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Genrely Speaking: Parody

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So last time around I talked about deconstruction and how it’s all about taking a genre back to basics. This month let’s take a look at another genre that’s very meta in it’s approaches to tropes, characters and story – parody.

Parody is a genre (metagenre?), like deconstruction, that is best when the creator behind it has a deep and abiding love of the foundational genre. While it can be done without that love, parodies that are just done to create a parody have a tendency to feel flat and lifeless at best or downright mean-spirited and petty at worst, frequently lapsing into the third metagenre, satire. Parody is closest to a characteristic genre, because most of it’s scenarios are drawn straight from the aesthetic genre being parodied while the characters toss around more lampshades than a discount furniture store.

The goal of all this nonsense is, of course, to illustrate the nonsense of the genre being parodied. Fun is the name of the game, fun had by pushing tropes to the limit and beyond to see how absurd they are then cleverly tying it all together to give the viewers the resolution they expect but not in the way they expected.

When you see the following, it’s probably safe to assume you’re dealing with parody:

  1. Lampshades. Big lampshades. Everywhere. Part of the humor in a parody is showing how the conventions of the parodied genre don’t actually make a whole lot of sense. And then, of course, allowing your characters to accept that absurdity as a part of their world and move on. In addition to being very funny it offers a valuable life lesson – much of real life doesn’t make sense to us but we still need to accept it to be able to function. Doing it with a bit of humor just makes it that much easier to do.
  2. Characters who are dangerously genre savvy. Since parodies tend to stack up tropes faster than Scrooge McDuck stacks money there’s a real need for the main characters to recognize and deal with the situations as fast as possible, otherwise the story either bogs down horribly or reaches the point where any believable resolution is impossible. Most of the time genre savvy is restricted to just one or two characters in a standard genre story – if more are demonstrating it odds are good you’re in a parody.
  3. As much flair and embellishment as possible. While most genres are trying to keep focus on their own central elements parody expects the audience to bring a functional knowledge of the central elements of its parent genre to the table so it can focus on making the tropes as big and over the top as possible rather than digging in to the depths of potential meaning the parent genre has.

What are the weaknesses of a parody? Probably the biggest is the basic investment parody expects its audience to have in the parent genre. A high fantasy parody expects us to understand the idea of rings of power or halflings and be ready to be entertained by them, it’s not going to delve too deeply into those concepts it’s going to be contorting them into new and weird shapes in an attempt to make us laugh.

On top of that, parody is a very loud and bombastic genre, very easily coming off as without reverence for the parent genre it is based on. And in some cases that’s true. A genre can suddenly skyrocket to popularity and detractors of the genre will try and show what’s wrong with it by using a parody – an attempt that pretty much always fails. Other times a creator’s idea of what would make a good parody doesn’t resonate with large chunks of a genre’s audience and the parody’s creator winds up loosing a lot of the audience he should be catering most too.

What are the strengths of a parody? As I said in the above point about lampshading, a good-natured attitude towards apparent absurdity is by no means a bad thing and parodies are very good at showing us how to maintain that. Also, the freakish gambit pileups that are often at the heart of parodies can be incredible showcases for creativity and fresh ideas, something genres can come up short on over time.

Most of all, parodies remind creators not to take themselves too seriously. Yes, being a creator is serious business. It’s very hard work most all of the time. It can be very easy to loose sight of the obligations creators have to their audiences, to loose touch with a spirit of fun that can make even the hardest messages more palatable. By bringing everyone, audience and creator, back in contact with that spirit the parody can do it’s parent genre a great service.

Genrely Speaking: Deconstruction

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Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, it’s once again time to break down a genre and see what makes it work. And what better genre to break down than the deconstruction?

Tropes are the tools of writers. They provide readymade structure for a story, a character, a scene or an exchange of dialog. They set the standard and, although a story is pure mediocrity if the standard is all it achieves, tropes are still very useful if applied in a thoughtful and informed fashion. But.

All genres tend to have tropes pile up around them. All genres can become over-stylized, over-formalized, totally divorced from verisimilitude and meaningless as a reflection of the human condition. When this happens the genre stops serving anything other than itself and rapidly devolves into empty entertainment until, eventually, it stops being entertaining. Unless.

If a creator with a firm understanding of the genre itself and what purpose it serves in addressing the human condition comes along and carefully, lovingly takes all those extraneous tropes that have attached themselves to the genre like barnacles and pries them loose he can go back to the roots. By looking at the original purpose of the stories and breaking off everything that no longer serves to advance those purposes the creator literally deconstructs the genre as it is understood in modern times and leaves behind the core impact, revitalizing the genre and making it relevant to us once again. This is the deconstruction.

Deconstruction is mostly a characteristic genre, since the tropes of a genre that have the hardest time changing are those that revolve around the people populating the story. Genres tend to gain or loose favor as their themes gain or loose prominence in society while the aesthetics of a genre either change to fit or split off into new genres (as we see with the divergence of alternate history and steampunk). So how exactly do you recognize a deconstruction when you’re reading one?

