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Genrely Speaking: The Time Travel Story

Posted by natechen on

Science fiction stories are stories about human ideas. They take these ideas and examine them from a number of angles. Hard Sci-Fi is all about technology and science – what will the ideas of our greatest scientists look like as they drive civilization for another one or two hundred years? Space opera is more about the ideas of society and sociology, how will disparate cultures interact in the future?

The problem with these genres is that they can rapidly loose touch with the individual. Since readers are individuals, and they will identify best with individual characters and not abstract ideas about “science” or “society”, that means that the readers can frequently loose interest in the story (which is bad.) Sure, some readers who buy into the author’s ideas will be totally enthused, but that just means the author’s appeal will be playing to the choir. But there is one great way to solve this problem.

What if all the major ideas the sci-fi story needs to advance could somehow grow out of the decisions or actions of one person? What if the consequences of that person’s decision(s) could be explored, not just in their immediate effects on the world around them but through their effects decades or centuries into the future? What if a person could know that their thoughts and actions would change the future – and what’s more, choose what kind of a legacy they were leaving?

That “what if” is the core of the time travel story, a kind of sci-fi that lets a single person shape reality in fantastic ways by traveling through time. Time travel stories are tricky from the genre standpoint, as they are both a thing of their own and tend to be lumped into a dozen other subgenres of science fiction. They can be anywhere on the scale of sci-fi hardness and may be set in a space opera setting or confined entirely to Earth. But they will have a few things in common.

  1. Some way for a character or characters to travel through time. This sounds like it should be obvious, but hey. It’s a fact. If no one’s traveling through time, or at least seeing through time, then we’re not dealing with a time travel story. Note that the direction of the time travel doesn’t matter. People can be going backwards to meddle in the history of the Roman Empire or dashing forwards to get lotto numbers and strike it rich, they only need be traveling through time. (Going “sideways” to alternate realities doesn’t count. Slider stories and alternate history will have their own entry thank you very much.) If you want to be really generous, stories with clairvoyants who can predict the future can kind of fall into this genre too. I am not so generous, but you can be if you want.

  2. The consequences of some action taken, and the ability to alter them with time travel, are central to the conflict of the story. Watch the classic Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever for a detailed example. In the typical time travel story one of two things happens – either the protagonist meets a time traveler who has come back to avert a coming disaster, or they themselves are going back in time to avert a disaster. Things usually unfold from there. Typical permutations involve accidental time travel – to the past that disrupts the flow of history, or to the future to give a warning of things to come.

  3. An emphasis on personal responsibility. Unlike many sci-fi stories, where science or crushing impersonal forces reduces mankind to a set of preprogrammed responses, the time travel story tends to focus on a person’s ability to make broad changes with just one or two little decisions. This, in turn, places an enormous burden on the person who can travel through time, to use that power in a constructive fashion. Or, at the very least, in some way that doesn’t cause reality warping paradoxes. Conflicts with people who want to use time travel in selfish or destructive ways can also come into play, particularly in a long running series about time travel.

What are the weaknesses of a time travel story? In short, they are confusing. Like, really, really confusing. Since time travel offers the ability for characters to go back and actively alter events that the audience has already experienced once it’s only natural that at least some readers will mix up what happened the first time and what the ‘altered’ state is. Heaven help the author who meddles with the same point in time multiple times. Add in temporal paradoxes, possible explanations of how time travel works in the first place, the Hitler Time Travel Exemption Act (along with any possible corollaries you can think of), the possibility that – well, you get the picture.

Writing a time travel story that your audience can follow, without insulting your intelligence or leaving some kind of glaring plot hole, is difficult. Not all who try succeed.

What are the strengths of a time travel story? First, it lets sci-fi do something it doesn’t always do well – let individual characters come shining through. Even with advanced technology, meticulous planning and the advantage of being able to check their work, time travelers still face a great deal of difficulty in changing the past. There’s enough room for conflict, but the potential for a single person or small but dedicated group to effect significant changes and see the outcome makes for very powerful story telling.

Also, it’s a very flexible medium, as I said before. Time travel can be used to tell just about any kind of story, from a romance to a spy thriller. It can be about exploration, saving the world from a disaster or fighting against crooks who exploit people via temporal manipulation. It’s scope is much broader than many genres in that respect.

