Science Fiction and the Genre Problem

How do you label and promote a misfit book?

You can't publish on any platform without selecting the tags for your genre/sub-genre.

There are all manner of categories now, from familiar tags like 'space opera' and 'military SF' to more recent coinages like 'solarpunk'. My problem was, and is, that I couldn't easily see a label that I wanted to attach to Three Kinds of North or the series as a whole. This also directly informed my decision to do my own thing with the cover design rather than following a 'genre-appropriate' formula.

So where does the Shattered Moon series belong? As there's a post-apocalyptic setting, it's probably science fiction by definition, and when I’m forced to tag it I start with that, but…

The apocalypse, whatever it was, is long ago and mostly forgotten. Society has recovered to a pretty orderly and generally peaceful state. The general level of science and technology is early industrial; there are a few canals, but no steam powered railways, for example. The place of science in society is very significant to the story, but it's somewhere at the level of, say, the Scottish Enlightenment. Perhaps someone, somewhere, is tinkering with steam-powered pumps or engines. I have an idea about this, and how it might work into the story, but that won’t be until Book Six.

It's also a coming-of-age story with significant romance elements. And it's been very much enjoyed by people who aren't regular SF readers.

Any other genre labels I might use? I welcome suggestions.

I can’t help feeling 'literary' authors have it easier, at least in this sense.

Just consider this list: Margaret Atwood, J G Ballard, Anthony Burgess, Aldous Huxley, Kazuo Ishiguro, Doris Lessing¹, Ian McEwan, George Orwell. You’ve got a couple of Booker winners there (Atwood is a two-time winner), and a couple of Nobel laureates. And they’ve all written books which are recognisably science fiction by any reasonable definition. But how many are routinely classed or recognised as SF writers? Maybe Ballard. You might see The Handmaid’s Tale on the SF shelves in Waterstone’s, but not Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four.

And where do they put McEwan’s Machines Like Me or Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go? Both of these have contemporary settings, but McEwan introduces advanced robots and Ishiguro has mass human cloning. Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing wrote no fewer than five outright SF novels, collectively titled Canopus in Argos: Archives, all well worth reading (I can’t honestly say the same for Machines Like Me; if you want an exploration of the implications of robotics and cybernetics, go back to Asimov or forward to Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries (note to self: read the rest of these). )

The 'literary establishment' often seems to disdain 'genre' fiction. Of course this 'establishment' isn’t a monolithic entity or conspiracy, and there are plenty of exceptions; witness A S Byatt’s staunch defence of Terry Pratchett, for example. Byatt, a Booker Prize winner, told an Edinburgh festival audience that Pratchett was her hero because he "caused more people to read books than anyone else – because he tells them something they want to know, that they can laugh at, and because he writes really good English".

Of course what chance was there that Pratchett would even make the long-list for the Booker?

But let’s not get into defensive mode, because I want to ask whether genre authors and/or publishers and/or readers don’t have to admit some responsibility for this regrettable schism? Are too many readers too ready to hunker down in their cosy little world of… um… galaxy- and aeon-spanning imagination?

Cue Ursula K Le Guin²:

"Genre, a concept which could have served as a useful distinction of various kinds of fiction, has been degraded into a disguise for mere value-judgment. The various 'genres' are now mainly commercial product-labels to make life easy for lazy readers, lazy critics, and the Sales Departments of publishers."

From The Obligatory Bit about Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Genre in The Unreal and The Real.

To the 'lazy list' we must now, of course, add Amazon… but Amazon didn’t get to where it is, and Jeff Bezos didn’t get to be obnoxiously rich, without some grasp of what works. So does it, maybe, come right back to 'lazy' readers? 'The customer is always right' and, very often, the customer seems to want more of the same, thank you very much.

Do I have any answers? Not really. I have come up with a reasonably snappy summary, though:

Genre should be a signpost, not a straitjacket.

What I do know is that I’ve been an avid science fiction reader from a very early age, devouring everything I could find in the Junior Library in Altrincham and then the Children’s Library in Lancaster. But even then I was reading stuff that wasn’t necessarily classed as for children, like James Blish’s Cities in Flight series, as well as lots of Andre Norton³ and the likes of Patrick Moore and E C Eliott.

I read fantasy too, starting—as far as I can remember—with Mrs Hammond, our teacher in first-year juniors (I think this is called Year 3 now), reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe to us a chapter at a time at the end of each school day. I didn’t read The Lord of The Rings until I was at University, and I didn’t discover A Wizard of Earthsea until even later.

But I was always reading lots of other stuff too. Books regularly came my way via church jumble sales⁴, making for an eclectic mix, much of which was far from new even then (1960s), so I got various sub-Wodehouseian public school stories as well as the historical adventures of G. A. Henty and Anthony Hope (as I suggested in an earlier post, Hope’s stirring The Prisoner of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau were surely influential on Philip Pullman’s fine The Tin Princess.)

I mustn’t wallow in nostalgia too long, especially as I’ve mentioned some of this before. Let’s just say I’m still reading (and re-reading) eclectically. Here are a few recent reads as a random example:

Into The Silence by Wade Davis: a weighty tome on the first three British expeditions to Everest, in the context of the aftermath of WWI. I think this is the sort of thing that gets called 'magisterial', but don’t be put off.

A Heart Full of Headstones by Ian Rankin. The latest in the Rebus series and well up to standard.

The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett. I’ve already covered this… but did you know she also wrote the screenplays for The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo as well as early drafts of The Empire Strikes Back?

The Ogre by Doug Scott. Not as big or as fine as his outstanding history of the context and exploration of Kangchenjunga, but a cracking read that includes one of the great survival stories in mountaineering.

Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes by Rob Wilkins. Re-read. Still excellent, but bloody hard going at the end. Yes, I cried. That final Tweet…

Better To Rest by Dana Stabenow. Good, and the Alaskan setting is always intriguing, but I don’t find Liam Campbell as compelling a character as Kate Shugak. If you want to read a good crime story with a fascinating setting (physically and culturally), start with her A Cold Day for Murder.

Travelling to Infinity by Jane Hawking. Fascinating memoir by Stephen Hawking’s first wife.

And I’ve just finished David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. Now that’s another fine example of 'wait, what genre is this? Oh, forget it, and just enjoy the ride'.

Which I think is my motto, both as a reader and a writer. Except that it doesn't make it easier to promote the damn thing…

1. Aske another time about the time I slept in Doris Lessing’s bed.

2. You may be wondering if I can actually write a post without quoting Le Guin. So am I!

3. I don’t think I realised until many years later that Andre Norton was a woman.

4. Is this still a familiar term? Have jumbles sales been ousted by car boot sales?