Back to the Futura

Yesterday, I went down to an old-fashioned physical book shop to buy the latest and last Iain Banks novel, The Quarry. Banks himself died last week from cancer, at 59: a massive loss to contemporary fiction. Ironically, he'd almost finished The Quarry before getting the diagnosis – ironically because one of the central protagonists is dying of cancer, and takes the opportunity to deliver some ripely expressive diatribes on the subject of those he's leaving behind.

When I took the book to the counter, the assistant remarked on the oddness of the cover:

Which was interesting because the day before, at the Futura Science Fiction convention (attended so poorly that a standard-issue police box would have suited us fine, never mind a TARDIS), one of the panels mentioned a book shop which deliberately obscured all its stock's covers with a paper bag on which a summary was hand-written. The thinking behind it is that cover design is a marketing tool which encourages ever-tighter genre descriptors and alienates potential readers. I'm in total agreement: much cover art is derivative and/or terrible, and it is alienating. There's a lot to be said for the old uniform Penguins.

Sometimes there are interesting experiments: I collect Jane Austen editions, and use them in my teaching about 'popular' and 'high' art. I show the students these copies and some other Austen editions, from too far away to read the names and titles, and invite them to guess what kind of novel is inside.

Then we talk about genre, marketing and how our reading are shaped by these kinds of expectations: the 'adult' cover art for children's novels also get an airing. It's a fun class and one which gets students talking about reading as a social and economic activity, as cultural capital and social positioning. At Saturday's convention, we were given several free books which looked like typical SF novels. One of them was described on the back as 'military SF': a sub-genre of which I've heard but never wanted to read. To me, military SF evokes Heinlein's neo-fascism and the kinds of terrible 'find planet-meet aliens-kill them all' stuff beloved of America's most imperialist phase, rather than Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. So you see, genre and cover art can repel as much as it can attract. 

But back to Banks. The quick chat with the bookshop assistant formed a kind of sad little coda (for me: she didn't appear to know who he was and I didn't want to break the bad news) for the weekend. The Futura event (I couldn't resist an SF conference named after a typeface) was overshadowed by Iain's death - for me as a reader but more painfully for the writers gathered. They'd lost their brightest star, and in the case of Ken MacLeod, a very close and longstanding friend. I didn't want to dig around in his grief during the kaffeeklatsch session (buying a convention ticket does include access to a man's grief), but he spoke very movingly and amusingly about their long association during his reading and presentation. Banks reciprocated: he makes a point of praising MacLeod's unpublished poetry in his last interview. We got the sense that the late 1970s was great for them: before Scotland's industrial destruction at the hands of Thatcher, Banks and MacLeod were bright, educated, hip young literary gunslingers. Active on the hard left, fond of a drink, full of the Scottish virtues of socialism (MacLeod described their politics as 'Socialism within, Anarchy without', which seems pretty seductive to me), contempt for the cosmopolitan and determined to put all this into their work, they seemed to have had a ball. Banks had three SF novels rejected before deciding to write a 'mimsy mainstream Hampstead novel' as MacLeod put it, and he worried that it was a betrayal of all he stood for. No need to worry: The Wasp Factory was hailed and condemned in equal measure as a nasty piece of outsider tyro viciousness. 

The convention itself was enjoyable, though it did feel a little like the last months of the airborne party Douglas Adams wrote about in The Restaurant At The End of the Universe: all the ingredients were there but the audience was slightly lacking. Literally: despite the publicity's exhortations to sign up for the various elements as numbers were limited, the total turnout was in the 30s at most. So I felt a little sorry for the authors (Ken MacLeod, Ian MacLeod (no relation) and Adam Roberts, plus several others of whom I hadn't previously heard because I don't read many graphic novels, or what Pratchett affectionately calls Big Comics). They are eminent and popular authors, and here they were in a cavernous space talking to tiny numbers of people: 5 of us in the Banks kaffeeklatsch. The day before, Adam Roberts (who writes cerebral SF and is a Professor of 19th Century literature and culture) gave a TEDx talk in Parliament to 1000 people. Yet here he was, discussing Kant and reading from his new novel, in which a cow mournfully (spoiler: and unsuccessfully) tries to persuade the man with the bolt gun that cows should be Turing Tested before meeting their ends in the abattoir. Roberts is interested in culture's representations of animals and aliens as (perhaps necessarily) anthropomorphised devices to talk about ourselves: the truly alien couldn't be comprehended. He read the piece in an Ermintrude voice, and I mentioned philosopher Peter Singer's article Heavy Petting, in which he suggests that bestiality really isn't so bad in comparison to just killing animals for fun and food. It's a provocative and enjoyable piece. 