Finally, there’s a wonderful quality to the idea that the past can be rewritten. The idea that the inadequacies that we face can be made up for, if a person would just have the power, the integrity and the compassion to find what went wrong and help us fix it. Everyone has at least one thing they wish they could do over. Sometimes the moral of the story is that the outcome we got was the one we needed, not the one we wanted. Sometimes the moral is that we need a helping hand. There’s a hundred shades of the possible between the two, and there’s nothing saying you can’t have both at once.

And in the end, that’s the beauty of time travel in a nut shell, isn’t it?

Genrely Speaking: Urban Fantasy

Posted by natechen on

When people think of fantasy they generally think of something like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. In other words, they think of something where the fantastic elements of the story stand pretty much on their own, and are only contrasted with the technology, culture and standards of the mundane world we live in superficially, if at all. However the genre of urban fantasy exists to do pretty much the opposite. While it includes many of the things that the average person associates with fantasy, it puts them in a much different context from the typical fantasy yarn. Oddly enough by doing so urban fantasy actually bears more resemblance to the early folktales that inspired modern fantasy than most modern fantasies do. After all, the people who originally listened to folk tales heard stories about people living much like they did interacting with fantastic creatures and forces.

So, for the purposes of discussions on this blog what defines Urban Fantasy?

  1. The story takes place in a city or large town that would be recognizable to the average citizen of a first world country. It doesn’t have to be a real city or town, nor does it even have to exist on Earth as we know it although that certainly helps, the important part s that the people have access to and be familiar with the trappings that make modern culture tick. Things like modern telecommunications, transportation and mass media are as much a part of urban fantasy as the fantasy elements are. Part of what defines the story is the conflict between recognizable culture and everything else.
  2. The story includes at least one element of myth or magic. This is the “everything else” mentioned a second ago. Whether it be gremlins in the sewers, wizards hiding as librarians or who knows what else, some aspect of the fantastic has to exist as a contrast to the recognizable, modern world. There can be only one fantastic element or many, they can be known to the world at large or hiding in carefully maintained obscurity, they can replace one or two mundane elements such as when teleportation magic replaces cars, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the contrast between modern society and the fantastic.
  3. There must be conflict over how the world will define itself. In short, the first two bullet points tend to be in conflict. Modern society isn’t really built with the fantastic taken into account. Sure, many people would like to have magic powers or be able to shapeshift, but the fact is our society currently doesn’t have the measures in place to police and protect such people from each other or the public at large. All kinds of issues creep out of this. The attempt to strike or maintain a balance that lets both sides exists peacefully is often at the core of urban fantasy.

What are the weaknesses of urban fantasy? First, it has a tendency to become obsessed with it’s fantastic elements. In order to explain how such things could coexist with modern society magic tends to become an uberpowerful fix-all, or vampires wind up holding all positions of political/financial/cultural power or something else that makes the everyman totally irrelevant to the story. While there’s nothing wrong with characters who are exceptional, in fact exceptional characters are pretty much a requirement of good fiction, cutting the everyman out of the story entirely makes it very hard for your audience to become invested. More than anything else, that must be managed.

Second, many urban fantasies feels similar. They frequently begin with, or arrive at, the All Myths are True trope. This is at least in part because they rely so heavily on their fantastic elements and, like all successful book franchises, run as long as the publishers think they can get away with. The constant need for new material keeps authors grabbing new ideas from mythology, but they tend to choose things that readers will be mostly familiar with. This is why there are so many werewolves and vampires in the genre, to give just one example. The best urban fantasies pick one shtick and try and stick with it. A great example are the October Daye books by Seanen McGuire.

What are the strengths of urban fantasy? Well, the author doesn’t need to spend a lot of time bringing the audience up to date with obscure culture or political situations, at least most of the time, because the characters are probably already living in an Earth a lot like our own. This leaves more time for developing characters and plot.

But most of all it makes the characters a lot more accessible to the reader. No one in the last three or four hundred years has spent their lives wishing to get out of their squiring to a drunken knight or cleaning out stables while wishing they could be a squire. The characters in an urban fantasy have problems similar to what readers have, or readers will at least know someone who’s had similar problems. When new, extraordinary problems come up it will make it easier to relate to how the characters are coping. The same goes for all other aspects of the story, not just the character’s problems.

All in all, urban fantasy is a great genre for people who love to tell fantasy stories but don’t feel confident in tackling all the world building needed for high fantasy. It’s also great for people who love more character driven stories and don’t want to bother keeping track of all the cultural, historical and political baggage that seems to come with so many other genres of fantasy. Lastly, if you’re just cutting your teeth on the fantastic it’s a great way to start.

