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Readercon: SF and Spy fiction
Jul. 13th, 2009 06:32 pmI spent part of this weekend at Readercon. I ended up staying home on Sunday because the cold I've been fighting caught up with me, which is disappointing. there were some things I'd like to have caught on Sunday.
I did catch an interesting panel on the intersections and cross fertilizations between SF and Spy fiction. The panel got rather side tracked by a discussion of whether there were any good female protagonists in spy fiction. A couple of panel members held out the opinion that most of the female protagonists people were able to cite as examples (Emma Peel was one, the others escape me) weren't really female characters - that if you changed the name and pronouns to something male, no one would notice anything wrong with them. It left me at a loss as to what they thought made those characters men in female disguise, as opposed to women. It occurs to me that I probably wouldn't like the answer if they'd explained it, so that may be just as well.
The more productive insight that came to me out of the panel is that perhaps contemporary science fiction and fantasy shouldn't be considered genres in the same sense as romance, mystery, spy fiction, etc.
Let's take romance as an example, since that's what I've been writing lately. The definition of the genre revolves around plot elements. If it's a romance, you're pretty much guaranteed to have two or more beings involved in an emotional relationship, likely to lead to sex, either within the book, or promised by the ending, depending on the level of heat in the story. You can put that plot element down in any setting - contemporary, historical, fantasy, SF, wild west, etc., and still reasonably file it under romance. It may end up in a specific sub-genre - historical romance, paranormal romance, etc. - but it still lands in the overall romance bin.
Sf, on the other hand, often seems to be more of a setting. You identify a story as Sf based on the inclusion of futuristic elements - technology that doesn't exist yet, a date defining the thing as happening in the far future, other planets, etc. Within that setting, any number of sorts of plot can happen. Romance, adventure, war, spies, mystery. They're all out there.
The same sort of argument applies to fantasy - add magic to the setting, and no matter what plot you have, it becomes a fantasy. Within that you have romance, adventures, wars, even mysteries.
One might, I suppose, make a case for the older classic Sf being a genuine genre, since in many cases the technology was the plot, with some characters as window dressing to move it around. It becomes a genre because that absence of character-driven plot makes it fail to be classifiable as anything else.
The other class of book that might qualify for Sf as a genre rather than as a setting is the speculative/political story. I'm think of things like Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. Those are clearly trying to be speculative/predictive/cautionary, rather than fitting a classic plot-based genre.
This leads me to think that about half the books found in the Sf section at the bookstore could just as well be filed elsewhere. Of course that would be poor marketing. I suspect there are a lot of people out there who will read Anne McCaffrey perfectly happily while she's filed under SF who wouldn't be caught dead near the romance shelves.
I did catch an interesting panel on the intersections and cross fertilizations between SF and Spy fiction. The panel got rather side tracked by a discussion of whether there were any good female protagonists in spy fiction. A couple of panel members held out the opinion that most of the female protagonists people were able to cite as examples (Emma Peel was one, the others escape me) weren't really female characters - that if you changed the name and pronouns to something male, no one would notice anything wrong with them. It left me at a loss as to what they thought made those characters men in female disguise, as opposed to women. It occurs to me that I probably wouldn't like the answer if they'd explained it, so that may be just as well.
The more productive insight that came to me out of the panel is that perhaps contemporary science fiction and fantasy shouldn't be considered genres in the same sense as romance, mystery, spy fiction, etc.
Let's take romance as an example, since that's what I've been writing lately. The definition of the genre revolves around plot elements. If it's a romance, you're pretty much guaranteed to have two or more beings involved in an emotional relationship, likely to lead to sex, either within the book, or promised by the ending, depending on the level of heat in the story. You can put that plot element down in any setting - contemporary, historical, fantasy, SF, wild west, etc., and still reasonably file it under romance. It may end up in a specific sub-genre - historical romance, paranormal romance, etc. - but it still lands in the overall romance bin.
Sf, on the other hand, often seems to be more of a setting. You identify a story as Sf based on the inclusion of futuristic elements - technology that doesn't exist yet, a date defining the thing as happening in the far future, other planets, etc. Within that setting, any number of sorts of plot can happen. Romance, adventure, war, spies, mystery. They're all out there.
The same sort of argument applies to fantasy - add magic to the setting, and no matter what plot you have, it becomes a fantasy. Within that you have romance, adventures, wars, even mysteries.
One might, I suppose, make a case for the older classic Sf being a genuine genre, since in many cases the technology was the plot, with some characters as window dressing to move it around. It becomes a genre because that absence of character-driven plot makes it fail to be classifiable as anything else.
The other class of book that might qualify for Sf as a genre rather than as a setting is the speculative/political story. I'm think of things like Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. Those are clearly trying to be speculative/predictive/cautionary, rather than fitting a classic plot-based genre.
This leads me to think that about half the books found in the Sf section at the bookstore could just as well be filed elsewhere. Of course that would be poor marketing. I suspect there are a lot of people out there who will read Anne McCaffrey perfectly happily while she's filed under SF who wouldn't be caught dead near the romance shelves.
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