  1. Look for an emphasis on normal, relatable central characters. The main character is where genres seem to build up the most tropes. Be it amnesia in action or fantasy stories, the grizzled soldier in war movies or the hardboiled detective in noir, fiction tends to wind up filled to the brim with characters who look nothing like real people. The first thing a deconstruction does is pull all of that away and rebuild the central cast as the most normal, relatable characters the creator can think of. Inevitably these characters will be defined by tropes and themes that the creator, and not necessarily the audience, can relate to (I’m looking at you Neon Genesis Evangelion) but the point is that the creator is trying to put the characters at the center of the story back in touch with reality.
  2. At least one or two supporting characters who are very much average or below average. Not to harp on this too much but we’re going to harp on it. Deconstructions are trying to take the genre aesthetics they’re founded in and bring them back in touch to normal life. That means not only bringing the leading characters back closer to normal but, given that most fiction is inherently a little unbelievable, it means making characters that are completely normal, who’s only tie to abnormality is their connection to the main characters, not only to ground the central characters but to give the audience a stronger connection to the story through more characters like them.
  3. An emphasis on real, believable consequences to character’s decisions, especially as regards their relationships with one another. In buddy movies the two central characters often forgive each other’s mistakes with little to no hurt feelings or anger. Fantasy stories often use magic to sidestep death or other realistic consequences (sci-fi sometimes does the same with technology). Many genres allow characters to achieve a significant degree of emotional intimacy in a short period of time. Deconstructions tend to eschew these shortcuts.

What are the weaknesses of deconstruction fiction? In and of itself, a deconstruction does not stand out. Many people will not be able to tell the difference between a deconstructed space opera and a regular one. In fact, this is ideal – deconstructions do not aim to change the genre they are deconstructing but rather bring about a sort of Renaissance in it, making the genre more relevant and vital to the culture of the times.

Also, a deconstruction is not a parody although sometimes it can be treated as such. That’s always bad for the work, since a parody seeks to playfully poke fun at the tropes at the core of a genre while a deconstruction aims to take out every element that isn’t the foundation of a genre. The two takes on a genre will actively work against each other and wise writers will avoid this. Worse, since a deconstruction aims at making a genre accessible to a new audience while a parody requires knowledge of a genre to make sense, parodying a genre you’re deconstructing can actually alienate the very audience you’re most trying to reach.

Finally, if it’s not done by someone who really loves and appreciates what the genre they’re deconstructing brings to the table there’s a real risk that the deconstruction will come off as mean spirited or just disrespectful. Yes, the point is to help a genre shed all the baggage it no longer needs and get a fresh start but, just like trying to do that with a person, if you don’t handle the genre in a loving and patient fashion you’re just going to make people mad.

What are the strengths of deconstruction fiction? First and foremost, it brings new life and new light to stories that could seem old and tired. As surprising as it now seems to us, given their wild popularity and the widespread imitation of them, Tolkien’s works were, in a way, a deconstruction of the Norse and Scandinavian myths that he loved so much. But instead of the fearless warriors of unparalleled skill that tended to populate those stories, Tolkien’s preeminent characters were… short, kind of portly people who loved gardens and good food.

For real.

Tolkien made the epic myth relevant to the people of Britain in his day by making the people who headlined those myths totally relatable and understandable to the people of his day.

But beyond that, deconstructions actually reinforce the central message of the genre. Mark Waid’s Irredeemable is a deconstruction of the superhero genre. While the Plutonian isn’t exactly normal, he doesn’t have the unflinching morals or sterling character of the Last Son of Krypton. He’s dysfunctional, neurotic and incredibly self-centered, unfortunately making him much like the cultural icons of now. His eventual self-destruction and descent into depravity is something we’ve seen from very many celebrities and seeing it raises questions about how our modern day society treats the people we idolize.

And yet in the midst of that Waid gives us Qubit. With every bit the unshakeable moral core the Plutonian lacks, Qubit holds up everything that is central to superheroes. Might for right. Protection for the powerless. Mercy, even for the worst. And in the end, we find that it’s Qubit who’s held the center, Qubit who’s set the example for his fellows and Qubit who’s refuted the idea that a man, no matter how far he’s fallen, can be irredeemable. And at the end of it, the poor man just wants to be remembered for doing his part and standing by his friends.

At it’s core, a deconstruction tries to do exactly what these two stories did. They try to take the old, the tired, the no longer comprehensible, and revitalize it by once more putting us at the center of the story and shouting out the importance of their messages straight into our lives.

Genrely Speaking: Thrillers

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Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, where we discuss what we mean when we reference genres in discussions at Nate Chen Publications. While others may disagree with the way genres are defined here they’re often so poorly defined as to be open to a great deal of interpretation, one of the reasons why I started this little feature in the first place.

Today’s topic is thrillers, a characteristic genre, and one that’s become more and more popular as modern storytelling techniques have evolved. Thrillers need almost no introduction as we’ve all seen or read more than one or two, but in addition to defining the goal of Genrely Speaking is to analyze and help develop a deeper appreciation for what genres have to offer writers. So let’s take a look at this popular genre, shall we?

