"It's all speculative."

[kiya]

I was meaning to write about this already, and papersky wrote a journal entry that got me started on it, so I've copied over my comment in her journal and will work from there.

And this nicely gets one of the journal entries I've been meaning to write out of the queue, which is something.


papersky wrote: "When I was a child, certainly, and also later to some extent, I read everything as SF." And I replied:

I don't think I ever stopped. This is exactly why I have a hard time understanding what people mean by "genre".

My father read to me -- he read me Winnie the Pooh and he read me Dr. Doolittle and he read me Dickens and Tolkien and Robert Louis Stevenson. We read Swiss Family Robinson and The Odyssey and historical fiction about the Stuarts and Mark Twain.

When I read on my own, I climbed his shelves and I found Cherryh and Heinlein and Tom Clancy. He lent me Wimsey and Campion, and gave me Anne of Green Gables. I collected the Black Stallion books and Nancy Drews, and my first real book, my first grown-up book of my own, was Black Beauty.

It's all the same genre to me, it's all about the strange people who live in exotic places like Meetpoint or Scotland and their customs and what they're going through. Jack Ryan is the same sort of point of view character to me as Black Beauty: someone in extraordinary-to-me circumstances with different realms of knowledge and expertise. The fact that one of them is a horse and one of them is an American playing high-stakes politics isn't a factor that comes up for me, really.

This is why I write the stuff -- because to me, in a very real way, there isn't anything else to write. That's all there is.

And I was thinking of writing about this the other day, and meaning to do it, and I may wind up just using this comment as a basis for the journal entry.

And after I posted that I realised -- hey -- most people wouldn't class either Jack Ryan or Black Beauty as sci-fi, really, I think one of them is supposed to be mainstream thriller and the other is, I don't know, classic literature or something. And I don't see the difference -- I enough don't see the difference that those seemed typical to my point.

They're all aliens in alien societies to me. Jack Ryan, who supposedly lives in my reality, in my country even, is no more nor less alien to me than Pogo the Possum -- who also lives in my country, in black-and-white ink versions of the Okeefenokee Swamp. But that's not a different sort of alienness than Black Beauty or the folks of Watership Down -- who aren't my species. It's not a different sort of alienness than the inhabitants of Cyteen or Pern -- nominally human, but still alien, different culture, different places. It's not a different sort of alien than a kif or a hradani, either. They're all coming from a different place with different ways; I can learn something about them and learn something about myself by seeing how I react to those different ways.

The title of this is from what may be an apocryphal story I heard once, possibly on rasfc. I believe it goes something like -- student talking to professor about a story, gets peeved when said story is called 'sci-fi', draws self up and says in haughty tones, "No, it's speculative fiction." And the professor says, "Dear, it's all speculative."

It's all speculative.

I think this is why I have to write the sci-fi, why I couldn't write anything else; I don't know where the edges go. If I just write the world the way I see it, it comes out in that mode that people call genre, even if I play it straight and literal; if I make things up, it's still genre; if I work with the worlds that live in my head . . . genre. Whatever genre is. (Which, in case that wasn't obvious, I have no clue about.)


I've been thinking on and off of trying to write a novel from a specifically Kemetic viewpoint. Maybe set in ancient Egypt, or something like it. I wonder if anything will come of it. Eventually, I suppose, it'll grow into something real, or it won't. But it'll definitely be "genre". Because that's all I know how to see.


And there are times I wish I was twelve again, so I could get Dad to read to me almost every night.

Comments

[annwyd.livejournal.com]

I read science fiction and fantasy mostly. I also read, on occasion, books set strange and fascinating historical eras. Books about lunatics are also good. Oh, and then there's espionage fiction. That's nice.

But I was never very good at reading the stuff I got assigned in my Contemporary Literature class. When we were assigned The Accidental Tourist, our teacher earnestly stressed how great it was that Anne Tyler wrote about such very normal people. To which my response was, "What's the point?"