Arts & Letters

At the risk of greatly simplifying my reading process, it’s possible to categorize books into two categories: page turners and slow burners. Page turners are incredibly easy and entertaining reads, while slow burners require a little more effort to digest (and usually take longer to read). Both types have their plusses and minuses, and naturally, most books fall somewhere between the two types, with certain rare and extreme exceptions. For instance, Gravity’s Rainbow is a typical slow burner – packed densely with fascinating ideas and esoteric concepts and beautifully written, it is also a very slow read that requires full attention (i.e. not something you’d want to read at the beach or on a plane). On the other hand, the books of John Scalzi would be best characterized as page turners.

Since discovering Scalzi a few years ago, I’ve quickly devoured most of his books. The first and most notable is Old Man’s War, an entertaining military SF book with a twist: the soldiers in this novel begin their service at 75 years old. Scalzi hits all the military SF tropes while retaining an entertaining and page turning feel. Not terribly original, but it featured likeable characters and a fun overall arc. He followed that up with a sequel, The Ghost Brigades, which follows a different branch of the military (the special forces). Once again, it was an entertaining page turner, though in my opinion, it did not reach the heights of Old Man’s War mostly because of the galactic-sized plot hole that the story hinges on. His next novel, The Android’s Dream (which, contrary to its title, doesn’t feature much in the way of androids or dreams), is independent of what has now become the Old Man’s War Universe, and is probably my second favorite of Scalzi’s novels. Scalzi then returned to the OMW Universe and wrote The Last Colony. Where the first two novels in the series focused on the military aspects of the universe, this novel focuses on the colonies. The heroes from the first two books, John Perry and Jane Sagan, head up an expedition to colonize a new planet, much to the chagrin of a collective of alien races. Once again, I breezed through the book in no time and thoroughly enjoyed it, despite a few seemingly loose ends or abrupt plot maneuvers.

Which brings us to Scalzi’s latest novel, Zoe’s Tale. The story is set in parallel with The Last Colony and depicts mostly the same events, but from the perspective of Zoe Boutin Perry, the 16 year old adopted daughter of John Perry and Jane Sagan (the heroes of the first two novels). This is actually a tricky proposition, for a number of reasons. First, while retelling the same story from a different perspective has been done before (Scalzi himself mentions the two most obvious examples in his acknowledgements: Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Shadow (Which retells Ender’s Game from the perspective of Bean) and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which takes minor characters from Hamlet and makes them the focus)), it is by no means a simple matter to portray the same events in a new and exciting light. Second, the character of Zoe, a teenage girl with rough childhood, presents something of a challenge because the book is written in first person and I’m pretty sure John Scalzi is not a teenage girl (he is, in fact, a 38 year old man). If he couldn’t manage to find Zoe’s voice, the book simply couldn’t have worked.

Overall, I think he managed to clear both hurdles, but not by a ton. Like his other novels, I blew through this book in just a few days, and it was indeed quite entertaining. However, there were a few things that didn’t quite work for me. As I mentioned before, the story takes place in parallel with the events of The Last Colony, and for a good portion of this book, the concept doesn’t really play that well. As a teenage girl, Zoe doesn’t really have much to do during a good portion of the story. Events are happening around her, but she’s not really driving or even responding much to them. Much time is spent building relationships with a small group of friends, while her parents are dealing with bigger and more exciting problems. Luckily, the loose ends in Colony that I mentioned above give Scalzi what he needs to empower Zoe, and the last third or so of the novel really kicks into gear. In particular, we get a little more on the indiginous life form on the colony’s planet (which are described as similar to werewolves). In Colony, the situation with the werewolves escalates to nowhere. Some things happen, and then that subplot is basically dropped in favor of another, more dangerous threat. To be honest, I still don’t think Scalzi has weaved the werewolves subplot into the story that well, but Zoe’s encounter with them does add some more perspective, and actually plays more of a part in this novel than it does in Colony. The other major event that is only briefly mentioned in Colony is Zoe’s diplomatic mission to the Conclave (which was essentially a deus ex machina maneuver on Scalzi’s part). This represents the climax of Zoe’s story and is handled well.

