Genres Revisited: What Genre Do I Write?

So what genre would you assign
to this book?  Oh, I know!
It has to be about an
exterminator named
Ki'shto'ba who labors at
destroying termite colonies
 by abducting their Queens! 
Right?!

What genre is this?

Hmm ... hard to tell from the cover.

In fact, I call it speculative

literary science fiction, future 

history, psychological fiction, plus a 

rumination on future religions.
With a provocative theme and

 great characters-- 

don't forget that!

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Jane Dougherty recently wrote a blog post entitled Does Literary Have to Mean Dull and Boring?  She defines literary fiction as "something that could never be accused of being genre fiction."  She goes on to say, "since authors are obliged to fit their work into a genre when pitching it to publishers and agents, or just to sell it on Amazon," anything that didn't fit in a genre was disqualified as poor literary production, in effect. "In the label 'genre' writing there is an implicit sneer," she says.  She mentions "magical realism," saying, "our magical realism is just plain fantasy (I wrote that with a sneer)."

       In her final paragraph she says, "Why can't we go back to the good old days when there were just books and children's books?  I like to think I write books.  I don't like to think that they are so similar to other people's books that there is a handy tag for them."

       I couldn't agree more, Jane!  And I want to elaborate on this idea a bit.  I originally planned to become a college professor of English literature, so I spent the early part of my career reading "literary" fiction.  Frankly, I didn't even know that was what I was reading -- books by Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, James Joyce, William Faulkner -- they were all "just books."  I daresay those authors are all considered writers of literary fiction.  But they are definitely not boring, for starters!  Lately, I've read several books that are "literary" -- The Great Gatsby, for one, and a recent book by Simon Gough (a grandnephew of Robert Graves) entitled The White Goddess, in which Graves is a main character. (The links take you to my reviews of these books.) Boring? Not on your life!  (Parenthetically, I should point out again that I consider all significant books to contain elements of fantasy -- see my post Defining Fantasy According to TermiteWriter.  To impart a shiver of wonder can only enrich any "genre.")

       In midlife I discovered Tolkien (is he literary enough for you?) and I started to write somewhat similar fantasy.  I also started to read a lot of fantasy and finally got into science fiction.  It never occurred to me that I was somehow betraying my educational background -- that I had sunk low in matters of taste.  I was just looking for good books and I kept the same standards.  Thus, although I read a good deal of Marion Zimmer Bradley, I considered her a pretty pedestrian writer.  But then there is Ursula K. LeGuin, who is one of the most skillful writers around.  And there  was C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams (one of the Inklings)  and other older writers like E.R. Eddison (The Worm Ourobouros et al.) and William Morris (The Well at the World's End) and ... well, I could go on and on.  They definitely cross genre lines and nobody seems to condemn them for it.
       As for "magical realism," I've only read one example -- Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits.  It's full of fantastical elements, of course, but it's also very dark and not particularly comfortable to read.  It's never boring, though.  I would say, if having seriousness of purpose makes a book boring for you, well, then most literary fiction would fall in that category.  And most of my books have a serious purpose, even the termite epic, so I guess I have the only literary termite people in existence!

       When I started to write again in 2000, it never occurred to me to worry about the genre I was writing.  I didn't realize at that time that I was supposed to fit my fiction into a category.  I was just trying to write exciting and fascinating books. I happened to enjoy both science fiction and fantasy, and obviously a tale laid in the 30th century with extraterrestrials who are giant intelligent termites cast The Termite Queen in the SF mold.  But it also includes the tale of Kaitrin Oliva and her enigmatic lover.  One early reviewer called my works literary science fiction and stated that they reminded him of Mary Doria Russell (I see Wikipedia calls her a writer of "speculative fiction" novels -- I presume that designation elicits more respect.)

