The essence and mechanisms of genre?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by pgb

Certainly Sorites' paradox (or the paradox of the beard, or of the heap) is relevant here. But - without any particular expertise in philosophy - my feeling is that the message is almost the opposite of yours. Accepting that, outside of mathematics, definitions are generally not going to be completely precise, is a way of being able to talk about all sorts of things usefully while being wary of getting too hung up on definitions.

I think that very fact means that we should not let ourselves be deterred from identifying distinctive typical features of one genre or another by the existence of borderline cases.

This sort of thing comes up, for example, for the Libertarian Futurist Society, which requires that the works it gives awards to (which may be in any of the fantastic genres) should have pro-liberty themes. What's required for "pro-liberty"? We've tended to avoid too narrow a definition; we've never required an award winner to adhere to a specific definition of "libertarian" or even to call themselves libertarians (some years ago Charles Stross joked that he was accepting the Best Novel award to a Scottish socialist as a substitute for Ken MacLeod). Sometimes this perplexes people who have narrower definitions than we do; for example, when The Lord of the Rings won the Hall of Fame award, there were people on File 770 who thought this was inappropriate because the happy ending included Aragorn's being crowned king of Gondor and Arnor, and they thought monarchy as such was incompatible with freedom.

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Technically, I think that alternative history as such is a mundane genre rather than a fantastic one. For one thing, as I've seen observed, many completely realistic novels are actually nanoAH: This is our timeline except for the presence of Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson in a particular London flat, or except for the voyages of a ship captained by "Lucky Jack" Aubrey. For another, there is quite mundane fiction with imaginary locations that imply an AH: the American state of Winnemac where most of Sinclair Lewis's novels are set (Lewis being a highly regarded realistic novelist), or the remote Asian land of Kafiristan in "The Man Who Would Be King," or Ruritania in the romantic but not fantastic The Prisoner of Zenda, or the entire Karain subcontinent in Islandia. None of the essays in If It Had Happened Otherwise has any fantastic elements as such.

Watson and Holmes aren't really world-shaking characters. Characterizing that as alternate history makes the concept indistinguishable from fiction itself. Aubrey is more of a border case, since if real his actions would have had a significant effect on the course of the war, and a multitude of little changes stemmed therefrom. The Sharpe books solve this by being a slightly alternate history where a number of things that really happened were accomplished by Richard Sharpe, rather than the various people who really did them, and other historical fiction either takes place on a small enough scale that it can be slotted into the vast number of real stories that just aren't recorded or hews exactly to the documented life of a real person and just fills in details in a coherent and hopefully interesting narrative. (Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, for instance, although I can't say I'm a fan). Ruritanias are the next step towards Speculative Fiction, via the roman a clef ty
tradition where the story is (or purports to be) about real people and places, but names have been changed or obscured to protect the author from libel charges and/or duelling challenges. Everyone in the intended audience is expected to be able to understand who all these people are and thus get all the juicy gossip, but you can swear on a Bible that these are all made up people. The thinly described gossip columns rapidly spawned entirely fictional imitators, which in turn spawned generic everyplaces like Ruritania, Lake Woebegone, etc.

of course this changes if the AH includes fantastic elements, such as the systematic study of magic in the Lord Darcy stories or the alien invasion in Worldwar. Or if it's possible for people from one timeline to get to another by technology or magic.

I would draw the line at the point where the change visibly alters the world in some fashion: Kafiristan is a remote mountain community that was never any bigger, Winnemac could be any state if a naming convention went differently, etc. You could have a history degree in the Kiplingverse and still never have heard of Kafiristan. Compare, say, Turtledove's alternate WWI series, where the Confederacy was implausibly successful in the US Civil War and an active participant in WWI. There's no magic or aliens or anything like that, but it's definitely absolutely spec fic. History is different in a blatant major way.

I don't think I would go for that as the distinguishing characteristic. For one thing, it excludes Vernor Vinge's "True Names," where the faceless entity is in fact the United States government and particularly the Internal Revenue Service ("the Great Enemy").

I'm not actually familiar with that one, but the synopses I've found indicate desperate alienation still figures prominently.

For another, it doesn't mention the crucial idea that Vinge shares with Gibson: cyberspace, an experiential realm where "perceived" entities in fact represent features of the programming environment.