Apart from the author stuff, I went to a panel which discussed whether SF is 'mainstream', which was very enjoyable. There's no answer of course: SF is certainly on prime-time TV, elements of SF surface in other popular genres, and literary fiction sometimes appropriates SF themes and tropes. Yet what is the mainstream? Is it critical approval? Canonical acceptance (I set books on academic courses: am I one of the 'them' who approves or disapproves?) Sales? What's so great about being mainstream anyway? Is anything mainstream in an era of targeted marketing and ever tinier sub-genres? Certainly there's an element of any genre's readership which defiantly rejects being popular – very reminiscent of my other hobby, record-collecting. Some people would rather their favourite music was never heard by the 'sheeple', which I think is a moronic attitude. I mostly listen to music that isn't popular, but I regret it: I'd rather my favourite singers and authors made a living than starved to death in a garret to increase my cool quotient amongst a tiny band of obscurantists. 

I also bought a couple of books and was given a couple more. Who could resist a pulp-homage zombie attack novel set at a Star Trek convention? Not me, especially not for a shiny £1. I also bought a book in which a man in search of a fabled lost Carry On film finds himself joining a shadowy underground army of resistance fighters. Can't remember the title, but it sounds promising. 

And I won a raffle prize - at 37, I'm no longer a loser in life's lottery! A copy of Ian MacLeod's Wake Up And Dream in a slipcase, signed in a limited edition of 100. It's very beautiful and I'll cherish it, though I really don't like the wider culture of limited edition things. I spent quite a lot of money buying the only copy of his The Summer Isles I could find, which was also highly limited, signed etc etc. Very lovely, but I wish an edition was freely available to potential readers who don't have money. The same goes for beautiful William Morris work, De Morgan tiles, or the new collection of James Joyce work in progress, Finn's Hotel: copies range from €350 to €2500. Beautiful things, whether they're books, wine, hand-knitted jerseys or paintings are expensive and slow to make, but when the objects become fetishes, they offend my democratic instincts, especially when they're valued solely for their rarity rather than their intrinsic cultural value. 

Of course this was also an opportunity. These three writers are amongst my very favourite contemporary authors and we had the chance to chat to them without any pressure or time constraints. I bagged them all as future guest speakers at the university too: we're trying to strengthen our cultural activity and these authors can contribute strongly to the sense that there's intellectual life here. A larger event wouldn't have afforded these possibilities, yet I was acutely aware of the social boundaries slightly blurred by the  accidentally-intimate scale of the proceedings. We turned up for the quiz which was meant to round off the evening: it didn't happen, and probably 12 people stayed in the bar. My little group of academics. Some non-academic fans. The authors. I didn't feel comfortable joining the authors' group because it felt intrusive, especially as we'd spent the entire day talking to them about their craft, the process, their ideas, Iain Banks and so on. And yet the other fans had no such compunction and enfolded the authors into their circle. Perhaps it was the financial relationship which inserted the awkwardness: we'd paid for their time during the day's events, so I felt quite strongly that stepping into their social space was presumptuous, as though it communicated a sense of 'I've paid £25, so I have the right to engage in drinking banter with you whether you like it or not. '. This, by the way, is why I oppose student fees so much: a customer/provider relationship is alienating. It erects social and intellectual barriers between what should be a unitary group of truth-seekers. 

So there I was, slightly absurdly drinking 4 yards away from the main attraction of the day, studiously keeping myself to myself. I can't speak for my colleagues of course, let alone the authors and the fans so I have no idea how they perceived the social situation but I was well aware of the absurdity. Perhaps I'm just too middle-class and repressed for ordinary social interaction. Mark Corrigan's spirit is most definitely hovering above me as I type this. Perhaps that's why I read SF: the classic loser's choice of reading – or it used to be until the nerds took over the levers of popular culture, to the bewilderment of people like my parents who spent my teenage years trying to ban SF from the house. 

OK, I should stop now: this is a rambling and random collection of thoughts. Futura: fun. Great to meet and talk to interesting, thoughtful and talented authors. A social minefield though. And now it's time to go to the launch of a history of The Hegemon. Which includes photographs taken by, well, me!