       I was always taught not to write in cliches, so why in the world would I want to pump out books that were carbon copies of other people's books?  My aim was never to get rich selling millions of books to thoughtless readers looking only for sensation or escape -- I wanted to attract some attention for my ideas and gain some respect and a following.  Those are still my goals.  I wouldn't even know how to write a stereotypical vampire romance or a nasty zombie tale or a cliched space opera or one of these sword-and-sorcery Tolkien rip-offs.  If I tried, the characters would soon develop all kinds of psychological complexities and gain a back story to explain it, and probably the outcome of the whole thing would be tragic.  Even my termite characters fit that picture.  It's just the way I write, and I have no intention of changing.

If you're interested, I addressed this genre question before, way back in 2012, from a slightly different perspective in a blog piece called What Genre Do I Write and Whom Do I Write For?

Review and Analysis: The Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell

       Earlier I wrote an analysis of The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, and now I've finished reading the sequel.  In Goodreads, I gave it 4 stars, while I gave the first volume 5.  While I found the book rewarding and a must-read for anyone who wants to complete the story of Emilio Sandoz, there are certain reasons why I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the first volume.
       In the beginning I thought I might actually like the sequel even better because we learn so much more about the fascinating alien species that Russell created. However, certain technical details about the book make it a more difficult read.  The Sparrow jumped backward and forward in time, but there were only two basic time sequences and it was done in a very controlled and orderly way.  In Children of God several different time periods are involved and in some cases chapters are even broken between two times because the sections are too short for a whole chapter.  It's difficult to ascertain where particular happenings fit in relation to previous chapters.  A table of contents would help, making it easier to see the shape of the timeline at a glance.
       Because of the large geographic sweep of events, a map of the Rakhat lands in question (perhaps showing some of the migrations) would also help the reader to get a visual picture of events.
       As a writer myself, I get the sense that in The Sparrow Russell was writing from what I call inspiration.  I would bet anything that she had the whole story conceived in her head and all she had to do was transcribe it.  In Children of God, I sense more improvisation, more tentativeness.  It's as if she were thinking, "I've got to finish Emilio's story, but what should happen?   Well, this might work and this, but I'm not sure -- I'll have to try out some things ... "  She may have had the ending in mind (the essential business with the music and the DNA) and certain other events along the way, but a lot of the filling feels improvised.  She keeps introducing new characters with only a brief role in the plot.  And the end feels rushed to me, as if she were saying to herself, "This is getting too long -- let's hurry and get it over with."  And while the fight between the two champions was skillfully described, there is a sense of futility about it rather than a truly epic struggle, and the war that follows seems like a blip, important only for its outcome.  Of course, she is not really trying to write epic fantasy here, but rather philosophical and psychological speculation, so emphasizing the battles to a greater degree would likely be superfluous.
       In the author interview at the end of the book, Russell talks about how Chapter 21 was the hardest to write.  In it she summarizes 20 years of Rakhat history.   She says, "I rewrote that chapter a dozen times ... I tried a straight historical narrative and that didn't work.  I tried a lot of stuff, but ultimately the least bad solution to this narrative problem was to convey the information in a conversation between the two canniest political minds in the story. ...  It wasn't a perfect solution, but it was the best I was able to come up with ... "
       Well, I can certainly empathize with that!  What she's doing is breaking the rule of showing and not telling, but frankly I don't really subscribe to that rule!  Sometimes showing would require a whole novel in itself.  For the sake of brevity, you have to tell certain things.  In my Termite Queen I used a chunk of 8 printed pages to summarize 900 years of Earth's future history. Certainly there was no way I could put that whole history in narrative form, and it would feel highly artificial to have two characters sit down and discuss it in that much detail.  So I simply chose to put it in a knotty chunk, which readers can skim or even skip if they want to (although I don't recommend doing that!).  It was the "least bad solution"!
      Now, I must touch on the theology and philosophy, because I think Russell achieved her purpose. In the author interview, she speaks about needing to solve Emilo's dilemma: "Either God is vicious -- deliberately causing evil or at least allowing it to happen -- or Emilio is a deluded ape who's taken a lot of old folktales far too seriously. That may not be good theology, but at the beginning of Children of God Emilio believes those are his only choices: bitterness or atheism, hatred or absurdity."
       Russell always works from the premise that  there is a God who has a purpose for us.  The almost inarticulate Isaac enunciates to Sandoz the ultimate conclusion here: "It's God's music.  You came here so I could find it," thus revealing to Emilio the purpose for his suffering: that the fact humans and aliens are all children of God could indeed be "proven" through a scientific construct.  Even though I don't work on that premise, there is a similarity between that statement and my Mythmaker Precept No. 19: Take joy in sharing your genetic heritage with all the bio-organisms of this planet, and of the universe.  My statement is less lyrical, but the idea of the music of the spheres being encapsulated in the DNA of all biological organisms is strikingly similar.  So even though my premises are humanist and I don't try to maintain that these things were "God's purpose" (something I feel we can't prove), nevertheless I can see a strong connection here between what Mary Doria Russell is trying to say and what I'm trying to say in all of my own writings.  In my world, Emilio would have a third choice -- to view both good and evil as coming from the inner nature of humanity and of those who share in the qualities that make us human -- those who have evolved the power to reject evil and find the Right Way within themselves.
 

