04-28-2022, 09:03 PM | #1 | |||
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Empty genres; or what to do with all those -punks?
On the Grimdark thread I was being a bit of a jerk about what I considered silly genres.
I just read an article that did a better job explaining my opinion than I have done: Identity through Consumption - On Steampunk and the Empty Genre Problem of Consumerist Storytelling If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, I don't blame you. Here's the relevant points: Quote:
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Last edited by ZodWallop; 04-28-2022 at 09:14 PM. |
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04-29-2022, 12:24 PM | #2 | ||
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Thanks for starting this thread! I have Opinions but didn't want to derail the other thread.
I read the article, and it didn't impress me. I'd place it in the "insult something popular hoping for rage reads" subgenre of clickbait. Quote:
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I've read Cherie Priest's Boneshaker, and I'd say the setting is important to both the plot and the mood of the story. You have this huge train thundering over the prairie, with a heavily guarded freight car which the passengers get increasingly uneasy about. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to reveal that the freight car contains zombies, and that they get out. In part it's a story about a powerful company using technology in unsafe ways, blithely willing to risk other people's lives, and when things go wrong trying to surpress the truth to avoid bad PR. If you open a random newspaper the odds are good you'll find some version of this story, and it has probably been told in every setting and genre, from Henrik Ibsen's plays to the latest Netflix hit. The story works really well with the combination of horror elements and weird science in Boneshaker. (I didn't like it because I never connected with the protagonist, but I have no complaints about the setting or genre(s).) I'd also say that there's nothing wrong with writing in a setting simply because you like it. The author complained about Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan series. The story about the friendship between the fleeing heir of duke Franz Ferdinand and a junior crew member on an airship could probably have worked just as well on a sailship or steamship, but why shouldn't Westerfeld set the story on an airship if he wants to? Is there some artistic or moral merit in avoiding steampunk elements? The author of the article also complains that people make and buy "steampunk'd objects" that "serve no functional purpose whatsoever beyond ticking all the aesthetic boxes of the setting". Has he met human beings? Decorating ourselves and our surroundings with non-functional stuff because we like how it looks and/or because we want a connection with other people is as human as telling stories. I see these micro-genres the same way I see all genres: labels which can be helpful in finding what we like. And a narrow term like grimdark or fantasy of manners is far more likely to give useful information than huge overarching genres like fantasy and science fiction. Some genre names may be short lived, but that's fine. And of course, very few genre names will be meaningful and interesting for everyone, but there's no reason they should be. I'm sure there are lots of words and expressions which describe the nuances in poetry, wine, baseball, rap music... Most of those words are meaningless to me, but their existence doesn't harm me, and is helpful to others, so why should I mind that they exist? There are, of course, some books where you get the feeling that the author doesn't like or respect the genre they are writing in, and is indeed only using it because they imagine it sells well. But that's an argument against those specific books, not against the genres. |
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04-29-2022, 12:50 PM | #3 |
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... can you name a Noblebright book? Can you name a story of Cassette Futurism?
No, but discovering new settings is one of the things I most enjoy about reading. ... These terms don’t really describe genres, they describe hypothetical genres by plucking out a few aesthetic or conceptual guidelines which could theoretically be developed into a genre of story. Couldn't the same thing be said about the earliest writings of R. E. Howard? Or even Edgar Allan Poe? Someone has to be first. Last edited by Calenorn; 04-29-2022 at 12:56 PM. |
04-29-2022, 03:44 PM | #4 |
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It's not just books that have expanded their genres. It's people too. Back when I was in school, we had hippies, nerds, cowboys, and jocks. When my kids were in school there were a lot more. Things I had never heard of. Goths and emus and things like that. Don't even think about trying to learn what's represented in the LGBTRXQWZ+ group. Have you looked at how many different music genres there are these days?
I think everybody wants to come up with a new identity to describe what they are - an identity that is unique and different from every other person. But there aren't enough real identities to go around. So you end up with a bunch of meaningless and made up differentiators. This is what has happened to book genres, and everything else. |
04-29-2022, 09:56 PM | #5 | ||
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I shared the article not because I think the labels must be wiped from use. But mostly because I think they are stupid and having a million sub-sub-subgenres stops being informative and can become a hassle. As an example, Gullstruck Island (a book currently on sale) is #94 in Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Siblings and is #258 in Teen & Young Adult Siblings Fiction. I know those are different, but they still illustrate my point. Quote:
I'm willing to admit that maybe this whole thing comes from the sub-sub-subgenres being new and me being old. I don't like them and they need to get off my lawn! |
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04-29-2022, 10:10 PM | #6 |
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Yeah, anything beyond Thriller, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Mystery, and Action/Adventure is lost on me!