Ambitions for the day

Today will be successful if I stay awake in this afternoon's lecture. Not so tough, you may think, but I nodded off once or twice last week while my esteemed friend and colleague gave a fascinating case study of India's media history. In my defence, I was exhausted, it was stiflingly hot and the chair was comfortable. I thought I'd got away with it until Steve said something and my students tweeted it. Judging by the seminar though, I'd absorbed more than them…

Today should be easier: I'm actually giving the lecture. I'll forgive the kids if they sleep, perchance to dream but I should probably try to stay conscious. It's a lecture on genre and narratology, which is one of my favourite subjects, but it's for media/cultural studies students rather than literature students, so I'm wrestling with Police! Camera! Action! and Homes Under The Hammer. For light relief, I'm giving them this bit of Charlie Brooker in between Propp, Barthes and Genette.



What other excitement do I have planned? Well, I have some RAM to instal (thanks Crucial - cheap and very quick delivery) and a book has arrived: Tom Phillips experimental A Humument, which takes a bad Victorian novel and produces a new, weird one by blocking out most of the original text with art.

Here's a sample of the original book next to the same, treated page.

Mallock's A Human Document, weirdly, is now only known at all because of what Phillips did to it - original copies are worth hundreds of pounds.

How I learned to stop worrying and love the… genre

A genre’s landscape should be littered with used tropes half-visible through their own smoke & surrounded by salvage artists with welding sets, otherwise it isn’t a genre at all. 

says M John Harrison. He goes on to discuss the supposed death of science fiction and fantasy - a claim made every three weeks, as far as I can tell. Which genres aren't permanently dead or in the ambulance? It's a matter of perspective. From where I'm standing, romantic fiction is dead, killed off by celebrity journalism, porn culture or exhaustion, but I'm sure on close inspection you'd find signs of re-birth: different sexualities and new formations, for instance. Look at Fifty Shades of Grey: its melding of the worse features of romance with the limpest emulation of BDSM porn will no doubt inspire a generation of cynical hacks, and maybe even some genuinely exploratory writing. Science fiction certainly isn't dead: from the corpse of the previous generation spawns the maggots of the next - every genre sprouts sub-genres. Perhaps the term 'science fiction' should be retired, however - we have the New Weird, Speculative Fiction, Steampunk, Alternative History, Alternative Futures, Cyberpunk, Space Opera, Hard SF and many others. Saying you're an SF fan is like saying you like music - tantamount to announcing that you're an ignorant know-nothing bum who likes a tune you can whistle. I'm guessing the same applies to all literary genres. 

However, what does happen to popular fiction sub-genres is exactly the same as what happens to any sub-group: appropriation. Once punk music emerged from the gutters, every major label told its house bands to grow mohicans and add naughty words to their songs. Result: punk was dead the day it hit Top of the Pops and mohican wigs appeared in Camden Market for the tourists. Away from the media gaze, real punk bands sneered and worked on whatever came next. I'd say the same thing has happened with SF: once almost every Hollywood movie is an adaptation (Watchmen, Green Lantern, X-Men), a disaster movie (War of the Worlds, Cloverfield) or any other vaguely sciencey presentation, it becomes just another popcorn kernel to momentarily distract the mainstream before going back into hibernation for a few decades - like the Western before it. Which is a shame, because most genres respond to the cultural needs of the climates in which they exist. But as I say, it's a matter of perspective. Out there in school playgrounds, comic stores and - above all - the internet, new texts and new variations on genres are arising, and what we think of as the defining characteristics of the genre are scorned as hopelessly outdated by those in the know. 

Paul Kincaid, whom M John Harrison references, thinks that inadequate boundary policing is at issue: SF is fading into literary fiction, he thinks. I think: brilliant. They'll revive each other. Literary fiction is a weird and indistinct genre, if it is one at all, and it's too often the preserve of authors who think they can see past all those proles busy tweeting each other rude jokes, whereas SF has been variously the preserve of techno-fascists, techno-determinists, techno-utopians, militarists, and a whole host of others who could do with some literary skills and perspectives. Besides, Kincaid is probably just looking in the wrong place: no doubt the borders between SF and porn, SF and romance, SF and poetry, SF and travel and all the other genres are being over-run. See, I'm slipping into imperialistic language: it's a common problem with genre discussions, especially the traditionally masculine ones: men are so concerned with purity, resistance, autonomy. 

Let's abandon the idea of genres as distinct territories and consider them as tendencies or characteristics instead. That way, we can focus on the genuinely creative work instead. Returning temporarily to the border metaphor, it's my feeling that the work which exists on the borders with other genres is the interesting stuff. A text situated right in the middle of a generic expanse, equally distanced from all other genres, is likely to be boring and over-familiar. There are exceptions, of course: Die Hard is a masterpiece because it's a summation of it's genre's best aspects - the same goes for lots of Westerns. But at the same time, it's the weird stuff around the edges that is often more interesting in a cultural and literary sense: the revisionist Westerns, for example, which evoke a sense not that the Western is a dying genre (though it was) but that the ideological underpinnings of the classic Western were rotting - and had perhaps always been rotten. 