That's not an essential component of cyberpunk; viz Islands in the Net, which along with Neuromancer is generally considered the defining work of the genre. Or Effinger's Budayeen Nights books.

Realistic fiction seems to have several different kinds of genre marker. In some cases it's a type of emotional reaction: ... either mundane or fantastic premises. In some cases it's a type of problem to be solved,

Yes. This is also why there are in many cases subgenres that are basically a combination of one or more realistic genres that have established their own set of tropes and beats, e.g. romantic comedy, or that have one or more sets of Speculative fiction added in (paranormal mystery, where it might actually be a ghost that did it, but is otherwise realistic and present(for the author*) day.

*which is a whole other kettle of fish: Mr Darcy and Lucky Jack Aubrey are contemporaries, but Jane Austen was writing contemporary romance, and Patrick O'Brien was writing historical fiction.

And then there's at least the Western, where the distinctive element is a particular historical setting (though I wonder if it might be possible to set a Western in ancient Persia, where men were taught to ride well, shoot straight, and tell the truth?).

The Western is a third category of realistic/historical (many of the tropes of the Western were established by books published contemporaneously with the cattle drives and Indian Wars that mostly define the era) genre, where the key marker is the type of setting, and includes Westerns and other frontier narratives, war stories, castaway narratives, exploration/safari stories, sea stories, etc. The key features of Western are a)wide open spaces, b)a border between an expanding state and one or more much smaller states or non-state societies and c) limited recourse to the mechanisms of formal law or civilization generally. A recognizably Western-type story could absolutely be set on the borders of ancient Persia, on the steppes of Mongolia during one or another period where they were expanding or China was expanding at their expense, or star a Cossack on one or another border of Imperial Russia. Indeed, you could actually have all three of them adventur together in the late 1400s; the Furūsiyya tradition of chivalry common throughout the Muslim world is very heavily based on the Persian code summarized in your post, and was active as an ideal in that time. You could even throw in an exiled Samurai if you wanted, several classic Westerns are rehashed Samurai movie.

[Dalillama]

On the topic of genre sometimes basically being cosmetic, Jurassic Park is about cloning dinosaurs with science, then putting them in a theme park, where predictably monsters get loose and people start dying. In a hypothetical alternate history, it's called Fantastic Park, and is about historical researchers finding a spell that lets them call up mythical creatures from out of the past, they hook up with some short-sighted financiers and fill a theme park with unicorns and dragons and such, where predictably monsters get loose and people start dying. The main difference is where the book is shelved.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

Mr Darcy and Lucky Jack Aubrey are contemporaries, but Jane Austen was writing contemporary romance, and Patrick O'Brien was writing historical fiction.

And there's the interesting case of Becky Sharp: scenes in Vanity Fair take place at Waterloo, so she was chronologically a contemporary of both men, and Vanity Fair is a classic work of fiction, but it was published in 1848 (decades after Jane Austen's death), so it was a work of historical fiction, at least in the sense in which a novel about the fall of the Soviet Union is historical fiction now.

(And while Vanity Fair has taken on a romantic glow for many modern readers, it was actually a fairly harsh satire in its day.)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

On the topic of genre sometimes basically being cosmetic, Jurassic Park is about cloning dinosaurs with science, then putting them in a theme park, where predictably monsters get loose and people start dying. In a hypothetical alternate history, it's called Fantastic Park, and is about historical researchers finding a spell that lets them call up mythical creatures from out of the past, they hook up with some short-sighted financiers and fill a theme park with unicorns and dragons and such, where predictably monsters get loose and people start dying. The main difference is where the book is shelved.

See Larry Niven's stories about the time traveller who keeps coming back with mythical beasts for the hereditary sovereign of the United Nations.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

Watson and Holmes aren't really world-shaking characters. Characterizing that as alternate history makes the concept indistinguishable from fiction itself. Aubrey is more of a border case, since if real his actions would have had a significant effect on the course of the war, and a multitude of little changes stemmed therefrom. The Sharpe books solve this by being a slightly alternate history where a number of things that really happened were accomplished by Richard Sharpe, rather than the various people who really did them, and other historical fiction either takes place on a small enough scale that it can be slotted into the vast number of real stories that just aren't recorded or hews exactly to the documented life of a real person and just fills in details in a coherent and hopefully interesting narrative. (Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, for instance, although I can't say I'm a fan). Ruritanias are the next step towards Speculative Fiction, via the roman a clef ty
tradition where the story is (or purports to be) about real people and places, but names have been changed or obscured to protect the author from libel charges and/or duelling challenges. Everyone in the intended audience is expected to be able to understand who all these people are and thus get all the juicy gossip, but you can swear on a Bible that these are all made up people. The thinly described gossip columns rapidly spawned entirely fictional imitators, which in turn spawned generic everyplaces like Ruritania, Lake Woebegone, etc.

