The essence and mechanisms of genre?

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

Genre boundaries are intrinsically fuzzy. As dcarson said (and I liked enough I put it in my sig file):



So I'd say don't worry too about drawing hard lines between genres. It will only frustrate you. Be ready to allow multiclassing. :)

And I actually was inspired to that definition by something wshwsh said on these boards.

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

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.

That story was written in 1908 and set in 1895. In 1895, the Royal Navy was negotiating for a license to build the Holland military submarine under conditions of great secrecy; they acquired said subs in 1901, and secrecy had begun to leak by '08. Doyle was doing the equivalent of the makers of Dr. Strangelove near-perfectly modeling the inside of a B-52 (then classified) by extrapolation from a B-29 an what was publicly known

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Irish Wolf

It's also important to remember that genres aren't always strictly defined. My favorite example, Alien, is both sci-fi and a slasher flick, and is firmly grounded in both genres (they can't escape the monster stalking them because there's literally nowhere to go for a very large number of light-years), while its sequel is both sci-fi and action, with the horror elements firmly downplayed (they know the monsters are there, and it doesn't take long for them to figure out which of the people involved will betray them and why, so the main conflict is how the hero escapes, rather than if).

That's a key difference in the horror and action genres (though a story can certainly be both at once). Horror is about fear, but more than that, it's about fear of the unknown, the uncanny, the uncertain. The xenomorph is a horror entity in Alien, because Ripley and the other characters have no idea what they're dealing with, what it wants, what it can do, what its limitations are, etc.

In the second movie, Ripley now knows, more or less, what she is dealing with, what it does and how it does it. She knows the difference between a face-hugger and a mature xenomorph, she knows what the face-hugger wants to do. The enemy is still deadly dangerous and scary, but now it's out in the light, and known. The story becomes about how to survive/defeat it.

Same deal with Predator. The first Predator movie starts out as an action-adventure 80s style shoot 'em up. But when the Predator begins stalking them, it turns into horror. It isn't immediately clear if it's SF horror or magical horror, they don't know what they're dealing with. The local girl is familiar with legends about it, how it appears in the hottest years, but it's not until the movie continues along that it becomes clear they're dealing with an alien, using advanced tech to do what it does.

One of the problems of the subsequent movies is that the Predator is now a known factor for the audience. (Though I thought the second Predator movie was still a pretty-good action-adventure SF film. Transplanting the action to a modern city made it different enough from the first film to reintroduce some uncertainty.)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by dcarson

And I actually was inspired to that definition by something wshwsh said on these boards.

My view is that a concept (outside of fields such as pure mathematics) has both a prototype and a boundary, or in your terms, landmarks and edges. Definitions attempt to specify the boundary. But if you have a boundary you're going to have boundary cases: things that don't look much like the prototype but have the essential traits, things that do look like the prototype but lack them.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by whswhs

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.

I don't recall that. There were some predatory business practices that resembled slavery/serfdom (like with the mudders), but those seemed more akin to Company Towns (which did show up in some Westerns) than the chattel slavery of America's Bad Old Days. But it has been a while since I watched it, and I never read the comics, so I may have simply missed that.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by whswhs

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.

Well, I think the divide is, "How much world-building are you doing?" You can tell historical or mimetic stories with minimal world-building, even when you make up countries and people if you leave it vague enough or don't really explore the consequences. A lot of alternate histories on the other hand start as exercises in world-building and then the story comes in. In genre, they love their little indulgences now and then, making allusions to our history freely or letting butterflies flap their wings to change unrelated events.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I don't recall {bondsmen in Firefly}

In "The Train Job". Mal and Zoe get captured; Inara, wielding her respectable Companion station, rescues them from the sheriff by telling him that Mal is her escaped bondsman, who's bound to be turned over to her. You could read that as indentured servitude as well, but that's really just slavery for a pre-defined period.

As far as the Western details go, I think Whedon was just being economical. The show features Mal, individualistic hero driven by his own code, even where that doesn't line up with the law -- a classic trope in Westerns. The show also takes place on a frontier, so there's a reason for that personal code to come to the fore, rather than a designated police force, and with the haves and have-nots. So many thematic elements in common with the Western genre at this point that Whedon could just save a lot of exposition trying to explain what the world was like to the audience -- no, no, spaceships but not like Star Trek; no, no, not like Star Wars either -- that he could just go whole hog with the Western set dressing with outfits, accents, low-slung holsters, mighty fine hats, even cattle, and (genre-savvy as Whedon is from three generations of television writers) he knew he could convey all of those implications just by making it a space Western. No lengthy exposition in the early episodes needed that way; the American audience having seen all those other actual Westerns will get it immediately, so the exposition that exists can focus on the differences and other elements of the overarching plot (Hands of Blue; Book the ex-Operative, etc) rather than spending that time establishing the broad strokes or a baseline.