  1. Thrillers deal with immediate and visceral threats to the wellbeing of the central character. Which is to say, they are always games of life and death. Whether it’s the life of the central character or someone they care about or the lives of everyone in a city or planet, thrillers are always playing for keeps. They offer simple, straight forward threats to the protagonist even though the solutions to those problems are almost never simple.
  2. Thrillers feature focused and tense pacing that leaves the audience little time to see far beyond the immediate danger to the character. While the narrative still varies it’s pacing (at least in well constructed thrillers) it never really lets the audience forget that the characters are facing dire threats. There may be romantic or comedic interludes but the threat to the characters is always nagging away in the back of the audience’s mind. Incidentally this is a major reason so many thrillers impose time limits of some sort on their protagonists. It helps give the narrative that urgency.
  3. Thrillers keep the audience guessing. Whether it’s about how the characters will pull off what they’re planning, or how their plan will go wrong, or who the traitor in the group is, every thriller has at least one mystery that will persist through ninety percent of the story, from very early on until the very climax of the narrative. While every story has some kind of mystery to it thrillers need big, attention grabbing ones that will hold an audience for the bulk of the time they’re engaged.

What are the weaknesses of thrillers? Well, for starters they’re really popular and they engage well with human psychology so a lot of them tend to get made and that creates two problems. First, originality starts to dwindle quickly. A successful thriller gets made and people follow the pack. That happens to an extent with any kind of success and not just in writing or entertainment. The bigger problem, for writers, is that in thrillers it’s the execution that makes them great and not the characters or the trappings of the plot. Unfortunately when people knock off thrillers they tend to copy the characters or the plot and not deliver the tight, gripping pacing needed to really make a thriller work. They bungle foreshadowing and ruin the mystery, fail to make the danger to the protagonists feel imminent or just can’t get the pacing right and everything feels off.

Second, thrillers are vulnerable to fridge logic – even very good writers can get so caught up in the excitement of their story they don’t see plot holes coming or, worse, they cross their fingers and hope the audience won’t notice. In the Internet age that’s a pipe dream. Discovering you accidentally gutted your magnum opus with a stray plot thread is no fun but it won’t be nearly as bad as the roasting your audience will give you when they catch you out on it. Always write with care, but that goes double for thrillers.

What are the strengths of thrillers? If one of the greatest weaknesses of thrillers is fridge logic and fridge horrors one of their greatest strengths is fridge brilliance. The moment when your audience is frying up eggs and suddenly clicks together all the little hints you left behind in your story and realizes, “Oh, he was the protagonist’s father!” Or, “That dirty information broker was playing both sides!” Or even, “She was in love with him and that’s why she sacrificed herself!”

Of course many thrillers won’t trust their audiences that far and will just brain them over the head with whatever thing the author wants them to walk away with. But when a creator takes the time and care to hide all the clues but makes sure that you’re too wrapped up in the main story to pick up on them the moment of realization after the fact almost always as much greater impact than simply having it spelled out in the story for you.

Of course the ultimate strength of a thriller is it’s ability to grab the audience and run with them. It’s human nature to want to know, it’s human nature to empathize and it’s human nature to want to come out on top. By giving us a protagonist who feel a very visceral threat we can empathize with, who we want to see come out on top, and then keep us guessing as to how it all happens, the thriller offers a solid formula for keeping the audience with you every step of the way. You have to execute the formula correctly, but then that’s true of any set of instructions. In short, the thriller is just plain good at getting and keeping your audience.

At first glance thrillers do not feel terribly exotic, although that is in no small part because they tend to stand on their own rather than be combined with an aesthetic genre. Part of that is simply because the pacing makes the world building aesthetic genres want much harder to do. But also, aesthetic genres tend to put a little more emphasis on characters and plot elements, things thrillers don’t particularly need to be effective.

But that doesn’t mean the thriller is a narrow genre. On the contrary, no other genre demands more from the author in terms of pacing and careful plot construction. Studying thrillers carefully will help you to master those aspects better and maybe one day you’ll be able to blend a thriller with your favorite aesthetic and make a new genre of your own.

Genrely Speaking: Aesthetics and Characteristics

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So I promised to talk about Aesthetic and Characteristic genres today. For starters, so far as I know, this is not any official literary distinction; it’s just something I’ve noticed as I spent the last year or so working on this segment and started organizing the genres I’ve covered into something like a comprehensive list. So what exactly prompted me to start breaking genres into two groups?

Well, basically it was the fact that genres get mixed and matched a lot. “Scifi thriller” or “paranormal romance” just to name a few. Look at either of those and you can break them into component parts. The scifi in the first is usually some kind of space opera or maybe just twenty minutes in the future hard scifi. The thriller is something else (that is not related to Michael Jackson.) Paranormal probably means urban fantasy while romance is well… romance. Each of these “genres” is actually two genres – one governing the aesthetics and themes of the story, the other governing the kinds of characters we see and the pacing and focus of the actual plot.