Genrely Speaking: High Fantasy

Posted by natechen on

Welcome to Genrely Speaking! Today we’re going to tackle the genre of high fantasy, a kind of story about the conflict of good and evil, the nature of humanity and formidable legions of heavy cavalry making glorious charges to save the day. Or, at least, that’s what most people think of when they think of high fantasy, probably because they’ve seen the movie versions of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. And in a way, they’re not wrong. The Downfall of The Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King is the definitive example of high fantasy. Tolkien codified many of the things which embody the genre today. It’s true, he based his stories on many of the epic myths he studied and taught as a professor, but stories like Beowulf don’t actually meet all the modern criteria of high fantasy. Strange, but true.

So what are the characteristics of high fantasy? I’m glad you asked!

  1. A world distinct from our own, usually existing in some kind of idealized Middle Ages, with it’s own history, geography, customs and very often peoples. There can be no cheating here. There can’t be connections between our modern world and the world of the story, or really our world at any point. The fantasy world must stand on its own, and any similarities between the two superficial at best. This first and biggest criteria is what keeps the old bardic tales from counting as high fantasy – they all supposedly happen at least in part somewhere in the world as we know it. It also rules out a lot of modern day fantasy such as The Chronicles of Narnia, which contain fully realized fantasy worlds that are visited by people from our own.

  2. An emphasis on the motivations of the character to enter into conflict, usually to protect something or achieve a moral purpose, such as redeem the family name or atone for some crime. This is what rules out a lot of “swords and sorcery” tales from the genre. High fantasy is not about mercenary warriors seeking to amass fortune or wizards delving into lost secrets so they can amass more and more power. It’s about the efforts of people to achieve something they perceive to be a noble end (whether it proves to be noble or not is part of the journey) and in doing so putting the things they value to the test. Most sources will tell you that these two things are the standards by which high fantasy is judged. However, for the purposes of this blog (which is why Genrely Speaking exists, after all) I add one other requirement, as sort of an extension of this one.

  3. The depiction of magic and the supernatural as rare, and outside the scope of everyday life. The purpose of high fantasy is to sketch the conflicts between light and dark in epic proportions. That’s easily undermined if the conflict comes down to who has the most magic mojo. At the end of the day, Sauron wasn’t defeated on the fields of Rohan, or at the walls of Gondor or the gates of Mordor. It wasn’t even because Frodo was willing to go, or Sam turned out to be a determinator made of iron. He was defeated because, decades before, Bilbo had compassion on Gollum and spared his life. Of course, without all those other people working to stall Sauron and divert his attention, it’s unlikely Frodo and Sam could have made the trip to Mount Doom. But without the compassion of Bilbo, none of the rest would have mattered. It was the unforeseen consequences of Gollum standing in the shadow of the volcano with Sam and Frodo that ultimately made Sauron’s defeat possible. In the end, that is the kind of thing that sets high fantasy apart from the rest.

What are the weaknesses of high fantasy? With all the crazy epic plots, focus on the fate of the world and themes of good and evil, it’s very easy to loose track of the individual human characters that are caught up in the whirlwind. Since no experience is really meaningful to us unless we can relate to it, that means the impact of high fantasy can be significantly weakened if not done well.

Note that this doesn’t mean there can’t be nonhuman characters in high fantasy in order for it to resonate with us. Hobbits strongly appeal to the human desire for safety and comfort, things just about everybody wants. They’re relatable, in fact much more so than some of the technically human characters, like Aragorn (how many here are born to be kings?) The importance is to keep these relatable characters in the spotlight as much as possible, while still keeping events moving as well.

What are the strengths of high fantasy? The ability to look at ugly things about ourselves from a safe vantage point. The veneer of a fantastic setting makes it easier for us to look head on at the kinds of evil that high fantasy tries to portray. While it’s very easy for the evil to become totally remote because of the fantastic skin put over it, the best writers remember to keep pointing out the potential for evil that exists in the best of us. Saruman the White and Denethor, Steward of Gondor are both excellent examples of Tolkien reminding the readers that the enemies were not orcs – it was evil. Sure, Sauron and the orcs were handy personifications of it, but the selfish cruelty they represented can easily show up everywhere.

High fantasy is a troubled genre. In many ways Tolkien, as it’s codifier, casts a shadow that people have had a hard time overcoming. Elves, dwarves and rings are all fantasy tropes that are deeply rooted in the audience’s mind. However it also has great potential as a storytelling medium, potential that is at least partly untapped. It’s worth an occasional read, at least to see where the genre is at. What works do you think embody the genre best?

