Posts Tagged ‘genre’

Stop Worrying About Subgenre

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There’s been an awful lot of chat­ter around the web lately about sub­gen­res and steam­punk in par­tic­u­lar.  We’ve seen attacks on steam­punk, defenses of steam­punk, and a thou­sand shades of opin­ion in-​​between.  As some­one who likes steam/​clockpunk enough to name his busi­ness after it, I have a dog in the fight.

But I’m not drawn to these discussions.

Genre in gen­eral, as far as I am con­cerned, is mostly a con­struct of mar­ket­ing. Booksellers care about them, and the read­ers do too, but I ques­tion how much it helps an author to con­sciously choose a genre or sub­genre.  Right now, I feel bad for any­one writ­ing a steam­punk novel, because steam­punk is clearly, at least to my eyes, reach­ing a sat­u­ra­tion point rivaled only by zom­bies.  To be on that bus, you needed to write and sell your steam­punk novel 2–3 years ago.  I’m sure we’re going to con­tinue to see nov­els from estab­lished authors in this vein, but it wouldn’t sur­prise me if edi­tors and agents are already mov­ing on in their search for the next big thing.

My advice to you, and to myself, is to ignore the sub­genre when you write.  You can ignore that advice and still be suc­cess­ful (of course). I know, for exam­ple, that John Scalzi set out delib­er­ately to write mil­i­tary SF because it seemed to be sell­ing well, but I won­der what we would have got­ten from him if he had set out to write his own sub­genre.  Scalzian fic­tion, we would call it, prob­a­bly.  What would it look like? Who knows.  It’d prob­a­bly have fart jokes though! (and I mean that in a pos­i­tive way)

That’s not to say that if your pas­sion is steam­punk, I think you shouldn’t write a steam­punk novel. By all means, punk away.  This post once again boils down to “don’t lis­ten to oth­ers and write what you love.”

But I think this advice espe­cially holds true when it comes to labels.  Labels are for mar­ket­ing and that comes later.  Right now, when you’re still string­ing words together and shap­ing a book just seems like the wrong time to get caught up in such thoughts.  It’s not the sub­gen­res that exist today that get me excited.  I’m exited to won­der just what weird, wild, and expres­sive forms and gen­res writ­ers are work­ing on right now, as we speak, that we’ve never seen before.  I can’t wait to see what they turn out to be.  Regardless of where they are shelved in the bookstore.

Book 2009 #1: Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

The first book I have read for 2009  prob­a­bly shouldn’t count.  I started it in 2008.  But I set the rules and I have decided that it is books fin­ished in 2009 that count.  Maybe  I will finally get through War and Peace after all this time.  Unlikely.  The Russian authors have rarely done much for me.  Although, now that I think about it, Crime and Punishment gave me some nasty night­mares in high school.  Something about a bloody ham­mer. No bloody ham­mers here, but there sure was a lot of blood in general.

So I read the rather long titled Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America by Brian Francis Slattery. I picked this one up after hav­ing seen the really inter­est­ing cover a cou­ple of times at the book store and read­ing the back copy.  I wasn’t quite sold, but then Cory over at BoingBoing posted a glow­ing Doctorowian review and­con­vinced me to give it a shot.  Speaking of  Cory, I think I’ll put Little Brother up on the chop­ping block next.  I’ve been mean­ing to get to that for a while and I sus­pect the­mat­i­cally it’ll go down well after the six course meal of this book.

Sheesh, that’s a lot of words with­out actu­ally talk­ing about the book itself isn’t it?  I was talk­ing with Nick Mamatas about this one and he said he thought it read like bud­get Pynchon.  I’ve never read any Pynchon but I trust Nick knows what he’s talk­ing about.  I’m actu­ally look­ing for­ward to read­ing some Pynchon now based on that com­par­i­son.    (Finally, I address the book itself, eh?)

Yeah, I liked this one for a lot of rea­sons.  The prose is wan­der­ing and wild and full of words that go together like choco­late and peanut but­ter.  Just some great writ­ing here, and it breaks rules of POV and such in lovely ways that just make every­thing slightly sur­real, and yet still grounded.  This is sci­ence fic­tion, but there are ghosts.  Are they metaphor­i­cal? I guess you could say that.  If this weren’t genre, you wouldn’t even ask that ques­tion though.

Post eco­nomic col­lapse America sounds a hell of a lot more ghoul­ish than I imag­ined it per­son­ally.  For one, Slattery sees slav­ery com­ing back.  I had a hard time buy­ing that at first but it does make a kind of grue­some sense.  I hope he’s wrong if things ome to that.

The main char­ac­ter here is really America (post col­lapse, but our his­tory as well).  Everyone else, espe­cially the pro­tag­o­nists, are just sup­port­ing cast.  That’s not to say they aren’t well-​​characterized.  I’ll prob­a­bly remem­ber Marco in par­tic­u­lar for years to come. But I like a book with a broad char­ac­ter like that once and a while.  It’s some­thing I would love to pull off some day, as I work to grow as a writer.

And every­thing here is so fuck­ing cool.  It’s almost Beats cool.  The Slick Six are very slick, very suave and I think there’s almost a comic book atmos­phere at play here.  They’re larger than life in some ways, par­tic­u­larly Marco (espe­cially Marco).   It’s so weird to me that Slattery has made his post-​​collapse America seem cool, but it really is.  Bursting with weird­ness and cool.  There’s a scene in par­tic­u­lar that I am think­ing of, involv­ing a con­fronta­tion between Marco and an assas­sin that is just great and so so cool.

Also, the villain’s name is the Aardvark which may be more ridicu­lous than cool, but I liked that.  What kind of vil­lain goes by that istead of the Hammerhead or the Wolf or some­thing suit­ably fright­en­ing?  Aardvark is not a word that strikes fear in any­one unless you hap­pen to be an ant.

This book will stick with me for a while, I think.  I am def­i­nitely look­ing for­ward to the next one by Slattery.  I may even read this one again, more care­fully this time, to enjoy the prose at my leisure.  I rec­om­mend this one if you like post-​​apocalyptic fic­tion, gonzo style road trip nov­els, or ninjas.