As for Zoe’s voice, I think Scalzi certainly does well enough. Speaking as someone who has never been a teenage girl myself, I can’t say this with authority, but I didn’t have many problems with the character. I think Scalzi did go a bit overboard with the themes of friendship and love, which are repeated over and over as the story progresses, but it works reasonably well within the story. After several books, it’s also worth noting that Scalzi’s main characters all seem to engage in witty, rapid-fire dialogue, but I’m not really complaining about that yet. It’s part of what turns the pages, after all.

In the end, I don’t think this is Scalzi’s best work, though maybe teenage girls will get more of a kick out of it than I did (and I think it could work as a standalone novel as well, which would might make it even better). On the other hand, I devoured this novel just as quickly as the others, and enjoyed it almost as much. While I very much enjoy these characters and the OMW Universe in general, I do hope the Scalzi moves on to something else, at least for a novel or two. He has a done a good job in mining his universe for interesting stories, and each novel has a very distinct feel (the first two give different flavors of military service, while the next two give different perspectives on the colonization process), but I’d hate for new novels to become tired retreads of the existing material. In any case, I do recommend Zoe’s Tale to anyone who enjoyed the first three, and I also highly recommend Old Man’s War for any SF fans out there (and The Android’s Dream is also quite good!)

There’s an interesting (but woefully short) interview with Neal Stephenson on the Sci Fi Wire. In it, he talks about his decision to include an introduction and glossary of terms (an excerpt of which is available) in his new novel:

People who do read science fiction and fantasy have developed a skill set that other people don’t necessarily have. They can pick up a book and begin reading it, and it will have all of these words that they have not seen before and names that they are not familiar with, and it’s set in a world whose geography they don’t know and whose customs they don’t know–and it can be a bit hard to follow at first, but those kinds of people know that if they just keep reading and are patient, over time all of that will be explained, and they will be able to piece it together in their heads. And doing that is actually part of the pleasure of reading such a book for a fantasy or science fiction fan.

This instantly reminded me of Eric Raymond’s excellent essay, SF Words and Prototype Worlds, in which he notes the way that SF can use a single word to embed broad and far-reaching implications into a story.

In looking at an SF-jargon term like, say, “groundcar”, or “warp drive” there is a spectrum of increasingly sophisticated possible decodings. The most naive is to see a meaningless, uninterpretable wordlike noise and stop there.

The next level up is to recognize that uttering the word “groundcar” or “warp drive” actually signifies something that’s important for the story, but to lack the experience to know what that is. The motivated beginning reader of SF is in this position; he must, accordingly, consciously puzzle out the meaning of the term from the context provided by the individual work in which it appears.

The third level is to recognize that “ground car” and “warp drive” are signifiers shared, with a consistent and known meaning, by many works of SF — but to treat them as isolated stereotypical signs, devoid of meaning save inasmuch as they permit the writer to ratchet forward the plot without requiring imaginative effort from the reader.

Viewed this way, these signs emphasize those respects in which the work in which they appear is merely derivative from previous works in the genre. Many critics (whether through laziness or malice) stop here. As a result they write off all SF, for all its pretensions to imaginative vigor, as a tired jumble of shopworn cliches.

The fourth level, typical of a moderately experienced SF reader, is to recognize that these signifiers function by permitting the writer to quickly establish shared imaginative territory with the reader, so that both parties can concentrate on what is unique about their communication without having to generate or process huge expository lumps. Thus these “stereotypes” actually operate in an anti-stereotypical way — they permit both writer and reader to focus on novelty.

At this level the reader begins to develop quite analytical habits of reading; to become accustomed to searching the writer’s terminology for what is implied (by reference to previous works using the same signifiers) and what kinds of exceptions and novelties convey information about the world and the likely plot twists.

It is at this level, for example, that the reader learns to rely on “groundcar” as a tip-off that the normal transport mode in the writer’s world is by personal flyer. At this level, also, the reader begins to analytically compare the author’s description of his world with other SFnal worlds featuring personal flyers, and to recognize that different kinds of flyers have very different implications for the rest of the world.