Genrely Speaking: The Detective Story

Posted by natechen on

For the first time ever, an episode of Genrely Speaking ties back to a previous installment! No longer a handful scattered categories, the genres are beginning to link up and a picture forms. The game’s afoot!

Yes, the detective story is a branch of the mystery, and thus a close cousin of the police procedural. But at the same time, they’re very different kinds of stories, as well. The sleuth is a classic trope of modern literature, and has been in use pretty much since it was created by Edgar Allen Poe. In many ways, the sleuth was the first superhero, slicing through tricky problems with his superior intellect to set difficult situations to rest.

Indeed, the super sleuth has much in common with later superheroes. His abilities dwarf those of the people around him, and he is usually highly admired and in much demand. In fact, Batman is sometimes characterized as the world’s greatest detective, and it’s considered a part of his “powers”. Great detectives may not be as flashy as superheroes, but that’s one of the things that’s helped them find wider acceptance. It’s easier to read about a snappily dressed sleuth who solves real, understandable crimes and not be laughed at than it is to read about a man in spandex who fights dinosaurs (or something).

But the other thing that gives detective stories their respectability is the fact that they are, in many ways, a kind of puzzle to exercise your mind. While you don’t have to read them that way, just wading through them should sharpen you a little bit. In theory, at least.

The hallmarks of the detective story are a little something like this:

1. A central character who is absolutely, no holds barred, brilliant. This character is the detective, and these stories demand that he stand head and shoulders above the rest of the crime-solving crowd. All stories want something special about their main characters. Detective stories need a main character who is good at solving mysteries.

It doesn’t really matter if they’re good at anything else. In fact, Adrian Monk and the Sherlock Holmes from CBS’ Elementary both need significant help with some (or all) aspects of their life. But in the sole arena of crime, the detective must reign absolute. Whether it be Holmes’ merciless logic, Hercule Poirot’s deft use of psychology or Monk’s obsessive need for order, the detective can somehow pierce through every layer of deceit to find the person who committed a crime. And, perhaps just as importantly, they have to do pretty much all the work themselves.

It’s not that there can’t be supporting characters who help the detective. There can, and should, be such characters. But they serve more as foils for the detective’s brilliance, by not understanding how the sleuth arrives at his conclusions they show how ordinary people don’t make the same connections the detective does. Take Poirot’s Chief Inspector Japp. He’s a competent detective, has to be or he wouldn’t be Chief Inspector. He can do all the leg work for a case, knows all the typical causes for crime and deftly handles multiple cases at once. But when confronted with the really devious problems he can’t seem to match Poirot. Which nicely brings us to the next hallmark of the detective story.

2. Crimes that feature a level of complexity and planning that far surpasses the norm. The detective is brilliant, and so the problems he tackles have to be worthy of his attention. They must challenge his intellect and, at the same time, that of his reader. After all, if part of the purpose is to challenge the reader with the puzzle of the murder, it needs to test our brains. Of course, complex crimes are more interesting as well, to both the detective and the reader. While a drive-by shooting is no doubt a crime and definitely a tragedy, it’s rarely going to lead us on a long, twisting crawl through the lives of the victim and his associates or the mechanics of the killing that eventually culminates in a brilliant set of deductions that pins the crime on the least likely suspect. In short, detective stories need unusual crimes, and so unusual crimes they will have.

Note that, while the crime in mysteries is almost always murder, or leads to murder, there are a few instances, particularly in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories, where the crime was a theft or kidnapping of some sort.

3. The detective figures things out through the use of his brain, not legwork or chance. Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that there’s no legwork needed, but the detective usually has a sidekick or plucky assistant to help with that. And there are elements of chance in the story, but they never help the detective – if anything, it’s the addition of some chance happenstance to the murder scenario that makes the situation so difficult to suss out.

The point of the story is that the sleuth is solving the crime through his superior crime-solving method. Chance is cheating and legwork is a way to fuel the deductions, not something to replace them. Of course, in real life oftentimes all you really need is to do enough legwork without breaking any rules that will hinder the DA from prosecuting, which is why most super sleuths are private detectives rather than actual policemen, and why the police procedural is a genre in it’s own right. This also let’s the reader “check his work” as he tries to solve the mystery on his own.