While on the one hand you can mix and match aesthetic and characteristic genres you can’t really combine two aesthetic or characteristic genres. Take the detective story and the police procedural, for example. Each of those genres demands totally different focuses for character development and plot structure. Likewise you can’t combine steampunk, with it’s heavy emphasis on progress and examining the standards of society, with the high fantasy themes of upholding law, rightful rulers and the destruction of the depraved – or you could, but your story would be jumbled, confused and lacking in impact.

Unlike the genres themselves, these protogroupings (ur-groupings?) have no real pros or cons. It’s just another way to take the expectations of your audience and your literary form and analyze them. I’ve been wondering if I should even bother making the distinction here on the blog since it adds so little to how I look at them – but then, there’s no telling what the Internet will make of things so there is that.

One of the most interesting things about aesthetic and characteristic genres is that they can stand on their own just fine. Thriller is a perfectly serviceable genre without adding scifi or paranormal overtones to it. So are hard scifi, space opera, detective stories, you name it. The whole point of fiction is to give us a reflection of real life with which we can form a deeper understanding of ourselves and our world. If there’s one particular part you want to focus on without wasting time building up added layers of complexity, go for it. That’s a real strength for a writer and you should not shy away from it. Genres are tools for understanding, not requirements of it.

So write whatever you want. But if you’re having trouble getting your themes focused or your characters to flow the way you want them don’t hesitate to use genres to help you find focus. That’s a big part of what they’re there for.

Genrely Speaking: Alternate History

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Welcome back to Genrely Speaking! Unless, of course, this is your first encounter with this running gag feature, in which case welcome! Genrely Speaking is where we look at genres, those loosely defined groups of literature that, in theory, frame any discussion about fiction we care to have. Since it’s important to understand what is meant by any given genre – or more specifically what any given person means when they talk about a genre – I’ve taken it upon myself to go through most of the genres I read and talk about and define them for your convenience!

Today’s subject is alternate history (or Harry Turtledove) a genre that skirts around scifi territory but really isn’t. While both are, in one way or another, about human ideas, alternate history does its best to stay within the bounds of, y’know, historical events. You can tell you’re dealing with historical fiction if the following things are present:

  1. A framework of familiar history. While some works of historical fiction can wind up very, very far afield (coughHarryTurtledovecough) they almost always begin with a distinct jumping off point, a moment in history that readers will already be familiar with or can become familiar with in fairly short order. For example, the novel Days of Infamy begins with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while Guns of the South begins in 1864, just as the Confederacy’s decline began to pick up speed.
  2. One huge difference. This is the alternate part. In order to be alternate history, something must be different from what we knew. Some writers will try and find the smallest possible thing they can change and still make an interesting story but usually it’s pretty big. In Days of Infamy the Japanese follow up the bombing of Pearl Harbor with an invasion of Hawaii. Guns of the South tells how Robert E. Lee actually manages to win the war.
  3. A careful and thoughtful examination of what might actually result if these things had been changed. Some of these can grow to absurd lengths. The complete breakdown of Guns of the South ran through four books, including the original, at a minimum. I haven’t read all of them, trying to hunt down all of Harry Turtledove’s work is an mammoth task.

What are the weaknesses of alternate history? There’s a lot of them. It can come off as dry, particularly if the author is trying to run down and explore all or just most of the fallout of whatever his big idea is. Like many scifi or scifi related genres, alternate history is in danger of drowning under the weight of its own ideas. It shows how invested the author is in his story but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s well told.

Worse, it can drown in its own scope and size. Alternate history authors tend to look at the big and the bold, not the small and the mundane. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that once you change one thing about history the changes snowball until your reader can feel lost and confused. Particularly since people who read this genre tend to be familiar with history already… and thus the new details can get mixed up with the old.

Finally, you see a lot of historical figures creep up in alternate history. Which is fine, but if not meticulously researched and carefully done they can come of not feeling quite right, or worse like a caricature of themselves rather than a real person. Granted, that’s all you can really get from reading a book – but the audience shouldn’t feel like that while they’re reading the book

What are the strengths of alternate history? Well for starters “what if” is one of the most basic questions of human existence, right up there with “why”, and everyone likes to try and answer it. Furthermore, “what if such-and-such had happened” is one of the most common forms of that question, whether it’s in regard to something stupid we’ve done or something stupid someone else has done. So obviously stories that revolve around  just that question are going to interest us.

Secondly, there’s a lot of room for controversy in how a person chooses to answer that question. The people who read a lot of alternate history are also the type of people to have reams of facts to draw on to test the author’s conclusions and will get a kick out of doing it. And then getting on the Internet and rehashing it with everyone they know and thousands of people they don’t. And they will do this at length and in excruciating detail.

While some of them may need a job, a girlfriend or some other aspect of a life they are lacking, they are an impassion fanbase and there’s nothing that will propel the growth and maturation of a genre like an enthusiastic group of people telling you what you did right and what you did wrong (but mostly the latter.)

Alternate history, like many scifi based or scifi related genres, is still young. But it’s also rapidly expanding its appeal and maturing. Sure, sometimes the plots are flat or unbelievable but scifi was the same way a hundred years ago and now… well, now its at least not as bad as it was.