Allen Drury started out doing that in Advise and Consent (it's clear that the unnamed president is a Democrat, since his party includes both a hidebound southern segregationist and a young black congressman from California; and the scandal of Brigham Anderson apparently alludes to an actual political scandal of some years past), but by the end of the series he's writing something in between future history and alternate history. In fact there are two final novels in the series, depending on which two people were assassinated at the end of the fourth volume, so effectively the story has an internal AH.

The thing I'm pointing at is that (a) there is a clear continuum from completely ordinary realistic fiction to (some examples of) alternative history, as the things that are different from what really happened get bigger and bigger (in contrast, there are novelists who avoid making up any historical events, and simply write an imaginative reconstruction of which might have been going on behind our historical records; see for example Robert Graves or Mary Renault); and (b) alternate histories such as Turtledove's prolonged Southern victory series, or his recent novel where HIV comes to Europe around 1500, are not different from our history as a result of any fantastic element---that is, anything whose existence would change our worldview if it were proven true---but only because some different mundane event happened at some point. We're now habituated to think of that sort of thing as "science fiction" (or "fantasy") because there are novels about travel to alternate worlds, or about creation of alternate worlds through time travel, so those have come to be prototypes, but straight AH doesn't have to have any such elements.

For that matter, there's the genre of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, written not long before an American presidential election, and showing a fascist takeover of the United States when someone different from FDR wins the election. It's set in the future, but the very near future, and it has no fantastic elements, not even the clever gadgets that show up in technothrillers; so it's sort of on the margin of SF, but it can be read as a straight realistic novel.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by whswhs

And then there's at least the Western, where the distinctive element is a particular historical setting (though I wonder if it might be possible to set a Western in ancient Persia, where men were taught to ride well, shoot straight, and tell the truth?).

Firefly had a lot of aspects in it that made it very similar to a Western (in fact I've frequently seen it referred to as a "Space Western" or similar) - much of the clothing (and many of the characters' accents) would have fit in such, it took place shortly after a large civil war similar to the ACW (or at least the more romanticized version where it was about State Rights rather than slavery), it took place primarily on the frontier, and most of the settlements they visited had a similar look and feel to the towns in Westerns.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Firefly had a lot of aspects in it that made it very similar to a Western (in fact I've frequently seen it referred to as a "Space Western" or similar) - much of the clothing (and many of the characters' accents) would have fit in such, it took place shortly after a large civil war similar to the ACW (or at least the more romanticized version where it was about State Rights rather than slavery), it took place primarily on the frontier, and most of the settlements they visited had a similar look and feel to the towns in Westerns.

The interesting nuance to Firefly was that the winning power DID have slavery, or at least "bondsmen," who seem to have been functionally much the same thing as slaves. You could take that either as a deliberate change of one of the assumptions to make things different, or a romanticizing effect, making the romantic South the free power and the humdrum North the slave power.

[Irish Wolf]

Originally Posted by whswhs

See Larry Niven's stories about the time traveller who keeps coming back with mythical beasts for the hereditary sovereign of the United Nations.

That was a deliberate crossing of genres; prior to Wells' The Time Machine, time travel was a matter of fantasy, so any time the extension cage went past that point in history it wobbled into fantasy realms. Nobody understood that because so much of history had been lost in various wars... :)

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

Watson and Holmes aren't really world-shaking characters.e.

I wouldn't be entirely sure of that.

The Bruce-Partiongton submarine plans were at least 20 years ahead of the SOTA when the story was written. That might make the story a techno-thriller rather than full on SF but as Bill knows, an 1890s submarine that could sink enemy ships rather than merely drowning its' own crew was a fantastic element. Making an important part of WWI's naval conflict happen 20 years early would probably be fairly world-shaking.

I coiuld probably find oter examples. It might be rare for an "important military secret" in fiction to not be at the techno-thriller/20 years early level.