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An entirely theoretical discussion
After rereading the last two or three entries, it strikes me that, I should explain something for the benefit of "those who came in late or have been away too long" (as Jack Chalker says).
I don't consider myself a cranky person, or a mean person. Those few people I'm fully comfortable around will attest that I'm often a lighthearted and excessively silly person. I am cynical - I admit it - but that's just a thorny shield I've developed over the years to protect my soft inner idealist child personality.
This journal gets an unwarranted amount of my crankiness. It isn't necessarily my best side, if you see what I mean. It's probably my worst. On the other hand, is is never my blandest side either, so you pay a price for having mostly-interesting reading :) I suspect I'm at my most intriguing when I'm on a High Rant about something. My happy feelings I tend to savor quietly. When I'm really thrilled I just giggle a lot and say nothing at all.
Sometimes I wonder if this isn't a problem with the species as a whole - that we all suffer from what I call Good News Isn't News syndrome. That we vent about the things that bother us, but never bubble about the things that fill us with joy. What do you think?
At any rate, I am aware that I have been even crankier than usual here in the last couple of weeks, and I'm not sure why that is exactly. I don't know of any ripples in my home life or work life that could be causing me to generate unusual amounts of bile.
The most likely possibility is that, because I'm not working on a novel at present, my brain has too much free time to fulminate. Like Kymm said: I'm thinking too much. Not to worry - after I come back from NYC this weekend I start another project. Perhaps the Aedie revisions if enough comments have come in - perhaps the work I'm finally preparing to do on The Other Novel - perhaps something altogether new. But something.
Meanwhile, I had been planning to tell a story this morning, something lighthearted as an antidote to all this crankiness. But I had some interesting correspondence this morning and I believe I should talk about that instead. The story can wait.
A couple of people have wondered about my fantasy/SF rants. Well, don't worry. You're not the only ones. As I said to Patrick this morning: I have grown accustomed to being a minority of one. Normally when I'm the only person who has a viewpoint, I question the viewpoint; with this topic, I have to stick to my guns, because the way I've sorted the genres for myself is the only way that makes any sense to me.
It's not so much that I'm resisting the standard genre labels - I don't see any point in denying what's out there, and I'm perfectly willing to play by the rules everyone else is apparently using. As I think I said, I don't care what genre my book is classified as; I'll take whichever niche my eventual publisher thinks it'll sell best in - their judgment on the matter is better than mine.
You need to understand that. This is entirely a theoretical argument for me. It's not something I have a great personal or emotional stake in. I've noticed a problem here - I argue things so loudly that people assume it's very important to me. No - I just argue that way.
Patrick said this morning:
Your novel is classic SF, and not one whit of fantasy, and here's why: Everything that happens in your novel could conceivably happen in the world as we know it to exist. Is it a "fantastic" set of circumstances for August, 1999? Yes. Does that mean that in twenty years, six months, or tomorrow, that none of this could happen? Certainly not.
He's basing a definition, it seems to me, on plausibility - travel to an alien world could conceivably happen one day; visitations by the Greek gods, probably not. I myself don't bring plausibility into it.
I think of something as SF if it really depends on the science. Remember what I said the other day, that the true test of whether something was a MacGuffin was whether you could swap it for something else and no one would care? Well, in the Aedie novel I feel that the science is replaceable. As I said to Patrick, Aedie could have travelled to Erewhon and been living among the elves. It doesn't matter. It only needed to be a group of sentients with very different social customs from humans. The science is not required.
Now, I realize that makes me something of a hardliner. Under that definition (and you certainly are not obligated to accept it), very little is actually SF. This is usually as far as people get when they decide to dismiss me :) Asimov's Foundation series is not SF, for example. It is mostly a story about mob psychology and balance-of-power shifts in trade relationships, with a wild-card charismatic thrown in and a secret society with the responsibility to get the course of history back on track. None of that really calls for science at all.
Basically my definition leaves only "hard" SF in the SF category, which is ironic, because hard SF is the only type of so-called SF I don't enjoy reading. (With rare exceptions.)
So where does all this non-SF SF go, if it's not SF? Well, in my universe I'd call it "fantasy" - but "fantasy's" been co-opted, as I said. How about if - as has been suggested in the past - we revive the term "speculative fiction?"
It'll never fly, you say? Oh, well. As I said, the labels are pretty well established, and it doesn't do much good to object to them now. So, Patrick, I agree with you. In the present world, with the present definitions, my book is SF. Clearly.
That's the difference between my cynical self and my idealistic self in a nutshell: One knows The Way It Is, and the other's always prattling about The Way It Should Be.
© Columbine
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