3a. The rule of fair play. Unlike the above, this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but you find it much more often in detective stories than you do in pretty much any other kind of mystery. The rule of fair play simply states that all the facts the detective uses to solve the case have to be made known to the reader, to give them a shot at solving the mystery before the summation scene. Fair play mysteries are the ultimate embodiment of the detective story as a puzzle for the reader.

What is the greatest weakness of the detective story? There are two. First, the overly complex crimes can defy belief. After all, who’s going to kidnap someone, kill them, then demand a ransom while staging an alibi when they could just mess with the victim’s brake lines and be done with it? The second is that the highly cerebral nature of the crime solving can take a lot of time from other aspects of the story, cutting into character development and side plots. While that’s hardly fatal, both the heavy intellectual emphasis and the lack of time for other matters might loose some readers. This is why so many modern detective stories are hybrids, including elements of comedy, romance, suspense, ect.

What is the greatest strength of the detective story? Mysteries are incredibly addictive. The quirks detectives bring to the table make them very interesting and people never seem to get enough of them. Also, with so many moving parts there are countless possible combinations of method, motive, alibi, ect to make one mystery different from the next, so they franchise well. But perhaps most of all, the detective himself is quite enduring. The best, Holmes, Poirot, Ms. Marple, Monk, are well known and enduring. And really, what more could an author ask for?

While the detective story is a very demanding genre to work in, the rewards are quite high as well. It’s a genre that offers an enthusiastic, if sometimes critical readership and the promise of a lot of work to come. If you enjoy reading them, there’s sure to always be something for you.

Genrely Speaking: Cosmic Horror

Posted by natechen on

Many genres of fiction focus on unanswered questions. However, the allegory is rather used to create stories that vividly illustrate great truths in a clear and forceful way. I use the term “great truths” to refer to those ideas that are central to the way the author looks at the universe, many of these ideas have been hotly contested since the beginning of time.

Cosmic horror is the allegorical fiction of a particular brand of hard core Rationalism, most forcefully pioneered by H.P. Lovecraft. It attempts to illustrate the emptiness of human existence and the meaningless, indifferent nature of the cosmos, not using math, logic or philosophy but rather through the careful application of pure dread. Whether that is because dread was what Lovecraft felt was the most enlightening human emotion or simply because Lovecraft thought it was most likely to produce the desired reaction in his intended audience is unclear.

A few quick notes before we go on. First, like all brands of mythology, cosmic horror has gained a great deal of popular acceptance over the years, although it’s still much more obscure than many other flavors. However, just as the movie Clash of the Titans had little in common with Greek mythology, most aspects of cosmic horror that are used in pop culture today have little to nothing in common with cosmic horror. Don’t be surprised if what I describe sounds nothing like the stories about squidheaded Old Ones you’ve heard before. If you’ve no clue what that even means and/or you’ve never read any Lovecraft, Nylarthotep is a decent primer.

Second, like all brands of fundamentalist religion, cosmic horror is not representative of the whole or even the majority of Rationalist thought. However, also like most brands of fundamentalism, it does show what core ideas look like in their most undiluted form.

Third, debating the validity of core ideas is not what the Internet is best for. While I am going to point out what look, to me, like weaknesses in cosmic horror as a storytelling platform, deconstructing an analyzing the systems of thought behind the genre is not my purpose here. It’s way outside the scope of a single blog post. That said, I’m sure one of the reasons I dislike cosmic horror as a genre so much is that I also find the ideas it’s founded on to be… lacking. I do have a bias when writing this, so keep it in mind.

So what defines this obviously very difficult genre of fiction?

1. A strong emphasis on the insignificance, helplessness and doomed nature of mankind. Lovecraft didn’t think much of humanity, looked on them as something of a cosmic accident. They had stumbled onto Earth with their bizarre ideas of reason, purpose and civilization and proceeded to muck everything up. Fortunately, they were constrained by their nature and doomed to an inevitable fall back into what they had originally come from – primal instinct and savagery. These instincts are programmed into man, and he cannot escape them no matter how he tries.

2. Powerful, incomprehensible, amoral and uncaring beings, usually aliens, that exist and sometimes tinker with humanity in some way. Probably Lovecraft’s most enduring creation, the great Old Ones were what he considered the nearest thing to gods to exist, in fact they were often portrayed as at the center of cults and possibly even as the inspiration for major world religions now and in the past. These creatures don’t care anything about what their activities do to mankind, they may not even realize we exist, and if they did we are so different that there is no way we could relate to one another. Humanity is helpless before them, we survive only because the stars have aligned in such a way as to thwart their activities and lock them away. (How such incredibly powerful beings could fail to predict and allow for the mathematically logical movements of stellar bodies is unclear.) So powerful and strange are these creatures that just encountering them drives people insane.

