O Genre, Where Art Thou?

This evening (still not wet and miserable, seriously, where is the narrative sense here?), I went to the shops with my housemate Child of Chaos and began to discuss my thesis with her, during the course of which I identified steampunk as a subgenre of science fiction. This led to one of our arguments.

As an aside, it should be noted that Child of Chaos and I argue over genre a lot. It is, after all, a passion for both of us, and we come from different sources (she is a fantasy girl, and I am a science fiction girl). However, while we do spend a lot of time in heated conversation, with loud voices and much interruption, we are capable of arguing without any actual rancour for two reasons. First, we are good friends and we are not going to stop being so over a Doctor Who argument (do not get us started on Doctor Who if you want to talk about anything else that night). Second, we know When To Stop Talking About This Subject and Move On. This is why we never discuss how time travel works in Doctor Who any more.

The advantage of sharing a house with Child of Chaos is that my debating techniques are always kept sharp.

So tonight we argued about whether or not steampunk is science fiction. I say that it is, citing Girl Genius (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/) wherein the main characters are mad inventors/scientists and their various allies and minions (to me, classic science fiction tropes). This led into an argument over whether the Sparks (the mad scientists) were magical or not. Child of Chaos says magical, I say that they're genetic mutations. Child of Chaos calls the monsters magical, I call the monsters genetically engineered (they were made by the Sparks). In the course of this and a later discussion, it became clear that there were two reasons why we couldn't agree (I have a lot of 'two reasons' for things). Firstly, she came from fantasy, and loving steampunk, sees in it fantasy elements first. I, coming from science fiction, and loving steampunk, see the science fiction elements first.

The second difference that became apparent is in how we interpret texts. To Child of Chaos, if there is a genetically engineered dragon/monster in the story, with a scientific basis behind all of their abilities, it is a fantasy story because it looks like fantasy. To me, the scientific basis makes it science fiction that looks like fantasy, but isn't. I need the dragons to be powered by magic, Child of Chaos is content to have them look like dragons (we discovered this is true of fantasy that looks like science fiction). Child of Chaos is willing to have either science or magic absent and call the text science fantasy if need be. I need to have both present to be willing to put forward that term.

My approach to literature is possibly informed by the fact that for most of my childhood, it was accepted that I was to be a scientist and spend my life faffing in labs solving all of the problems of the world (my less than neat approach to labwork revealed this to not be the best idea on the planet). I have a tendency to look for the explanation behind the text, and what the text is built on tends to constitute its reality for me. What it might look like is window dressing, but it doesn't necessarily define it for me. I enjoy window dressing that changes what it looks like but the narrative rules are what's important.

Genre fiction, perhaps more than any other literatures, seems to be capable of generating these kinds of arguments in which, technically, no one is actually wrong or right. It led me to wonder about other subgenres. Child of Chaos and I have established that I consider alternate history to tend towards science fiction, whereas she sees it as historical fiction first, though in the case of alternate history, it really does depend on what text you take. The same could also be said for steampunk (I'll keep coming back to this, because it's in my head today), especially when you come to the differences between what we could call 'high' and 'low' steampunk. High steampunk would be Girl Genius; the science isn't explained entirely and there's enough technobabble that there can be a valid claim to fantasy (my wording probably indicates that no, I don't particularly think that's true but I'll allow for other opinions as long as I get to have my own). Low steampunk would include things like the rather adorable Murdoch Mysteries (http://www.murdochmysteries.com/), a crime show set in nineteenth century Toronto with the 'world's first CSI' as the main character, whose encounters with the early inventors do give it a steampunk feel, while putting it on a par with CSI for spoofing some of the science to make it fit. Though the fact that the show actually features a death ray might move it a few rungs up the steampunk ladder... Nonetheless, Murdoch Mysteries does not feature any actual fantasy elements. It is all based on nineteenth century science, though often a little ambitious in terms of what could have been built at the time (which to me, is one of the core elements of steampunk).

I suppose the difficulty is that all of these subgenres come in under the blanket term speculative fiction, with the next set of terms being science fiction, fantasy and horror, and once everything else is added in, it looks like a convoluted family tree where no one is quite sure what the relationships are, but everyone is definitely from the same bloodline. Which reminds me of Ward Shelley's History of Science Fiction: http://www.wardshelley.com, possibly the most convoluted and accurate image of where science fiction comes from. It also illustrates what I think is one of the most entertaining things about genre fiction; it can take anything from anywhere else, dust if off a little, dress it in a slightly different costume and give us something we haven't quite seen before.

So that's my ramble based on this argument with Child of Chaos. More will follow...