“genre”: still not a synonym for “sucky”

A friend of mine has been writing about Connie Willis’ Blackout and All Clear (not linking because it’s a semiprivate diary). It’s a beautiful exploration of what she loves about the books, and it’s convinced me to read them. (There are some Connie Willis books I love and some I’ve been avoiding because they’re so dark – I did eventually read the plague one and will get to the others some day when I have a high level of brain capacity.)

I was entirely enjoying her review until the last couple of sentences, in which she lauds WIllis for exploring the moral and philosophical consequences of time travel, and says “That gives them a weight and a worthiness not often found in a genre book.”

‘Scuse me? That entirely doesn’t match my experience. In fact one of the reasons I read speculative fiction is the same as one of the reasons I read YA: I find those genres much more likely to address moral and philosophical consequences of assumptions and actions than modern literary books whether it’s done as explicitly or more quietly. Freedom and Necessity. Anything by Bujold. Anything by … oh nevermind, the list got too long.

I read mysteries too – the genre which has been described as being satisfying specifically because one can usually depend on the triumph of good over evil. I grant that many modern mysteries don’t spend much time exploring all the ramifications of the characters’ actions, but anyone who’s read Sayers knows it can be done. On a much fluffier level, I am reading Susan Wittig Albert’s latest Beatrix Potter mystery, which is very light on the mystery but spends the whole book tracing how everyone’s choices affect everyone else in a village.

I grant that a lot of romances are bad writing specifically because people fall in love and commit for a lifetime without any examination of what that means, without looking atwhat real people have to do in order to take separate lives and turn them into joint ones. But that’s not necessarily a necessary feature of the genre; that just means there’s bad work in it. Baby. Bathwater. I don’t read a whole lot of romances, at least not romances that don’t have other stuff going on too. Actually, I take that back: in any good romance the characters are also doing other things besides falling in love, because otherwise they are flat and unrealistic. So it’s more accurate to say that I don’t read many things that are primarily romances. But the romance is a big enough part of Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels books for that to be one valid label for them. (They’re more likely to be called urban fantasy, but it’s possible to consider the recent stuff under that label as a subset of romance or of SF or both – me, I’d go with both.) And that’s exactly why it takes four books for the romance in that series to get anywhere, because Kate and Curran both have baggage, and they can’t ethically hop into bed without considering the moral, philosophical and social consequences of their choices. (By ‘social’, I don’t mean “will this make me popular,” I mean “how will this affect people who depend on me.”)

Connie Willis is a great writer, who does a brilliant job exploring the consequences of her assumptions. I just think it’s easily possible to say so without deprecating the rest of her chosen genre. Admittedly, a lot of it’s crap … but possibly it’s no accident that the law pointing out how much more widely that applies was stated by another SF author, Ted Sturgeon.