Some Words on Evangeline Walton and Narrative Style

       I've never intended to use this blog as a vehicle to review oither people's books, but today I'm making an exception because it introduces a topic I've been intending to cover in a blog post, anyway.  If you've been reading this blog right along, you know what a proponent I am of Evangeline Walton's writings.  Yesterday I posted a review of her recently published posthumous collection of short stories, "Above Ker-Is" and I'm reprinting it here:    

       According to Douglas A. Anderson, the editor of this posthumous collection, the first seven of these stories were written between the late 1920s and the early 1930s, when the author was between the approximate ages of 20 and 25 years, predating the 1936 publication of The Virgin and the Swine (later known as The Island of the Mighty, the first novel of the Tetralogy to be published).  The final three stories were written from the late l940s to the early l950s.  This collection is a good vehicle in which to observe the development of Walton’s style.  

    The first three stories, which are retellings of a Breton folktale about a city sunk beneath the waves through the actions of a princess who may or may not be viewed as an evil force, employ an old-fashioned, circuitous, first-person style in which a narrator hears a story from another person and then retells it.  It can be a priest hearing a confession or a folklorist recording the tale of an aged informant.  This, combined with a conventional depiction of some characters, makes the early stories not particularly memorable, in spite of some fine descriptive writing and mood creation.

       The central four stories can be considered a transitional phase.  In “The Tree of Perkunas” we start with a narrator who has reconstructed the tale from a friend’s letters, but then this narrator disappears and a straightforward third-person tale develops. In “Werwolf” the fictional framework disappears altogether, although the opening paragraph gives an omniscient narrator’s introduction.  In “The Ship from Away” the author reverts to the fiction of a third party (“Young Devlin told me this story”) who functions to reveal the fate of Devlin at the end.  “Lus-Mor” also utilizes the format of a person telling the tale to another; in this case the tale is first person and the recipient also has a small role to play at the end.

      The last three stories are quite different.  The narrative is direct, with less time spent setting up the premise and creating layers between the reader and the story.  There is a sense that the author has matured and is in command all the way through, knowing exactly how to move the story along and create a sense of horror.  Here are the opening lines of “The Judgment of St. Yves” (“I had this story from old Yanouank Ar Guenn, that aged fisherman whose years must number nearly a hundred now”) or of “The Tree of Perkunas” (“It was from the last letter of my friend, Serghei Zudin, that I pieced together this story … ”) Compare the opening lines of “At the End of the Corridor” (“Whenever Philip Martin felt like being funny he would say that he was a professional grave-robber”) or of “The Other One” (“I should have locked the door.  You can’t drag a solid body through a locked door.”)  The endings of these last three tales are equally strong.  They are the sort of story that grabs the reader and then remains in the mind.

