would be overwhelmed otherwise. The interesting thing about this is that even if an assumption works to keep us from falling down a manhole, that doesn’t mean the assumption is accurate. It’s merely functional for the time being. Think about it. Our base design is such that we are not capable of seeing the absolute truth. At our base we are inaccurate creatures. We live by guesstimates. Trust. Faith. And that is the source of so many of humanity’s greatest joys and heart aches.
The weird thing about the genre conversation is that it wasn’t even possible to have it until recently. As Gene Wolfe noted (and I’m damned if I can find out where), for a long while, “genre” lay at the center of literature: the ILIAD, the ODYSSEY, Dante’s INFERNO, etc. It’s only been relatively recently that writing about the “mundane” became the default literature and those who were writing about the fantastic increasingly found themselves marginalized. That’s a development that would have struck the classical writers as more than a little strange. Not only would they probably have been bored shitless by most of the stuff in bookstores, but they would have wondered how one can address the fundamental questions that plague humanity without recourse to archetypal tropes.
As humans we like to create classifications. There are a few good reasons we do that. It helps us get an immediate picture of what to expect from a thing; identify other, similar things; and decide whether we want it. We apply this to principle to books as much as to fruits and televisions.