Alternate history is a genre to watch, not only because its fun and interesting, not only because it’s changing from a genre just starting out to a genre that is starting to demand a place of its own in literary circles, but because reading it makes people more interested in real history, and trying to figure out the details of what they just read. What was based on real history? What did the author make up? To answer those questions they’ll learn more about their own past and that can’t possibly be a bad thing.

Genrely Speaking: Low Fantasy

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Time to speak Genrely.  Low fantasy is, as you might expect, the polar opposite of high fantasy. Low fantasy plays around with many of the trappings of high fantasy but applies them to very different ends. The names of the genres kind of sum up the differences. While high fantasy focuses on the big ideas of the human condition low fantasy examines the minutia. Interestingly, it is possible to craft a story that mixes elements of high and low fantasy in one of the harder to quantify genres in existence (see Quintessence for one example).

So what is it that makes low fantasy what it is?

  1. An emphasis on characters who are not at all important in the scheme of things. The people who make up the central characters of a low fantasy story are not movers and shakers, not planning to overthrow governments and not wielders of forces that are out of the ordinary for their world. The scale of events and the people they focus on are, in some ways, much more normal than the typical fantasy stories.
  2. Focus on day to day activities. While this doesn’t exclude the kind of swashbuckling adventure that you’re accustomed to seeing in movies like The Lord of the Rings or reading about in The Chronicles of Narnia, the action in low fantasy ultimately has much less impact on the state of nations than the action in high fantasy. The genre simply assumes that there are people who do that kind of work for a living. There will always be tombs to rob, monsters to fight and evil wizards to put down. After a while it becomes kind of humdrum, and what does that mean for characters and societies?
  3. An abundance of magic. Magic in low fantasy tends to be commonplace. Not everyone knows how to use it but chances are everyone’s seen it a time or two. It tends to be of the sufficiently analyzed version, will come in all kinds in all kinds of shapes and sizes, might be tied in some way to a person’s ancestry or powerful artifacts, or follow any one of a dozen other rules, or just be available to anyone who takes the time to learn it. Its presence or absence in a situation is in no way significant.

What are the weaknesses of low fantasy? It tends to come off as the fantasy equivalent of status quo is god. The characters aren’t out for big purposes they are, at best, out to help a few people they know or just out for their own good. It can be hard to get invested in stories where nothing meaningful ever happens. Sure, the characters go out and have adventures but ten years later they’re sitting in the same bars, drinking and trying to figure out where their next big break will come from. I’m not saying stories about people in regular situations struggling with realistic problems are bad. But something about them cuts against the grain of a genre grouping that shares the same root with the word “fantastic” know what I mean?

What are the strengths of low fantasy? Low fantasy thrives on the way it proves ye olde maxim, the more things change the more they stay the same. We may not live in a world with flying carpets or travel between parallel earths but we can all appreciate the importance of paying the bills and keeping thieves and murderers off the streets – no matter how those crimes are accomplished.

At first glance low fantasy may look like an unappealing genre. Why add all the swords and sorcery if it’s ultimately incidental to the stories? Isn’t the author just being lazy, making sure they don’t have to research all the gritty little details of what they want to write about? Isn’t this a cop out?

The answer is, no. Low fantasy can act as a kind of insulation between the audience and the story. Some things may be uncomfortable when looked at in a way that hits close to home. By looking at these things through the perspective of the fantastic we can give the audience a degree of separation that makes these subjects easier to handle. Of course, by the same token the fantastic may turn off part of your audience as well. It’s important to know who you’re writing for, after all. What’s important is to take low fantasy on it’s own terms – stories of little people in big worlds. And after all, isn’t that what we all are?

Genrely Speaking: Military SciFi

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Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, the part of the blog where we sit down and look at modern genres and what we mean when we mention them on this blog. Classifying things is as much art as science, so having style guides is important for you if you want to be clearly understood. Thus we get a monthly segment. This week’s genre: Military Sci-Fi.

Military sci-fi is a subgenre of science fiction (surprise!) and, if you’ve read enough of the previous entries in this subsection you know that sci-fi is the genre that examines human ideas. Military sci-fi is most closely related to hard sci-fi in that it takes ideas of human development in general, and military development specifically, and applies them to craft a tale about human ingenuity and courage. You can usually spot it a mile away by the title of the story and what’s on the cover, but once you get inside you’ll also find the following hallmarks of the genre:

  1. An emphasis on the idea of necessity as the mother of invention. Many people will quote the idea that wars drive progress, and that’s true to an extent. Wars will cause a lot of resources to be focused on solving a very narrow slew of problems. While normally money and attention is spent on whatever problems people think need solving at the moment, during war (or at least total war such as we last witnessed a generation ago during World War Two) the needs of the military override the preferences of individuals or nonmilitary groups. A big focus of military sci-fi is how this unusual confluence of money, time and intellect comes together to produce results in ways that are sometimes quite surprising.
  2. An examination of the interface of technology and conflict. Whether the author is Taylor Anderson examining what would happen if you dropped WWII era technology into a war fought with sailing vessels and crossbows or Ian Douglas spinning tales of daring and bravery backed by the bleeding edge theories of reactionless propulsion and sentient computer technology, military sci-fi examines how warfare will change, how it will stay the same and how people will adapt to the situation.
  3. Sound military theory. The more things change the more they stay the same. There’s a reason Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is such an enduing treatise on conflict – much of what it says is valid in just about any kind of conflict, regardless of whether it’s armed or political, futuristic or primitive, if you apply it correctly. The military sci-fi author recognizes that and relies on this and many other examinations of military theory to create their scenarios. Of course, if you’re writing in this genre it’s also important to keep an eye on the less tangible aspects of war – endurance, determination, courage and principles.

