More on Map of Spec Fic

Okay, before I get into this, can I just complain for a sentence or two? Can't you all use trackbacks or comments? I mean, I have to go to my stat counter and troll through the "came from" urls to find out y'all are talking about my genre diagram behind my blogack? Geez.

Okay, that and itchy ears out of the way, you guys are great. You'd be the perfect students for my spec fic class if you didn't already know more about spec fic than I do. I love that there's a leetle discussion on this, and agree with most of the criticisms of the diagram. I did realize, however, that I didn't make my explanation perfectly clear, so I wanted to clarify (claireify):

1. Lemme just reiterate that this diagram was created for a specific pedagogical purpose. That purpose was to introduce people who were largely ignorant of speculative genres to the general thinking about them. This was both from an insider and from an outsider perspective. The insider perspective, which took for granted that spec genres are valuable and interesting, was simplified by the outsider perspective (which tends to categorize oversimply) so as not to overwhelm newbies with the endless details of the insider arguments about the fluid borders of genre.

The choice of basing my definition of speculative vs. mimetic (itself an oversimplification) on the (oversimplified) notion of the novum came from the fact that the novum offers an easy (and I would argue, extremely useful) way to understand the generic differences without offering judgement on the quality of writing in each genre. Saying that only one element (albeit a very important one) seperates the two areas of fiction levels the playing field between them -- and renders either both, or neither, genre. Also, using the novum, rather than laying out traditional genre tropes, as a definition is an easy way of including spec fic that deliberately subverts or ignores genre tropes.

That having been said, any categorization begins to break down the moment you understand it. As fluid a thing as literature can't be contained, even for a second, within a diagram. The purpose of this map was to create, quickly, a common understanding of the general areas of spec fic, so that everyone in the class could immediately begin arguing about them. It's no surprise that people who have a much more sophisticated understanding of the field than I do would have a lot of just criticisms about this map.

2. Nick Mamatas sez:

Two things immediately jump out at me. Metafiction is ridiculously placed — there should be a little gray dot within every other circle, at the very least. And horror should be much larger, indeed finally bleeding off the page. It's a tonal genre and thus need not be fantastic or have any particular setting or even particular content, as was proven in practice by David Searcy's Ordinary Horror. There's plenty of horrific SF, horrific realist fiction, and horrific non-fiction (e.g., the narrative journalism in "true crime" books that ape the form and content of the horror novel).

Nick's right, I do have to rethink metafiction for this diagram. I disagree that it should be a dot in each circle, though, since the purpose of the diagram is to break down received notions of genre divisions and reorganize them according to a different principle. So, to feed the idea that all genres can be aligned or not according to a few simple principles, I'd reform the diagram so that all the small circles line up on one side of the larger circle. Then I'd make the "metafiction" gray not a circle but a rod that starts outside the fiction circle and penetrates each genre in turn, all the way to the center.

Regarding horror, this is horror fiction not horror in general, just as all the other genres are fiction, not nonfiction, which is why nonfiction finds itself nowhere on the diagram. So to talk about nonfiction whose intent is to horrify doesn't have a direct place in the discussion of this diagram. I agree that horror overlaps all the genres, though, since it is less about novum or no-novum than it is about the effect on the reader that it's going for. Again, if I realigned all the genre circles on one side, then I could have lozenge-shaped horror thing that intersected all of them but did not breach the skin of fiction.

3. Nick Mamatas also sez:

Implicit in the chart is a literary version of the "blood quantum" racial theories so beloved by Americans. If you write plausible SF, including even the possibility of a ghost or some sort of cosmic awe and dread at infinity in your little book, puts you into the fantasy camp.

First of all, the tack Nick takes, that of the outraged person of color smacking down an ignorant racist with fancy racial theory is what in a race discussion would be called "playing the race card". This is something I've, in fact, done in the past, often with justice, and just as often not. (It's something I'm going to do in the next paragraphs, albeit somewhat subtly.) Nick is playing the genre card. The problem with playing the race card on a person of color is that they can play it right back. Same problem with playing the genre card on another (albeit less experienced and knowledgeable) genre writer. I've created this diagram artificially seperating out the various genres to make the field more clear to people almost entirely ignorant of it. I've done so knowing that this diagram makes no place whatsoever for my science fiction/fantasy/alternate history/"literary"/ethnic novel. And I don't care.

Likewise, I have very often artificially categorized the racial landscape of America, and the ethnic landscape of Asian America in particular, to an unacceptable degree, for the purpose of making the outlines of those landscapes perceptible to people almost entirely ignorant of them. And I have done so knowing that I myself do not fit into the verbal diagram I'm creating. Doesn't matter. What matters is that people start to understand. I leave the sophisticated discussions to my colleagues over at Hyphen magazine, who know what goes on already.