For example, the moderately experienced reader will know that worlds in which the personal fliers use wings or helicopter-like rotors are probably slightly less advanced in other technological ways than worlds in which they use ducted fans — and way behind any world in which the flyers use antigravity! Once he sees “groundcar” he will be watching for these clues.

The very experienced SF reader, at the fifth level, can see entire worlds in a grain of jargon. When he sees “groundcar” he associates to not only technical questions about flyer propulsion but socio-symbolic ones but about why the culture still uses groundcars at all (and he has a reportoire of possible answers ready to check against the author’s reporting). He is automatically aware of a huge range of consequences in areas as apparently far afield as (to name two at random) the architectural style of private buildings, and the ecological consequences of accelerated exploitation of wilderness areas not readily accessible by ground transport.

Fascinating stuff. I don’t have much to add, except that September 9 can’t get here fast enough…

The second in a series of short, capsule reviews of SF books I’ve read recently. Part 1 covered several Heinlein Juveniles and an Arthur C. Clarke novel. This part will cover a miscellaneous selection of old and new novels:

• Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (1967): My friend Aether has been recommending this to me for years, so I figured I should check it out. I liked it, but I really came away wishing I knew more about the Hindu Pantheon before reading it. I read Siddhartha (which Lord of Light supposedly resembles) in high school… but I remember next to nothing about it. The story follows Sam (aka Siddhartha, Buddha, Lord of Light, Binder of Demons, The Enlightened One, and probably ten other names) in his campaign against the gods. The setting is an Alien planet. When it was first colonized, the humans had to find a way to survive in the hostile environment, which happened to contain unfriendly indigenous races (styled as demons in the story). The humans employed their technology to fight them, often using genetic manipulation to essentially give themselves superpowers (to paraphrase the old saying, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic). Over time, a small group of humans become very powerful, and after they had control of the planet, they began to style themselves as gods of the Hindu Pantheon. To maintain their power, they keep the rest of the humans in a medieval state while using reincarnation technologies to stay alive indefinitely. What I’m describing here is actually backstory, and mostly only hinted at during the story. Sam, our hero and a classic trickster, is an accelerationist, someone who thinks the rest of the humans should be able to progress beyond their midieval state (the gods always squashed inventions like the printing press, etc… before they had a chance to have a real impact). The structure of the story is somewhat fractured; each chapter tells of a different battle in the campaign against the gods. It sometimes felt like a travelogue (or battlelogue, as most chapters feature some sort of battle with the gods), and I was reminded at one point of various epic poems (Song of Roland came to mind, but like Siddhartha, I remember very little of that story). It’s a very interesting novel, but again, I wish I was more familiar with the Hindu Pantheon before I read it….
• Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984): I’d actually read this before, just after I had read Snow Crash. But that was a long time ago (about 10-15 years ago) and I didn’t have much context for either book (for instance, I realize now that I was reading them in the opposite order). I remember liking it, but not as much as Snow Crash. When I read it this time, distanced from Snow Crash and with more historical context, I enjoyed it a little more. With this novel, Gibson popularized the subgenre known as Cyberpunk. To me, it seemed to be indicative of SF catching up with computers, networks and hacking, which is what I liked most about it. But Cyberpunk is also dark and dystopic, featuring anti-heroes and other unlikeable types. This is generally not my thing, though a good author can pull it off and it works well enough here. Gibson was mixing stuff like traditional hard-boiled noir (shades of Raymond Chandler here) with SF tropes, and again, it works. Here we also see more of an emphasis on literary style and atmosphere than we did with stuff from the Golden Age, which had a more pragmatic storytelling style. Again, I’m not a huge Cyberpunk fan, but I do give a lot of credit to this novel for originating or popularizing a lot of tropes (not just SF ones). It’s almost universally considered the finest example of Cyberpunk as well, which, when you consider that it was the first real Cyberpunk novel, tells you what you need to know about Cyberpunk (Snow Crash is often held up as another shining example and perhaps due to the satirical nature of the book, also the last). Still, I liked this book a lot.