3. An emphasis on occult knowledge. Which is to say, the “truth” of the universe is known only to a select few. These people have delved “too deeply” into some field of knowledge, gone exploring where they should not or studied some arcane, forgotten document and thus been exposed to the truth. These truths will ultimately destroy those who know them, but ignorance is no defense, offering only a false sense of security. Characters are predestined for destruction whether they know the truth or not.

What are the weaknesses of cosmic horror? Well, if I got going we’d be here all day, so I’ll try and just hit what I feel are the top three.

Poor characters. While the protagonists in cosmic horror are usually well educated, articulate or at least worldly men, the emphasis on their total inability to accomplish anything of note really cuts them off at the knees. Ultimately they’re unimportant, so why bother getting to know them? Whether because of the nature of the genre or simply because cosmic horror authors rarely learn to develop good characters, there’s rarely anyone you can relate to in a cosmic horror story. This stems, at least in part, from the constraints the genre puts on human characters.

Poor conflict. The greatest threat to humanity is often the Old Ones, beings so immense in potential that they are to humanity as we are to microbes – they are totally beyond our ability to trouble in any way.

ASIDE: I’m not sure if this analogy is original to Lovecraft, I haven’t read his full body of work, but just about every other cosmic horror writer uses it, so I suspect it is. Regardless it’s a bad one, considering viruses, the smallest of microbes, have probably killed more human beings than war and famine combined… END ASIDE 

Back to the conflict part. Since part of the conceit is that Old Ones drive people insane, just being around them effectively ends the story.  Cultists are sometimes used as proxies, but in the end they’re just as big dupes as the main characters are. The Old Ones are inscrutable, with aims supposedly beyond human knowing, and totally indifferent to humanity. So, by the same token, clever manipulation or direct hostility on the part of the Old One is out the window as a source of conflict.

Most conflict in cosmic horror consists of the main character(s) trying to escape his fate and finding he can’t. This usually takes the form of the environment reshaping itself to prevent it or the character simply being restrained by inexplicable forces. When the character’s reason or the advice of others plays any part in moving him towards his doom he usually repents of it later, only to find he was trapped by predestination, his birth or the wonderful invisible hand all along.

With all these forgone conclusions built into the genre, there’s very little in the way of doubt about the ending. You just sort of sit there and wait for the hammer to fall. It might be kind of entertaining the first time or two, but it doesn’t really hold up well.

Poor analogies. You would think, after nearly a century of existence, the genre would have come up with some new ways to describe the influence of its prime characters.

But no. There are some phrases the genre simply cannot seem to get away from. Unnatural or non-Euclidean geometries. Fleshy tentacles. A feeling of immense presence or intellect. These analogies are evocative, if vague. Lovecraft himself coined a number of other very nice phrases to explain specific instances. A color out of space is probably the best. However, the genre’s very insistence on experiences that defy reason and rely on occult understanding make it a very poor genre for explaining things. You must either experience it and be equipped to understand, the cosmic writer seems to insist, or you will merely be another one of those deluded fools who can’t handle the truth.

Now it may sound like I’ve just said that the very things that define the genre are part of what make it a weak form of fiction. In fact, that’s exactly what I’m saying. The tropes and devices of the genre actually work to undermine it’s storytelling potential – just one of many reasons I dislike it.

What are the strength of cosmic horror? If done correctly, and the reason most people mention Lovecraft as their example first, last and always is that he’s one of the few people to have done it correctly, cosmic horror is really, really scary. Not in the, “something jumps out of the closet and yells boo” kind of a way, nor in the, “look, there are zombies everywhere” kind of a way. Rather, in the, “something under the bed is drooling” kind of a way. You know it’s out there, and that it’s coming for you. But what are you going to do about it? Nothing! HAH! Because there’s nothing you can do!

Ultimately, there’s not much to recommend cosmic horror. Sure, existential dread is great if you’re an angsty teen or an overly intelligent author who never seems to have developed sympathy for your fellow, less intelligent man, but in the end, even if the allegories it presents us with are true, thinking about it overmuch doesn’t get us anywhere any more than worrying about our gray hairs will make them go away or stop them from coming. I have better uses for my time, and you probably do, too.