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04-30-2022, 05:57 AM | #7 | ||||
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So this thread has resulted in me learning a bit more about a subgenre that's helpful for me when vetting books, that's good Quote:
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04-30-2022, 03:17 PM | #8 | ||||
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Teen & Young Adult Fiction about Siblings and Teen & Young Adult Siblings Fiction seem like they are exactly the same. I meant those made up Amazon genres are different from the fan-made made up genres we are discussing. But to my mind, they are about equally useful. Quote:
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04-30-2022, 11:49 PM | #9 |
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No one is mocking. It's a perfectly valid example to illustrate the high number of sub-genres and sub-classifications that we are now dealing with in many walks of life. Just like all the other examples I gave ... groups in high school, music genres, etc. The point was to illustrate how we are flooded with sub-classifications these days, in all kinds of different areas of life. Even the gay community itself now adds a plus sign on the end of the letter designations to indicate there are too many to list. Given that, I can't think of a better example to illustrate my point. So I included it in with my other examples, because it is a good example.
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05-01-2022, 01:52 AM | #10 | |
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Quote:
And going back to the premise. I similarly think all those microgenre tags come off as dense and impenetrable. |
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05-03-2022, 08:20 AM | #11 |
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The good thing is that no one really needs to penetrate dense genre subclassifications if they don't want to. The larger umbrellas they fall under aren't usually that difficult to suss. Go as granular or broad as you like and allow others to do the same. Discussing examples of ones you "don't get" is rarely helpful/enlightening, and is typically unnecessarily dismissive (even when you don't intend to be).
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05-03-2022, 08:33 AM | #12 |
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Social media and self-publishing have opened the floodgates. Choice is no longer curated (limited) by bookstore stocks or publisher gatekeepers. Anybody can find whatever they want to read. It makes perfect sense that an explosion of options would require additional categories.
Genres are time-saving signposts. They not only help direct people toward the material they want, but also away from what they wouldn't enjoy. What's not to like? |
05-03-2022, 08:59 AM | #13 |
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Also, the article's author tips his hand in the final paragraph. "Write a real story," he says.
And there you have it. This pretentious prig wants to decide which stories are "real," and then tell us to read them. Only them. He yearns for the control the publishing houses used to wield over what we read. Sorry, Charlie. That ship has sailed. Get over it. |
05-03-2022, 11:23 AM | #14 |
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Sometimes too many sub-genres can turn you away from something you might like. Case in point for me. When I originally saw the genre "Urban Fantasy" I didn't know what it was. I knew I felt more comfortable in the rural or suburburban areas rather than the urban ones - using the traditional understanding of these words. And fantasy is something I sometimes like a little bit, and other times avoid. So I stayed away from "Urban Fantasy" because it just didn't sound appealing. Then for some unknown reason, I read Jim Butcher's first Dresden Files book. And I really liked it. Will I like other authors take on Urban Fantasy? That, I can't say. But I can say that I was initially repelled from the genre just by it's chosen sub-classification name, and not knowing what that meant.
So it works both ways. Too many oddly named sub-genres can be a turn off as well as an invitation. Had I been asked how to describe Jim Butcher's work, I would have called it something like "Crime/Mystery, with a magical twist". "Urban Fantasy" seems like an artificial jumble of unrelated words to me. An attempt to distinguish the genre as something different from all the rest, but doing so in a relatively meaningless way. Basically, it is just plain old Crime/Mystery. With a twist of the occult added. It's not really a "new genre" IMHO. |
05-12-2022, 03:16 PM | #15 | |||
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As I mentioned in the SF/Fantasy thread, I have a tendency to start to draft answers, and then never getting around to posting them because I want to answer all points I find interesting in the thread. I'll post this even if it isn't complete:
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(I'm glad to have read LotR and the Narnia books, as they're foundational to the genre, but they're pretty far from what I prefer to read these days.) Quote:
I'm reminded of this blog post about discovering a genre, by Sarah Rees Brennan: Quote:
On the answers to haertig's "LGBTRXQWZ+ group": Adding a lot of nonsense characters to LGBT+ seems awfully like mocking to me. If I'm wrong, and that's a real acronym, I'd appreciate a link to help me learn better. Google didn't find it. I'll try not to stray over into Politics & Religion territory, but this is a good parallel to the genre discussion: Noone's demanding that everyone know all of the intricacies of gender identity and sexuality. Some people find the rare terms useful, that's great for them. The rest of us can ignore the details, and just stick to some easy rules of manners (address people as they want to be addressed, basically). If someone finds it helpful to use a term I don't understand to describe themselves, that's no skin off my nose. I'm probably skating close to white-knighting here, but the rights of transgender and non-binary people are currently under attack in my country, and mockery has been followed by more concrete harm (reduced access to health care). |
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