Secondly (and I can't believe that I have to say this, but here we are), comparing genre to race is both obvious and offensive. Comparing blood quantum to a diagram on genre that speculativizes any writing with a teeny bit of novum is specious. Blood quantum is problematic because the consequences of a person being aligned with a racial group which they share only biological heritage with (i.e. not culture or community) are dire -- dire economically, politically, socially, psychologically, professionally, sexually, and personally. Aligning a mostly mimetic fiction with speculation because it might have a ghost or something might stigmatize it in some readers' minds. In an extreme case, it might affect sales if someone takes the recategorization too seriously and mis-shelves it in the bookstore. But mostly, all it does is cause some hot arguments on the blogosphere. It just doesn't matter that much. It's just words on paper, and how we shape them in our minds. It's not about projecting our faulty abstract ideas onto people's bodies and lives.

4. And:

The chart, and Light acknowledges this, also "set[s] up an artificial distinction that grouped the 'realism' of literary fiction with the exaggerated, but nevertheless 'realistic' (because they do not deal with nova) genre tropes of romance, mystery, thriller, western, etc. This in itself is pretty cool, because it forces literary fiction into bed with dirty genre (as if all characters thinking and speaking in poetic, revelatory, Joycean diction were 'realistic' rather than generic.)"

Yes, it may be cool (I don't really think so), but what's clever and what's true are two different things. It may also be cool to set up a disctinction that groups fictions into those stories that contain characters being swallowed and potentially consumed (because we find such a thing sexually exciting) and those that don't, but we end up with The Bible and Anaconda-Davida in one group and The Recognitions, The Naked Sword, and Kiss My Fist! in the other. We don't learn anything, except that some people jerk off to the thought of being swallowed.

I won't argue the coolness factor because that's entirely subjective, but I would refer Nick back to my pedagogic purpose above (which I admit was not fully explained in the original post.) What I find cool is that the novum definition very neatly, and I think plausibly, aligns what my students would seperate out as "literary fiction" (and consider "high art") with a number of genres they openly denigrate, even in the context of my class. This is not something that happens just in my class. It happens pretty much all the time in mainstream literature discussions that occur when the literary "establishment" is forced to pay attention to genre for a second. Like Malcolm Gladwell's dismissal of the Kaavya Viswanathan scandal on the basis that Opal Mehta is genre and all genre is more or less plagiarized.

I can't repeat enough that "literary fiction" is itself a genre and needs to be treated as such if fiction and literature in general are not to remain in the stagnant pond they've been algaeing since Eggers first published and people started lining up to write like him. Novum/no-novum places Opal Mehta in the same generic camp with Updike and Cheever, as well as the somewhat more intuitive Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, as well as the obvious Jennifer Wiener and Kim Wong Keltner. And it does so, in my opinion, with plausibility. I think that's cool and worth discussion. I also think it's a much larger and more important distinction than fiction depicting people being swallowed. It was a funny comparison, but not a just or illuminating one.

(Nick's slicing of ever finer bits of "novum", however, is smart and funny and definitely worth a read. And go through the comments to his post, too.)

4. Andrew Wheeler sez:

I do think any flat map will somewhat misinterpret the territory, and I have some mild complaints about this one. Putting Spec Fic in the middle is a nice trick for pedagogical purposes, but I don't think a bull's-eye is the right shape to begin with. (On a more minor point, I'll add that Alternate History can be Fantasy as easily as it can be SF -- and, as practiced under the name "counterfactual" by historians, can also be even more like non-fiction.)

I generally prefer to pull out two or three axes (not binary choices, but continua along which a work can fall) at a time -- there are probably at least a dozen that could interestingly sub-divide the world of literature -- and use those to present any particular case, while being clear that any such interpretation is a very simplified view.

He goes on to list a few of the axes he would use. I have very little to say about this because, frankly, I agree with pretty much everything Andrew says. (And no, it's not a coincidence that his post is mostly complimentary to me :) ) I find the idea of a 3-D map of genres thrilling and hope that someone more savvy with the 3-D image-generating stuff will undertake this, just to keep us arguing.

In fact, I seem to remember Scott McCloud creating a (2-D) diagram with more than one axis to address abstraction and realism in comics. Lemme see ... here it is. I think I oughter blog about this over at atlas(t). I'll cross-post if I do.
Okay, that was long, let the counter arguments begin!

Comments

[Nick Mamatas]

Responded back on my lj, briefly and I hope in a comradely fashion.

For tracking, I use www.icerocket.com It's handy.

[Jose]

Well you seem to have taken some heat over your map. As one of those people dishing out a bit of that heat I've read and feel like I understand your defences.

However the problem I have is with the underlying premise. Defining SF is like defining pornography. You know what it is when you see it but any attempt to define it comprehensively will elude you. And that's probably a good thing.

[claire]

jose, if i tried to hand your five-year-old a magazine full of pictures of naked people having sex, i'd bet you could come up with a working definition of pornography pretty damn quick.

i appreciate what you're saying. but definitions are necessary, if people are to have a common language. and categorical definitions are necessary, if people are to have something to talk, or argue, about in that language.

what i'm trying to do here is to set up some definitions so that i can go on and talk about my ideas about genre and other kinds of hybridity in literature. while the point of view that trying to define SF is impossible is a valid point of view, it's not a useful one. and all it does is shut down discussion, which is the opposite of what i was trying to do here.