Genrely Speaking: Hard Sci-Fi

Posted by natechen on

Welcome back to Genrely Speaking, the part of the show where I come out and explain what I mean when I mention various genres and/or subgenres of fiction. I do this in no small part because everyone looks at classifications a bit differently and since I am always in need of content want to be totally clear about what I mean when I use these terms it’s best I spell it out so I have something to link back to rather than defining the terms each time they come up.

Today’s genre is “hard” sci-fi. This is science fiction for the thinking man, something that clocks in at 4 or more on the Mohs’ scale probably qualifies. You won’t find much in the way of laser swords or rubber forehead aliens here, hard sci-fi takes itself and its readers very seriously. The hallmarks of hard sci-fi are as follows:

1) A strong emphasis on technology and science as it works in reality (and thus, in the story.) Hard sci-fi starts with the premise that science fiction needs to have a strong grounding in science. Generally, this doesn’t just mean basic physics and chemistry. Any and all science used in the story must be explained to the reader and the scientific facts (or as-yet unproven hypothesis that the writer is betting will be proven) is important. The narrative will spend time explaining some or all of the high-level concepts the story deals with, be they quantum physics or alien biology. How in-depth this goes depends on the author and their goals.

2) A tendency to advocate a particular kind of technology and the social changes the author thinks it will bring about. In other words, many hard sci-fi writers want science to be doing specific things in our culture and write about what they think science doing those things would be like. There’s nothing wrong with this, in fact pretty much every story is a writer saying, “I’d like to see something like this.” However, in hard sci-fi creating a new tool to make the change come about is the story, or at least one major part.

3) Strong belief that humanity need simply progress scientifically to achieve better philosophy and life. The hard sci-fi author’s love of science borders on a bizarre kind of Messiah complex. Arthur C. Clark’s maxim that “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” is probably the most blatant statement of this principle. Another is the way many aliens in hard sci-fi sound like they walked out of a cosmic horror tale (see this post for more on cosmic horror, although Lovecraft and Co will eventually get their own post, I’m sure). Not only are aliens made deliberately, well, alien to humanity they’re often much more technologically advanced and allowed to do inexplicable things simply because they’re technologically advanced. This point is allowed to contradict point one.

What are the weaknesses of hard sci-fi? Well that’s a difficult question. You’ve probably already gathered that I’m not the biggest fan of hard sci-fi. In fact, I said as much last week. So my critique might be a bit harsher here than it is in some of the genre write-ups for genres I really love. That in mind, here we go.

First, the tendency to explain all the science does horrible things to the flow and pacing of the story. Some hard sci-fi authors have great stories roaring along until they stop for five or six pages and expound on theoretical quantum physics. Once things start rolling again you’re just frustrated and need a break. Eventually the story will draw you back but you’ll probably never get back to the level of your first investment. You can avoid this and still get all that exposition in, but so few authors in the genre actually pull it off.

Second, the way hard sci-fi handles human vs. non-human intelligence is directly contrary to its core tenants. Humans are almost always running into weird aliens with more advanced technology that somehow can’t quite figure out human psychology and/or behavior. Yet humans tend to get a handle on aliens pretty quickly. There’s a huge array of reasons for this, from the desire to avoid rubber forehead aliens to the fact that the writers are human, and thus can only create aliens that make sense to humans (unless the aliens behave randomly, but that has a new host of problems.) This is a problem because hard sci-fi says that technology should be the defining element in advancement. Thus, aliens should have an easier time understanding humans than the opposite. On the other hand, a strong AI will probably understand humanity just fine but it’s creators will find it almost inscrutable.

Part of this is just because the story wants to keep the focus on the human characters, but then, why be so hard line on “hard” sci-fi? While it’s not something every reader will notice, it sometimes galls me.

What are the strengths of hard sci-fi? Hard sci-fi does have some great strengths. It’s the best genre for asking hard questions about what technology we’re making and what we intend to do with it. Serious philosophical issues underlay these questions and the very serious matter of technology and human development give these sometimes-abstract questions very immediate consequences.

Hard sci-fi is not a genre for everyone. There’s a reason laser swords and rubber forehead aliens are what define science fiction for most people – they’re fun. Also, the people who are telling those stories have spent huge amounts of time studying the art of story and making their stories as interesting as possible. Hard sci-fi writers are less invested in story or fun, but that’s not saying they avoid it entirely.