• A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (1992): Of the 10 books I’m reviewing this week, this is probably my favorite. This is an exceptional hard SF novel set… well, in the whole galaxy really. A small group of humans stumbles upong an old archive (millions of years old) and accidentally awaken an ancient Power, which immediately begins taking over large portions of the Galaxy. A single family barely manages to escape from ground zero and ends up on an Alien planet. They may be the only ones that can defeat the ancient power, and the race is on to find them. The book is filled with absolutely fascinating ideas and concepts, as well as one of the most intriguing alien species I’ve seen (I wrote about them in a recent post). Vinge is one of the proponets of the singularity, and is somewhat infamous for making a prediciton that humans will have the technological means to create a superhuman intelligence by 2023. Regardless of what you or I may think of the singularity, it’s clear that this would pose something of a challenge to Vinge in writing a novel set in the distant future. Since a superhuman intelligence is almost by definition, incomprehensible to a mere human, it’s got to be difficult to write a story that features such “Powers” (as he calls them). Vinge attempts to get around this by dividing the galaxy into “zones of thought,” only some of which can support a Power. The other zones contain certain physical limitations to intelligence and technology that make the singularity impossible. Most of the action in the story is set in a place called The Beyond, which is a zone where automation and nanotechnology work much better than is possible on earth (which is deep within “The Slowness”). I’m really only touching the tip of the surface here. Despite my ramblings on the ideas, the story is character-based and excellent. There are a several humans in the book, including an fascinating human named Pham Nuwen who has a special connection to a Power. There’s an alien race called The Tines that takes the form of packs of dog-like beings. In some ways, they’re very similar to humans, but in other ways, they are dramatically different, and Vinge does a good job extrapolating from those differences. The Tines are stuck in a medieval state that, for physical reasons, they could not transcend until humans land on the planet (and with the humans come technology, though it’s not easy for the Tines to discern this at first). It’s all very entertaining. The setting in general is just huge and sweeping, often referincing millions of years of galactic history. It’s an ambitious novel, and Vinge does a good job hinting at the enormity and wonder of the cosmos. I’m not sure what to make of the ending, but it certainly fits the story and is quite interesting, to say the least. Vinge wrote a prequel to this novel called A Deepness in the Sky (I wrote about this a while ago). It features the character Pham Nuwen and another interesting Alien race (I read that before this), but I think that A Fire Upon the Deep is the superior novel.
• The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (2007): At first glance, this detective procedural doesn’t seem like much of a SF novel until you realize that it’s also an alternative history story. Set in the present, the bizarre premise is that during WW II, a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Alaska, and now the lease is about to run out. In this world, Israel doesn’t exist, and there seem to be a lot of other subtle differences (particularly in Russia and Poland). The plot starts, like a lot of detective stories start, with a dead body. A down-on-his-luck detective stubbornly decides to investigate, eventually stumbling into a rather large conspiracy. At first, I hated this book. I was intrigued by the premise and the initial story, but Chabon’s writing seemed awfully sloppy. After a while I got used to it, though, and the rest of the book was fine. I didn’t realize what it was until Alex mentioned that Chabon had intentionally written the novel in third person as if it were the first. I’d have to read it again to really tell, but I’m willing to give Chabon the benefit of the doubt. In any case, while the premise is intriguing and most of the plot proceeds in an interesting fashion, I wasn’t sure what to make of the ending. The novel actually won this year’s Hugo award, which I found interesting. Worth a read if you’re into noir-like mysteries, but it’s also quite strange.
• Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman (2008): This is a collection of short stories. Like a lot of short story collections, it’s a bit uneven, but there are some bright spots. Here are a few of the stories I enjoyed the most:
  • A Study in Emerald – A fascinating blend of a Sherlock Holmes style story with H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. It ends a bit abruptly for my tastes (I want more!) but it was entertaining.
  • Other People – Interesting and very short, this Borges-like circular story is not exactly a feel-good story, but it’s well done.
  • Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot – Basically a series of vampire-themed vignettes, it was actually quite funny at times. For instance, this one:
    

    They asked St. Germain’s manservant if his master was truly a thousand years old, as it was rumored he had claimed.

