Noel B

Jeff VanderMeer explaining that the reason his books are often shelved with "general fiction" instead of SFF is that he sells better that way: his books are too strange for genre readers.

It absolutely tracks, and it explains why he's usually not in genre award ballots (or not to the degree you would expect from someone as successful and acclaimed). It's also a confirmation of the vague feeling I've had in the past few years, that SFF got worse: more boring, more homogeneous more fandom-poisoned, more moralizing.

It shouldn't make any sense but yeah, I can see genre readers absolutely are less open to new, weird experiences than general fiction and litfic readers. It goes hand-in-hand with "hard magic systems", and wikipedia-style "worldbuilding", and pitching books based exclusively on trope lists, and "diversity" meaning "the hero's journey, but this time is a gay woman", and the writing advice urging everyone to "cut out unnecessary scenes", and trying to achieve "cinematic" prose, and high concept books that are just "X meets Y", and the endless retellings and spin-offs and fanfic with the serial number filed off, and...

You get the idea.

I know they got a lot of hate for this but the Rite Gud podcast was right on the money when they identified "squeecore" as the dominant aesthetic in SFF, and it's smothering everything that I like about genre in the first place: the potential for weird shit.

Like I'm not expecting every book I read to blow my tits clean off, but I wish mainstream SFF wasn't so committed to the "Disney Live Action Remake" style. We tell the same story that we liked as children, but with a Progressive™ coat of paint that amounts to a same-sex couple holding hands, an extra 30% of story exclusively to keep cinemasins-types from dinging you on your worldbuilding, and the entire cast of characters looking at the reader and saying "being a bad person is bad, actually".

I miss New Weird, man.

Not to disagree with any of the particulars above. But like, old school well regarded sci-fi dudez like Philip Dick and Theodore Sturgeon would have preferred to break through to the literary side and would essentially be forced by the market to repackage straight literary works in science fiction trappings in order to get them published in the places that were willing to publish them, since they had already been pigeon-holed. (Despite there being little argument, at least in retrospect, that they were masters of the craft of writing by any standard.)

Any genre is essentially a marketing convention, and it makes sense that as soon as weirder books could be sold as general lit, they would be. (Although also there have always been very weird books in the strict literary space for I would imagine as long as the distinction between genre and mainstream fiction has existed.)

It is also always interesting to see which works end up being considered good candidates to cross over. For example, while it's been a while since I was in a physical bookstore, Grossman's The Magicians was pretty commonly shelved as literature while works that are structurally very similar and at least as good in literary quality IMO, like Jo Walont's Among Others and Charlie Jane Anders's All the Birds in the Sky, were generally not. At least around here.

In general, writers (and readers) are absolutely terrible at conceptualizing marketing as separate from artistic merit.

Like the weird hierarchy between "literary" and "genre" where "literary writers" looked down on "genre". But then it ended up flipping over and "genre" writers/readers would complain that "literary" works were all the same. And then people started objecting to "literary being a genre" because "it's all literature" when "literary novel" means "novel that puts emphasis on form and language", which is a useful thing to distinguish for marketing purposes. (Some genre readers fucking hate experimental forms or prose that calls attention to itself, as I alluded to in the first post, a literary genre is useful for them to avoid those things, but the language is charged.)

Or how "science fiction" used to include space dragons and space barbarian stuff but then those things became exclusively a fantasy thing and fantasy is seen as less sophisticated than science fiction, so now those elements are avoided like the plague.

Or the periodic discourse around "romance" books needing a happy ending or not, where people equate "book with a romantic plot" and "book in the romance genre", when the latter is a well-defined marketing category that has "happy ending" as a selling point and the former is more general than that.

Or how (usually English-language) marketing treats "Magical Realism" as a genre for marketing purposes (fantasy-lite!) and ignores the ideological/political underpinnings of Realismo Magico as a literary movement. And then you have people drawing lines in the sand exclusively around geography: if you're from LatAm, you can say your fantasy-lite is magical realism and if you are not, you must say your post-modern, story that questions an eurocentric empiricist view of the world is "fabulism" or "urban fantasy".

Or how YA went from being an age category to kind of a genre in itself, with people people taking it as an identity. So you have adults demanding YA includes older protagonists or more sex or whatever, but that will not read outside of the category because "they like YA"

Anyway, the reason I generally say I like/write "speculative fiction" as opposed to "science fiction", "fantasy", or whatever is that taxonomizing anything in a rigid, granular way feels foolish to me, but especially when it comes to human culture. I do understand the utility of genres as a marketing category, but I also understand that, because they are just a marketing category, they can't cover all aspects of the work.

I don't know, I guess all of this is to say, I agree with you. I just wish SFF had more room for strange, new, weird stuff

EDIT: Oh my god I talked wrote myself into figuring out what I mean. The places to find novelty are always in the margins: SFF used to be more underground, niche, ignored (and, like you wrote, shunned) by the mainstream... Which means it was the environment to find weirdos.

SFF slowly, but steadily, became mainstream, so now the weirdos are pushed further away to make room for mainstream appeal. Litfic is becoming more open to genre weirdness because "experimental" is their current niche.

I guess I need to find where the would-be-SFF weirdos are going, and from what I've seen, horror seems to be it