There’s also no saying that hard sci-fi couldn’t do both, make great stories and still carry most or even all of their scientific and philosophical emphasis. But it will take a lot of time, effort and skill. Right now, the genre is still defining itself. I find it worth a visit every now and then, but not something I’d want to read all the time.

Genrely Speaking: Steampunk

Posted by natechen on

So it occurred to me in the middle of the string of steampunk spotlights I did over the last month that I never took the time to define what steampunk is. And for that matter, I throw around a lot of genre names without really saying what I think they are. This is significant, since genres, like most other non-scientific classifications schemes (and even some scientific classification schemes) are a bit vague and their definitions tend to vary from person to person.

A genre, for those who aren’t that familiar with the term, is a category of a work of fiction based on its style, form or content (according to Merriam-Websters.)

So, what are some hallmarks of the style, form and content of the steampunk genre?

1. A setting in the Victorian era, or a fictional world that mostly conforms to the social, political and economic realities of that era. In either case, an exception is made in the matter of technology. The works of H.G. Wells or Jules Verne are often used as an example. The British empire is an almost omnipresent force in steampunk novels, and very few things can replace it. It often serves as the driving force in science, exploration and economy, not to mention serving as an excellent source of political intrigue and social commentary. If Britain is not used as the setting or it’s foundation, expect to find the American West or some other frontier setting. Otherwise, you might be looking at a different genre. This idea is usually summarized with the question, “What if the future came early?”

2. An emphasis on science, progress and the resulting social and sometimes military conflict that these forces bring about. One of the biggest themes in steampunk is science. With all the change and turmoil during the Industrial Revolution, it often looked like science would swallow up everything that people had known before and leave behind a world of steam, gears and barely human creatures to oversee them (today this is known as the technological singularity and people are expecting to actually replace humanity, rather than diminish them). The benefits and drawbacks of technology will often be debated.

3. Social change. The Victorian era also saw the beginning of the labor movement and women’s rights. These themes are almost always worked into steampunk stories. And, of course, the British Empire offers a wealth of opportunities to examine the effects of empire. In some cases these things are integral to the story, in some cases they merely signify the era and in some cases these causes are actually advanced further than their historical benchmarks, to go with the theme of progress come early.

Are there drawbacks to this genre? Sure, all genres have their pros and cons. Many people think of the Victorian era as a time of great scientific progress, and it’s true that a lot of people were running around and writing down the things they saw and a lot of very useful machines were invented, but it’s also true that many of the ideas espoused in the Victorian era were flat out wrong. (Ether, to give just one example.) Yet steampunk rarely looks at what the Victorians got wrong.

Sometimes that can be retconned by taking more modern ideas and handing them to scientists who are beginning to uncover them, but that papers over the fact that science was hardly the simplistic, straightforward undertaking so many people, even today, depict it as. There were a lot of widely accepted “scientific” ideas that were flat out wrong, “theories” with no experimental support that were accepted just because they sounded right an fit the mood. Quacks exploited people with pseudoscientific medicines or treatments. Steampunk rarely tackles that particular dark side of science – it’s just not as sexy as Jekyll and Hyde or Frankenstein’s monster.

One thing that authors will probably find very appealing about steampunk is that literacy rates were fairly high in some parts of the world. The written word, we think, was valued. But if you look at the kind of writing that was being done… well, it wasn’t always that great. There was a kind of story called the penny dreadful, so named because they only cost a penny. And, as the name implies, they weren’t exactly great reading.

In short, while most people recognize that the Victorian era had its flaws, steampunk tends to idealize certain parts of it that were, in reality… less than ideal, just like all the other parts.

What are the strengths of steampunk? Steampunk is a very romantic genre. Exploration and greater understanding are incredibly powerful and captivating ideas, and steampunk puts these things at the front and center, giving the reader immediate and visceral buy-in.

Steampunk is also a great home for a large number of fun archetypes. The gentleman adventurer or scientist, or his distaff counterparts, the plucky heiress with something to prove (be it her scientific prowess, her adventuring acumen or just her general equality with men), the airship pirate, the mad scientist – the list goes on and on. It’s a lot of fun for writers and makes it a lot easier for readers to connect quickly with the characters.

Finally, there’s a great appeal to returning to what many view as a great era of history and throwing our own hurdles at them, asking ourselves how would these people have handled the problem? When that’s done right we have fiction at it’s best.

I’ve shared several steampunk tales I love, but to be honest I wouldn’t mind hearing about one or two more. Any recommendations?