    “How would I know?” the man replied. “I have only been in the master’s employ for three hundred years.”

    Heh.

  • Goliath – A short, entertaining story set in the Matrix universe (though without explicitely referencing that). I really liked this one.
  • Sunbird – I wasn’t really sure what to make of this one until I got to the end and everything clicked into place. Good stuff.
  • The Monarch of the Glen – This is the longest story in the book, and is subtitled “An American Gods Novella.” It picks up the story 2 years after the events of American Gods, and follows Shadow as he attends a rather strange party in Scottland. I really enjoyed this one, probably the best in the collection.

  So it started strong and it ended strong. There were several stories I didn’t care much for, and a bunch of poems that didn’t do much for me either. Still, it was worth reading, though I think there’s a reason why I’m attracted to writers like Neal Stephenson, who routinely write 900+ page stories.

And that just about covers what I’ve read recently. At some point, I’ll post the list of books that are up next in the queue.

In case you can’t tell from my recent posting history, I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction lately. I’ve always had an affinity for the genre, but I came to realize recently that I’ve only really explored a rather small portion of what’s out there. One area I was notably deficient on was the Heinlein juveniles, a subgenre that seems to be almost universally revered but which I had largely neglected. I’d read several of his later novels (including Starship Troopers, which seems to be the turning point for when Heinlein started writing for adults), but his juveniles seem to hold a special place in SF history, so I wanted to explore them a bit. In a discussion at the 4th Kingdom, I got several recommendations for Heinlein juveniles along with some others. I’ve also been looking at various best-of lists to get some ideas about the history and best examples of SF. As such, I still have lots of books I want to work through, but I figured what I’ve covered in the last few months is worth a recap. I have 10 books I want to cover, but today we’ll only take the first 5 (most of which are Heinlein juveniles). The next 5 will be posted on Wednesday.

• Between Planets by Robert A. Heinlein (1951): And we start with perhaps my least favorite of the novels covered in this post. It’s not especially bad, I just didn’t connect with it in a good way. The plot concerns a teenager caught in the middle of a war, yes, between planets. From a storytelling and thematic perspective, it seems to be pure Heinlein, stressing the individualism and implicit distrust of political institutions and social engineering that would become his hallmark. Eric S. Raymond has written a fascinating take on the history of SF from a political perspective, and he describes Heinlein’s philosophy as being the core of what’s called “Hard SF.” Raymond writes:
  

  There was also a political aura that went with the hard-SF style, one exemplified by Campbell and right-hand man Robert Heinlein. That tradition was of ornery and insistant individualism, veneration of the competent man, an instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering and a rock-ribbed objectivism that that valued knowing how things work and treated all political ideologizing with suspicion.

  This is something we’ll see in all of the juveniles I’m reviewing today, and Between Planets is no exception. Take, for example, this paragraph from page 91 of my edition (about halfway through the book):

  He had lived in security all his life; he had never experienced emotionally, in his own person, the basic historical fact that mankind lives always by the skin of its teeth, sometimes winning by more often losing — and dying. … But never quitting.

  All that said, I found the execution of the story somewhat lacking. Heinlein’s prose seemed awkward and stilted (though perhaps that has something to do with reading this book 57 years after it was written). In any case, some of the specifics of the plot also seemed a bit too on-the-nose and coincidental as well. It was an entertaining and short read, but definitely not even close to Heinlein’s best.

• Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke (1953): When Clarke died earlier this year, lots of folks listed their favorite Clarke stories, and this one often topped the list. I’ve read his 2001 and Rama series (both of which started off excellently, but eventually ran out of steam) and was interested in his other works, so I figured this was a good place to start. The book is short, intriguing, entertaining and it tackles similar themes as Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. To say more would give away too much of the story, but Clarke has always been enamored with the idea of transcendence, and it was interesting to read this story with the knowledge that he was writing this long before concepts like the technological singularity were being thrown around. In that, the book is prescient, though in other things, perhaps not so much. Once again, the book’s prose seems a bit on the simplistic side, but it worked fine (it was not awkward at all, but neither was it very literary – this is rather common with Golden Age SF, which seems to be written in a more pragmatic manner that favored clarity over literary flourishes (I remember Asimov writing in a similar fashion)). The plot, concerning a technologically superior alien race appearing in our skies, is something that seems familiar at first (and why not? This book must have influenced the likes of Vand <a href="Independence Day“>Indepence Day), but plays out differently than you might expect. The structure of the plot was a little strange in that there didn’t seem to be any one main character, and we end up following several threads… but not simultaneously. Perhaps it’s that I’m so used to multi-threaded stories that a story told from various perspectives in serial form seemed odd. But there’s really nothing wrong with that, and it works well. Ultimately, I think I still prefer Rendezvous with Rama and maybe even 2001 to this book, but it’s still quite good.
• Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein (1955): Probably the most involving and taut of the juveniles that I’ve read, this story is more concerned with basic survival techniques more often seen in frontier westerns than science fiction. But from a SF perspective, it does make sense. If we do create something similar to the star gates in the book, we will essentially be expanding into new, uncharted wilderness filled with alien ecologies, and as such, survival skills would be at a premium. The SF ideas are certainly there, but they do take a backseat to the survival elements. The story concerns a group of students sent on a survival test to an uninhabited planet. The test is supposed to last only 2-10 days, but naturally, someting goes horribly wrong and the students must fend for themselves in an unhospitable environment for much longer than anticipated. Thematically similar to Lord of the Flies, Heinlein uses the setting to delve into human nature and politics, as various groups of students must band together and organize themselves to survive. A quote (from page 6 of my edition):
  

  Man is the one animal that can’t be tamed. He goes along for years as peaceful as a cow, when it suits him. Then when it suits him not to be, he makes a leopard look like a tabby cat.

  Again, this story stresses individualism and especially the veneration of the prototypical Heinleinian “competant man” (and, I should note “competent woman” as well since the story features several, which was apparently something of a rarity at the time). Unlike Between Planets, the prose here is fluid and the pages seem to turn themselves. The story is economical, realistic and thrilling, and is the most consistently good of Heinlein’s juveniles that I’ve read so far. From beginning to end, I loved this one. Perhaps not my favorite Heinlein book, but right up there at the top of the list.

• Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein (1956): This is technically not an official Heinlein juvenile, but it resembles one in both tone and style. It’s another story that seems kinda familar, but it doesn’t play out the way I thought it would. An entertaining yarn about an actor hired to impersonate a politician during a critical negotiation. Of course, things don’t exactly go as planned, and there are lots of roadblocks that present themselves along the way. Not as thrilling or involving as Tunnel in the Sky, it was still consistently good throughout. An interesting quote from when the actor must confront the Emperor (from page 145 of my edition):
  

  Like most Americans, I did not understand royalty, did not really approve of the institution in my heart — and had a sneaking, unadmitted awe of kings. … Maybe that is a bad thing. Maybe if we were used to royalty we would not be so impressed by them.

  And once again we see Heinlein’s implicit politics embedded into the story (though I should say that he’s not very preachy about it in these books – at least, not as much as he was in something like Starship Troopers). Overall, a solid read, and apparently very popular at the time as it won a Hugo award.

• Have Space Suit—Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein (1958): The trademark characteristic of “Hard SF” is the high standard of both scientific rigor and storytelling skill required to make a good novel. Most SF before 1940 was decidedly not realistic and poorly structured. Heinlein and his contemporaries raised the bar in terms of scientific plausibility while retaining an entertaining edge. This is perhaps more difficult than it sounds, as scientific plausibility can easily take the form of boring tedium. But in this book, Heinlein is able to wring a lot of suspense out of seemingly boring details like the amount of oxygenavailable for your trek across the moon (which comprises one of the most intense set pieces in the Heinlein juveniles I’ve read). Ultimately, this book veers off in a different direction and ends on a different note (including the appearance of a rather interesting Roman centurion). A little uneven compared to Tunnel in the Sky and Double Star, but where it’s good, it’s really good.