       It’s too bad Evangeline Walton didn’t return to the Ker-Is folktales after she had developed the approach presented in The Island of the Mighty (what a difference a few short years can make!)  In that novel, the peculiarly bizarre magic and the powerful characters of the Mabinogion myths are reworked with such realism that the reader is held spellbound.  That in this reviewer’s opinion is the way myth should be retold!  This being said, however, there is a lot of power in the collection Above Ker-Is and the book is recommended to anyone interested in myth and folktale, in the paranormal, and in horror fiction.

[End of review]

       My topic today takes off from the discussion of the presentation Walton used in her early stories.  I want to compare it to my own methodology.  I've always thought I'm pretty good at stories told by somebody else or through the utilization of a fictional scholarly framework.  Let's discuss the former method first.

       The device can be used to distance the reader from the subject.  In the Walton stories, however, distancing is not really needed; the characters are generic and non-essential and so it becomes something of a distraction or a complication.  In the case of my books, the latter half of "The Termite Queen" is the object in question.  I can't say too much about this because I don't want to play the spoiler, but I can say that I utilize the device of two people who are essential to the plot sitting around talking about something that has happened.  It's the only way to bring about a final understanding of the characters.  Somebody told me that it was too static -- that I was telling and not showing.  That's probably true, but it's impossible to do the job through any other means.  And it seems to me that, since in this case the action is psychological and not physical, the showing takes place within the context of the telling.  All stories are told by somebody, after all -- it's just that in some cases, the teller is more obvious than others.  So I make no apologies for my method.  I do confess that the story is overly repetitive, and for that I do apologize.  It's a case of the writer loving her material too much!

       Now to the second method: the utilization of a fictional scholarly framework.  From my background of studying and working on college campuses most of my life, I'm attracted to academic things and I was first intrigued by the form when I read Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Left Hand of Darkness" close to forty years ago.  The first chapter opens: "From the Archives of Hain.  Transcript of Ansible Document 01-01101-934-2-Gethen:  To the Stabile of Ollul:  Report from Genly Ai, First Mobile on Gethen/Winter, Hainish Circle 93, Ekumenical Year 1490-97."  Chapter 2 begins: "From a sound-tape collection of North Karhidish 'hearth-tales' in the archives of the College of Historians in Ehrenrang, narrator unknown, recorded during the reign of Argaven VIII." Not all chapters begin this way, but many do, and when I read all that, I was absolutely fascinated.  To me that framework gave the narrative a huge sense of reality.

      Now take a look at my novella "Monster Is in the Eye of the Beholder."  I do exactly the same thing -- I draw on government documents to piece together what happened on the planet Kal-fa.  I acknowledge a direct influence there!  Ursula LeGuin has long been a favorite author.

       That brings me to the series "The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head."  Here the whole concept is one of an academic undertaking.  I didn't write the books, after all, even though I'm putting my name on the title page and the cover for the sake of convenience.  Di'fa'kro'mi wrote the books,  Prf. Kaitrin Oliva translated them, and they were first published in the 30th century.  That's why I'm including a facsimile title page, and that's why Kaitrin wrote a Translator's Foreword, explaining the origin of the tales.  How they came to be published ahead of their time, in our present day, remains a bit of a mystery.  Maybe Thru'tei'ga'ma the Seer could explain it, but I cannot!  I like to say, I'm channeling them from the future! (LOL, wink, wink, ;-) -- I'd better put in all that so you don't think I'm too crazy!)

       And the format is again that of somebody sitting around telling the story to somebody else.  The aging Di'fa'kro'mi is dictating his memoirs to his young scribe Chi'mo'a'tu, who occasionally interrupts with clueless remarks and questions that inject considerable humor.  I do hope nobody will criticize this format as showing and not telling.  Personally, I think it works great!  I think you'll find plenty of action in these stories, along with that humor that I mentioned, a good bit of serious philosophizing, and some opinionated rants!