What are the weaknesses of military sci-fi? It can be a very impersonal genre. Military histories, the style of nonfiction our genre most closely resembles, tends to focus on leaders and decision makers, and the facts and figures they use to reach their decisions. This is because warfare is a vast and chaotic undertaking and even decades after the fact it can be hard to find a clear picture of what took place. But fiction is ultimately a much more personal thing than nonfiction. We don’t want facts and figures, we want suspense, empathy with characters, memorable dialog and exciting plot twists. While military sci-fi can deliver on all of that, it can be hard to do and not every author does it well.

What are the strengths of military sci-fi? It’s big, bombastic and fun. If properly written it delivers rousing speeches, sudden reversals and snatches victory from the jaws of defeat. It can be like Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and Saving Private Ryan all rolled into one and there’s no doubting that, when it really works, it’s good stuff.

There’s a thin line between cool geek and irredeemable dweeb. With the mainstreaming of comics/graphic novels and other traditionally “geek” media over the past ten years that line keeps getting harder and harder to define. But military sci-fi remains so far into dweeb territory that you can’t even see geek from there. I like the genre, myself, but I don’t think anything I’ve ever read in it would make my top five books of a given year, much less all time. If you love geeky gizmos check it out. Otherwise, you might want to look elsewhere…

Genrely Speaking: Dystopia

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Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, the part of the show where we examine the classifications of literature and what we mean when we use them here. The dystopia is a particularly notable genre at the moment, as it is used to describe a number of stories that have come out recently, particularly The Hunger Games and Divergent series of books and the corresponding movies. Shall we take a moment to break down the genre and see what that means, and if these two series actually qualify?

Of course we shall!

Let’s begin at the beginning. Dystopia, like so many words today, started life as two separate Greek words. “Dys” is derived from a Greek adjective that refers to something hard, or straight out bad. “Topia” comes from a Greek word that can refer to either a place or an incredibly horrible artificial substitute for hair. Thus it is most literally a hard place, or possibly hard hair, something certainly favored by real life dictators who tried to create dystopias.

But enough of that. What is it that makes these stories, and the places in them, so hard?

  1. The government is treated much like a god. It is nearly or perfectly all-knowing and destroys all attempts to challenge it ruthlessly, but at a time of its choosing. Its power may or may not be absolute, but the long arm of the law is at least powerful enough to crush most resistance and probably alter most circumstances, including culture and sometimes even memory, to suit its own ends.

  2. Like most gods, the government cannot be destroyed or even appreciably harmed, only annoyed. In this way, dystopias are oddly like cosmic horror. Except instead of squidheaded aliens poking their heads out of R’Lyeh, like you’d find in a typical example of Yog’Sothery, what you get instead is masses of humanity united into Parties and actively tearing one another down. The result is actually far more chilling, as the human motivations are far more believable than the supposedly uncaring cosmic beings that populate Lovecraftian stories. Worse, these human gods can and do demand appeasement at the expense of their followers, appeasement that quickly grows natural, then even enjoyable.

  3. The character is feeble in the face of the government’s overwhelming strength. Again like the protagonist of a cosmic horror story, the characters in a dystopia are pretty much unable to make a meaningful change in the world around them. The power of the government is too absolute for them to challenge, their society, crafted by the government to keep them imprisoned, withholds all skills and ideas that would make challenging the status quo practical or attractive. This doesn’t mean people don’t try, just that they’re very bad at it.

What are the problems of a dystopia story? Well for starters, building a believable one is very, very hard.

Keeping all those lemmings in lockstep requires an almost equal sized herd of cowboys (lemmingboys?), all of whom would have to buy in to the ruling ideal unquestioningly. How exactly is a society supposed to make the jump from even the most repressive regime known to man (say, North Korea, where people still escape on a nearly constant basis and subversive ideas like Christianity runs rampant in the backwoods) to a true dystopia where all contrary ideas are extinguished? That such a powerful and self-contained society could exist defies belief and you have to be very, very careful when including ideas that defy belief in a story.

Another problem lies in the very ideas underpinning most dystopias. From Big Brother’s hate (1984) to the World State’s soma (Brave New World) to the hedonism and agism of the Sandmen (Logan’s Run) to the enforced ignorance of the Firemen (Fahrenheit 451), none of them are very good foundations for societies. As the old parable says, a house built upon sand is doomed to collapse as soon as the floods come. It really shouldn’t be possible for these societies to stand up to any kind of serious testing, so why bother telling stories about them at all? In other words-

What are the strengths of a dystopia story? Dystopias are a kind of science fiction, which means the stories they tell are about human ideas. Dystopias seek to take an idea that might look serviceable and even attractive on the surface, and carry itto its most extreme logical implementation.