That’s all for tonight. Stay tuned. The next 5 books will be posted on Wednesday, and cover books ranging from 1967 to 2008, by the likes of Zelazny, Vinge, and Gaiman.

In Wednesday’s post, I mused a bit on genres (mostly going along with Neal Stephenson’s talk.) Well, in the comments, Roy was having none of that. And he has a point. When I started thinking about it, trying to define genres or even fiction in general is difficult. I was reminded of the opening paragraphs of Clive Barker’s novel, Imajica:

It was the pivotal teaching of Pluthero Quexos, the most celebrated dramatist of the Second Dominion, that in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its theme, there was only ever room for three players. Between warring kings, a peacemaker; between adoring spouses, a seducer or a child. Between twins, the spirit of the womb. Between lovers, Death. Greater numbers might drift through the drama, of course — thousands in fact — but they could only ever be phantoms, agents, or, on rare occasions, reflections of the three real and self-willed beings who stood at the center. And even this essential trio would not remain intact; or so he taught. It would steadily diminish as the story unfolded, three becoming two, two becoming one, until the stage was left deserted.

Needless to say, this dogma did not go unchallenged. The writers of fables and comedies were particularly vociferous in their scorn, reminding the worthy Quexos that they invariably ended their own tales with a marriage and a feast. He was unrepentant. He dubbed them cheats and told them they were swindling their audiences out of what he called the last great procession, when, after the wedding songs had been sung and the dances danced, the characters took their melancholy way off into darkness, following each other into oblivion.

I’m sure this philosophy isn’t anything new (sometimes I like to quote fiction to make a point), but what struck me about it is the way other writers immediately challenged the doctrine. As soon as Pluthero Quexos laid out his grand observation, I’m sure a hundred writers immediately set themselves a task to subvert it. Quexos calls them cheats, but are they? I’d say they probably aren’t. The problem is that by talking about genres or even fiction in general, we’re trying to put a box around it. However, anytime we put a box around something, especially something as subjective as fiction, it’s tempting to think outside the box. Actually, it’s fun to think outside the box.

I think this is why I like genre fiction so much. The very premise of a genre is to limit the story to some series of conventions… but the definition of what constitutes any specific genre is blurry, and writers like to play within that gray area. It’s fun. A while ago, I wrote about the definition of a weblog, and I basically thought about weblogs as a genre:

A genre is typically defined as a category of artistic expression marked by a distinctive style, form, or content. However, anyone who is familiar with genre film or literature knows that there are plenty of movies or books that are difficult to categorize. As such, specific genres such as horror, sci-fi, or comedy are actually quite inclusive. Some genres, Drama in particular, are incredibly broad and are often accompanied by the conventions of other genres (we call such pieces “cross-genre,” though I think you could argue that almost everything incorporates “Drama”). The point here is that there is often a blurry line between what constitutes one genre from another.

A lot of fiction does this even within itself. It sets up a paradigm, and then sets out to subvert it somehow. A great example of this is Isaac Asimov’s robot stories. In those stories, Asimov laid out the now infamous Three Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov was able to work wonders within the seemingly limiting framework of the three laws. Without going into specifics, he was actually able to have robots murdering humans. Technically, Asimov was thinking inside the box, but by the end of the series, the three laws were completely unreliable (and he’d broken out of the box). Of course, anyone familiar with formal systems is also familiar with the deductive process Asimov used, and the three laws probably isn’t that notable of a system except in that it is easily understood by an informal audience (and don’t mistake me, that is the brilliance of the three laws). Of course, by breaking out of the box, Asimov cheated a bit, but again, that’s all part of the fun.

In any case, I like talking about genres, even though it’s probably not possible to be definitive. It’s fun anyway, and subverting the genre is definitely a part of that…