Kincaid knows this. As he says: 

Within any art form there are individuals or movements that attempt to push the boundaries in various ways. They are concerned with seeing what new can be done, what more can be done with the form. Often, though not always, they are initially viewed with dismay or disdain by aficionados of the art, though in retrospect they are generally viewed as being the innovators who mark an important developmental stage in the history of the form.

What Kincaid and Harrison have discerned is not the exhaustion of science fiction as a genre, but the exhaustion of the institutions which foster and propagate science fiction: publishers content to promote the profitably familiar. It's the same in music: Classic FM is the epitome of the embalmer's art because it only plays music which has been on adverts, or sounds indistinguishable from what's been on adverts. In the process, it's cheapened the genuinely interesting music is does scatter amongst the dross: Vaughan Williams, for instance, who has been transformed from spiky iconoclast into twinkly English Grandfather. 

But I don't despair. Where there's a Classic FM or a mainstream SF publisher, there's a Radio 3 and a range of pirate stations. By the time Jeff Noon, Cory Doctorow and China Miéville attract major-label imitators, they'll be doing something else, and a new generation will be distributing supposedly un-popular work underground. Some publishers and some readers are conservative - but enough aren't, and literary movements operate on a timescale long enough to bring about gradual change. 

So don't stress about genre. It's only partly in the hands of the author, the publisher, the bookseller and the jacket artist. It's also in your hands. If you think Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go or certain Jeanette Winterson is in or near SF - read it like that and ignore their self-serving denials. Don't just browse the SF shelf - you'll find weirdness and science and far-flung settings and fear of/fascination with technology and social change in plenty of other places. Genre's like that: it shapes your expectations but your generic expectations dictate your readings. Take this sentence from Pride and Prejudice:

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

I used to ask my students to write down the tone of voice they imagined seemed appropriate. Then I'd ask one person to read it romantically, one to read it sarcastically, and one to read it 'neutrally'. The way in which you read that one sentence determines the meaning of the rest of the novel to you - and it will differ to the meanings acquired by the person next to you. For me, it drips with satire: my Austen is the one who disguises horror at the encroaching dangers of Regency womanhood with sharp, sharp humour. Her women face social abysses: only a few survive. But it's equally easy to read the texts as lovely sparkling romances in which nice intelligent demure girls are rewarded with the right man by being good judges of character. 

I haven't picked Jane Austen as a random example. Amongst my extensive collection, I have editions repackaged as 'chick-lit' (pastel handwriting, dresses, pink) and Austen mash-ups, including two Austen-porn novels and two Austen/Zombies and Austen/Sea-Monsters novels, plus P D James's Death Comes to Pemberley, which is far more offensive and disgusting than either Pride and Prejudice with Zombies or Jane Austen: Hidden Lusts. Most of these novels aroused utter fury amongst the Janeites because they're resistant both to generic miscegenation and any tinkering with their heroine's work (weird, really: Victorian Shakespearians liked tacking happy endings onto his tragedies without concern for purity). Both PPwZ and JA:HL have tried to do something bold, and they've done it with some panache and charm. Both authors also know how Austen's dialogue and plotting work: you have to understand the wiring before you put up the Christmas light. PD James, on the other hand, grafts a murder mystery on to Jane Austen without giving a second's thought to Austen's interests or literary style: James appears to think that it's easy, and drops massive clanger after massive clanger. The genre-mashers, on the other hand, have taken the key elements of different genres and welded them together to considerable effect. 

Take your chainsaw to your genre of choice and weld it to something else until you can't tell which bit originated where. 

Loathe Story

I've just given a lecture and run a seminar on genre, for media students. I quite enjoyed explaining why Jimmy McNulty doesn't bake and Miss Marple would never describe a suspect as a 'motherfucker', and why viewers would be made deeply uncomfortable were they to do so.

We got on to the structural and generic conventions which separate and unite American and British sit-coms. They picked up without prompting the more frequent comedy of shame, sarcasm and embarrassment in UK humour, as opposed to the general (obviously there are exceptions) niceness and zing-based American version.

So in their honour, here's a bit of Steptoe and Son, the comedy based entirely on Oedipal loathing, bitterness and isolation. It's a work of genius, though its attitudes are depressingly unprogressive in many ways. In this episode, Harold tries to kill his father with a cleaver. Somehow I can't see mainstream US comedy making anything similar.