Doing this exposes the weaknesses of a given system of thought. This is true regardless of what the system of thought is – it’s possible to found a dystopia on the maxim “love thy neighbor as thy self”. (And some people might say we’re in the process of doing that in modern day America. Humans are nothing if not inventive in finding new ways to oppress themselves and others.) The point is, when we take these ideas to their natural conclusion we realize maybe they aren’t such swell things after all.

So dystopia stories fill an important purpose in social commentary. They show us our ideas, and what can become of them when we let them get out of hand. This is where they shine.

You may have noticed that I’ve defined dystopia very narrowly. Like all genres, the dystopia as a kind of amorphous and vague thing, but I feel that it’s important to limit the genre to stories about a society where human culture is in the process of active and gleeful self-annihilation, and not confuse the genre with others it often overlaps with, such as post-apocalyptic literature, or noir (both to have their own days in the spotlight here, I’m sure). Elements of these two other genres can often turn up in dystopias, particularly in modern times, and elements of dystopia can turn up in post-apocalyptic or noir stories as well.

So I don’t consider The Hunger Games, Divergent or even The Matrix dystopian stories. While each contains a totalitarian society that is ruled over by a government that has gained power through manipulation (of food and entertainment in The Hunger Games, social structure and work life in Divergent and technology in The Matrix) they don’t carefully examine the ideas that would create such a society or spend a great deal of time deconstructing how that society dehumanizes individual people. The totalitarian governments are just there to be torn down. While that story serves its own purpose, that purpose is not the purpose of a dystopia story.

Ultimately, dystopias serve to show us human society at it’s nadir and remind us that there, but for the grace of God, go we.

Genrely Speaking: The Amateur Detective

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Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, where we talk about the genres of fiction and what they mean when they’re mentioned here at Nate Chen Publications. Genres are a slipper thing, as much based on the whims of whoever is doing the classifying as any specific criteria. That also means that creating a new genre is almost as simple as saying, “this is a genre,” and then mentioning it as much as possible. If it catches on, great, if not, that’s no real loss.

Today we’re going to invent a genre.

You won’t really find much if you Google amateur detective stories, other than to find that sometimes the protagonists of detective stories are amateurs and not professionals. And in the very broad, general sense that’s true. But if you read the Gernely Speaking post on detective stories you’ll find that, when we use that term here, we’re talking about stories where the main character is a detective to the bone. A story with a protagonist who’s never solved a crime before is not what those stories want. Besides, amateur detective stories have their own standards that must be met.

What standards, exactly? Well by now you know that’s what we’re here to talk about.

  1. An amateur detective is not normally a detective, but has attributes that will prove useful in solving a mystery. Amateur detective stories are still detective stories in the end, there’s going to be some kind of mystery that needs unravelling and our protagonist is going to be leading the charge. As such, he needs to be equipped to handle the problem but not with years of experience and savvy, but rather a set of skills that will give him a unique and fresh perspective. One classic example is Miss Marple, the matronly old lady who stars in a number of Agatha Christie stories, solves problems using logic and an incredibly shrewd insight into human nature honed after years of being a benevolent busybody. Another example would be Ellis Peter’s Brother Cadfael, who is a monk who serves as apothecary to his cloister and the nearby village. As a soldier and man of learning in the dreary middle ages, Cadfael is well equipped to solve murders and has a sense of right and wrong that burdens him to do so.

  2. The amateur detective usually stumbles into his mystery by accident. Where as the protagonists in police procedurals and detective stories will often be sought out or called into an investigation, amateur detectives tend to just get swept up in the course of events. They’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they know someone who was, or they just have a friend who tends to fall into bad company – there’s as many excuses as there are stars in the sky, really. But, while the hero can, and perhaps should, be a man of upstanding moral character he is not, by nature, a person who seeks out and challenges injustice on a regular basis.

  3. The amateur detective survives by cunning and occasionally luck, but not skill. This doesn’t refer to how the protagonist solves his mystery but rather how he deals with the frequently manifold dangers solving a crime will present him with. Since amateur detectives aren’t used to dealing with criminals they probably hasn’t been put in significant physical danger at any point in their lives. There are possible exceptions, of course, but for the most part amateur detectives will have to get out of tight scrapes using something other than skilled gunplay or fisticuffs. In fact this wild improvisation is frequently part of their appeal to the audience.

What are the weaknesses of the amateur detective story? Unlike other detective stories you can’t write a series of amateur detective stories – at some point the protagonist’s amateurish characteristics will stop being appealing and start making them look kind of lame. Thus most of these stories have a one-and-done kind of a feel. There’s nothing wrong with that from the writing perspective but it may make your audience and/or publisher less willing to invest the time into the story – long running mystery series are some of the biggest money makers out there, they’re popular with people and thus with publishers. But people really want them to go on, not come to a stop.