Same reason so many fantasy games run in "D&D World". "Fantasy" incorporates an enormous range of possible settings. But everybody knows how D&D worlds work in general, so you don't spend your game sessions defining a weird set of physics for the behavior of the floating islands in the etheric currents populated with novel demonic races up to things that make sense only in their Blue-Orange morality that the players don't yet know and so on. You can start with pseudo-medieval European castles and towns with elves and dwarves and orcs that the players all already know, and just get on with the rest of the game, without assigning so much homework studying the 300-page setting description document and spending all the play time teaching that in game. Genres and tropes are a convenient shortcut to activating all the related concepts in people's heads.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

In "The Train Job". Mal and Zoe get captured; Inara, wielding her respectable Companion station, rescues them from the sheriff by telling him that Mal is her escaped bondsman, who's bound to be turned over to her. You could read that as indentured servitude as well, but that's really just slavery for a pre-defined period.

That's exactly the lines of dialogue I had in mind.

Same reason so many fantasy games run in "D&D World". "Fantasy" incorporates an enormous range of possible settings. But everybody knows how D&D worlds work in general, so you don't spend your game sessions defining a weird set of physics for the behavior of the floating islands in the etheric currents populated with novel demonic races up to things that make sense only in their Blue-Orange morality that the players don't yet know and so on. You can start with pseudo-medieval European castles and towns with elves and dwarves and orcs that the players all already know, and just get on with the rest of the game, without assigning so much homework studying the 300-page setting description document and spending all the play time teaching that in game. Genres and tropes are a convenient shortcut to activating all the related concepts in people's heads.

I'm aware that there are people who think that way, but I don't grok it. I'm currently on my fourteenth fantasy campaign since I started keeping count back in the nineties, and none of them has been set in D&D world. My players don't usually seem to have much trouble. The closest to a failure was when I ran a campaign based on E.R. Eddison's Zimiamvia series, and only one of the players managed to read the novels; the rest got by on what I told them as a quick summary, and so the style was quite a departure from the source material.

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Well, I think the divide is, "How much world-building are you doing?" You can tell historical or mimetic stories with minimal world-building, even when you make up countries and people if you leave it vague enough or don't really explore the consequences. A lot of alternate histories on the other hand start as exercises in world-building and then the story comes in. In genre, they love their little indulgences now and then, making allusions to our history freely or letting butterflies flap their wings to change unrelated events.

This is basically my contention: the point where worldbuilding becomes a concept is the point where we enter Speculative Fiction territory. Murder, She Wrote isn't spec fic or alternate history even though Cabot Cove is a fictional place (indeed, IME virtually all fiction set in small towns happens somewhere fictional, though often heavily based on a real place)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Dalillama

This is basically my contention: the point where worldbuilding becomes a concept is the point where we enter Speculative Fiction territory. Murder, She Wrote isn't spec fic or alternate history even though Cabot Cove is a fictional place (indeed, IME virtually all fiction set in small towns happens somewhere fictional, though often heavily based on a real place)

I have my doubts about that way of drawing the distinction.

(1) I don't think "speculative fiction" means, literally, any fiction that contains an element of speculation, even a large element. Historically, it originated as a usage of science fiction writers, one that substituted for "science fiction." Narrowly, I think, it was a way of talking about science fiction that sounded more respectable than "that Buck Rogers stuff" or the horror movies on Saturday afternoon "science fiction theater." Broadly, it was a way of talking about fiction with fantastic elements without getting into arguments about whether they were rigorously treated enough to count as "science" fiction. Indeed, "speculative fiction" in that sense could be taken as meaning anything that could be called "fantasy" in the broad sense of "fiction about the fantastic" (rather than the narrow sense of "genre fantasy").

(2) But if you do mean it literally, then I would point out that there are authors who do elaborate worldbuilding without having any intention of writing fantasy in any sense, broad or narrow. There is Sinclair Lewis's fiction set in Winnemac, for which he apparently did massively detailed worldbuilding (Robert Heinlein claimed to have taken him as a model). There is Austin Tappen Wright's Islandia, set in a fictional country that has no magic, no advanced science, for which Wright wrote a voluminous history and got his brother, a professional cartographer, to draw maps; I've seen it said that he even did the geological history. This seems to be speculative fiction in your sense, but I don't think it's science fiction or fantasy.

(3) Stipulating these two different senses, what I was talking about was never "speculative fiction" in your sense. It was fantastic fiction, or fantasy-in-the-broad-sense. And "what if the Spanish monarchy had not conquered Granada back from the Moors?" or "what if Hitler had not gone back on his deal with Stalin?" does not seem to me to be a fantasy premise; it's just a mundane supposition. So I don't include AH as such in "fantastic fiction," though I certainly recognize that some AH also is fantastic fiction: because it has fantastic elements as a feature of its timeline, or because people got to its timeline by some fantastic means (rather than the usual method of being born there), or because the timeline was created by time travelers or something.

(4) I think that having fantastic story elements is a fundamental difference of kind. I don't think that elaborate worldbuilding is such a difference. So if an AH has an elaborately constructed alternate timeline, rather than a quick sketch, I think it's still the same genre, AH; I don't think the worldbuilding make it a different genre; and I don't think that genre is a fantastic one, but a mundane one.