And for the writer the biggest pitfall is letting too much hinge on happenstance. Your protagonist is already (most of the time) involved in the story at least partly by coincidence, and will probably need some measure of luck to survive a scrape at some point. If you let your protagonist skate by on nothing but luck your plot starts to look a little bit thin. On the other hand, take fate completely out of the equation and your protagonist may wind up looking a little too much like Batman to be believable.

What are the strengths of an amateur detective story? The biggest is simply that the protagonist is much more relatable than most in the mystery genre. Let’s face it, the average reader is not Sherlock Holmes, nor does he understand the chemical or biological sciences of an experienced CSI tech. She might get the basics of the psychology behind interviewing witnesses and tricking or forcing information out of them but there’s a good chance readers won’t be entirely comfortable with those things.

Neither will an amateur detective. This isn’t what they do, after all. As an outsider to the game of crime and punishment they are just like us. This is part of the genre’s great appeal. While everyone wants to see justice done when we are offended; few people want to actually get their hands dirty doing it. Finding the truth of a situation is often unpleasant and makes you a lot of enemies. But the amateur detective is driven by something greater than their personal comfort or satisfaction, and that is often the only thing that sets them apart from us. They can be more than a little inspiring to find, and make us want to be a little more like them. That alone makes them worth our time.

Genrely Speaking: Paranormal Investigation

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Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, the part of the show where we look at various genres and dissect exactly what is meant when they’re mentioned in this blog. Today’s subject is the paranormal mystery.

This is kind of a fine distinction, and once upon a time I would have just lumped this in as a subgenre of urban fantasy. But after some reading I’ve come to be of the opinion that the paranormal mystery is distinct enough to qualify as a genre of its own. What defines it? I’m glad you asked.

  1. An aggressive mixture of traditional investigation techniques and mystical or magical methods of detection. While urban fantasy is about the blending of the supernatural and the mundane, paranormal mysteries are about methods of investigation – they’re a kind of ‘what if’. A great example is Alex Hughes‘ Mindscape Investigation novels, where a powerful psychic serves as a consultant for the local police. He can read minds and, to a lesser extent, emotional echoes from locations, but the evidence he gathers is only admissible under some circumstances. For the most part, while the main character can generate leads, the police still have to do their share of legwork and deduction. See also Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series for a similar take. The X-Files, on the other hand, is about trying to understand the paranormal using human science, with the characters bringing varying levels of faith in the paranormal to the table, but it still fits into this genre. There’s many different ways a paranormal investigation can work to strike a balance, but they all have to have a balance between the paranormal and normal aspects of the investigation in order to count – paranormal abilities can’t let the detective cheat or be the only angle the investigators pursue.

  2. An emphasis on the paranormal as strange and unpredictable, even to those  who have spent their whole life working with it. While most paranormal investigators have a concrete problem their trying to solve, like a murder or mysterious disappearance, the very paranormal forces they’re dealing with tend to be opaque and not entirely understood. Whether no one’s ever used magic as an investigation tool before or the nature of the Masquerade makes it almost impossible to find the goblin witness detectives need to interview, the paranormal forces at work can be as much a hindrance as a help to investigators. While a particular book/episode in a series may deal with a specific paranormal crime, the difficulties of the medium serve as a unifying arc. Laura Anne Gillman’s Paranormal Scene Investigators series provides a good example of this.

  3. A mix of paranormal and mundane sources of trouble. This is part of what justifies keeping regular investigation methods around. While a powerful psychic may hypnotize people to extort their money he probably has to launder it or otherwise keep it safe using normal banking methods. Or, conversely, a powerful mob boss may be keeping evidence of his mundane crimes suppressed by hiding them behind magical illusions. A ghost haunting a hospital may turn out to be the victim of a decades old murder that has to be solved before the spirit will rest. Regardless, both mundane and paranormal methods of investigation will be necessary to solve the problem.

What is the greatest weakness of a paranormal investigation story? Probably the incredibly delicate balancing act involved in keeping your mundane and your magical angles of investigation relevant. Lean to far one way and there’s no need for ghosts and goblins in your story at all, lean too far the other and there’s no need for normal forensics or deduction at all. Worse, because of the many ways the paranormal can enter into stories, from fairies in the attic to wizards killing with curses, there’s no short list of tropes writers can turn to for reference, at least not yet. Time may ease this difficulty.

What is the greatest strength of a paranormal investigation story? Probably it’s incredible diversity. As I mentioned in the police procedural post, and again in my post on the detective story, mysteries are in no small part about their characters. And that’s good, I’m for anything that encourages strong characters. But there are only so many ways you can dress up a robbery or a murder with mundane tools, so many ways to execute a kidnapping or make a ship go lost at sea. Adding a plethora of new paranormal tricks, or new paranormal creatures to conspire with or paranormal obstacles to overcome this genre can bring a new feeling of freshness or just give a story new directions to go in.

Paranormal investigations are kind of a young genre, one of the earliest examples of it would be the 1965 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and even that only lightly touches on the possibilities of the genre. I’m not sure where it’s going yet, but I think I’m going to getting there.