Curethan Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 Clearly, we need more sub genres. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MinDonner Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 Clearly, we need more sub genres.Or fewer. I'm more than happy to just bundle them all together into one big lump called SFF, and not worry to much about which particular part of that acronym is most applicable. Shame you can't organise libraries using Venn diagrams really. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stalker Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 Why would The City and The City belong to the genre at all? If it were by any other author, probably none of us would have even read it. I dislike the label, but if books were sorted on the basis of what's in them alone under the (poorly named) existing categories I'd suspect that it would be in the "literary fiction" category. IMO, the book isn't constructed like a typical fantasy novel: it's constructed like a typical novel. While I agree with you, I can easily see why some readers think so. Some even read the book as if there are some supernatural force dimming out the other city, and that's what explains the actions of most characters. I think it's simply easier for many to imagine people constricted by an external force, that motivated be thoroughly nonhuman motivations. Readers tend to identify with characters more than environments, so an alien mind is a greater barrier than an alien world. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lyanna Stark Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 Or fewer. I'm more than happy to just bundle them all together into one big lump called SFF, and not worry to much about which particular part of that acronym is most applicable. Shame you can't organise libraries using Venn diagrams really.Absolutely. I often feel too detailed labels just detract from the value of exploring a new novel. "Oh but this is HARD SCIFI/EPIC FANTASTY/NEW WEIRD, do you read that stuff?" instead of describing that it's about a spiritiual alien race who can cure all ills with divine laying on of hands and communicates only through haiku poems and interpretative dance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bastard of Godsgrace Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 Some even read the book as if there are some supernatural force dimming out the other city, and that's what explains the actions of most characters. Thing is this novel plays against fantasy reader's expectations, subverts them purposefully. The great mystery is that there is no great mystery, which makes TCaTC sort of "anti-fantasy". For someone who comes to this book without fantasy reader's expectations it probably reads very differently and this aspect remains unnoticed, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dr Spoon Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 Personally I don't think you need magic to be fantasy.I don't see how Gormenghast can't be fantasy, and there's no magic in that. It's not set entirely out of our world (they even learn French in the castle school) but our world has no real bearing on how it runs, to the point where characters believe that nothing exists outside the area. Nothing obviously supernatural happens (although the owls seem to be abnormally large), but the atmosphere and isolation seem impossible in reality, given the level of technology (why has nobody visited? Do they trade?) - despite the fact that the setting must be our world or something much like it.My own brain tends to blur fantasy into "Tolkienish" (pre-guns, possibly magic, mythical/heraldic creatures, often characters in very powerful roles) and "weird stuff" (anything else). A bit vague, but I don't see how anything like this can't be vague. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Nan Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 Magic in fantasy is basically just a plot device, a kind of "black box" ability that somehow allows someone to do something that would otherwise be impossible in real life for the purpose of story-telling. Certainly you can analyze things this way, but most people don't read them like this. For the reader, magic exists for magic's sake, not as a functionalist storytelling device. And since 'similar' plot devices, at a sufficient level of abstraction, can be found in all kinds of literature, I'm not sure how useful that claim is anyway.I don't find the 'speculative fiction' label very useful either, since it lumps a lot of books I don't like in with those I do. Ultimately, yes, I think magic is a requirement for a work to be fantasy; I'm not sure if I buy that chaotic irrationalism like Alice in Wonderland or the New Weird or the Mexican stuff is of the same genre, but it's somewhat closer than is horror or alternate history or certainly sci-fi, even those in constructed worlds. Plenty of fiction exists in a world that is non-realist or artificially realist, and I see no need for an overarching unification. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
beniowa Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 Plenty of SF has secondary worlds, though. As well as tertiary, quaternary, quinary... Ender takes out plenty of the bug aliens' worlds, as do the Roughnecks.Perhaps it's my fault for not explaining this very well since several people seemed to miss what I was trying to say. Basically, it's like what Galactus and Cantible said, while both SF and Fantasy can have secondary worlds, it depends on how you use it and in what context. Besides, it's all speculative fiction anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sologdin Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 FWIW, clute & grant offer the following definition:"Fantasy" - certainly when conceived as being in contrast to Realism - is a most extraordinarily porous term, and has been used to mop up vast deposits of story which this culture or that - and this era or that - deems unrealistic. [...] "fantasy," though a term that lacks the specificity of science fiction, does designate a structure. [...] a self-coherent narrative. When set in this world, it tells the story which is impossible in the world as we perceive it; when set in an otherworld, that otherworld will be impossible, though the stories set there may be possible in its terms.ETA--i don't find this all too useful. it's like a definition that relies on "escapism," as though the non-fantastic failed to have an escapist effect on readers. similarly here, the definition applies more or less to all fiction. rosemary jackson offers this:[fantasies] have refused to observe unities of time, space, and character, doing away with chronology, three-dimensionality and with rigid distinction between animate and inanimate objects, self and other, life and death. [...] it is literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss. [...] The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made 'absent.' [...] it tells of the impossible attempt to realize desire, to make visible the invisible, and to discover absence.she also makes some use of todorov's formulation:The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is entrusted to the character...the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as 'poetic' interpretations.moving from this, jackson prefers to think of fantasy as a mode, rather than a genre, and locates the fantasy mode within the conjunction of the marvellous ("the world of fairy story, romance, magic, supernaturalism [...] minimal functional narrative, whose narrator is omniscient and has absolute authority [...] representing events which are in the long distant past, contained and fixed by a long temporal perspective and carrying the implication that their effects have long since ceased to disturb") and the mimetic ("narratives which claim to imitate an external reality").the fantastic asserts that it is representing the real and uses the tropes and figures of realism to do so by popping the matter of the marvellous into that frame. "the narrator is no clearer than the protagonist about what is going on, nor about interpretations; the status of what is being seen and recorded as 'real' is constantly in question. This instability of narrative is at the centre of the fantastic as a mode."jackson summarizes the positions of numerous other theorists, including bakhtin, bataille, sartre, and so on. none of these attempts aforesaid to define fantasy or the fantastic involve necessarily magickes, miracles, ghosts, or giant adenoids.we need more sub genres. goodness, i don't know about that. clute & grant record at least the following sub-genres, just within fantasy as a whole: adventurer fantasy, genre fantasy, heroic fantasy, high fantasy, sword & sorcery, epic fantasy, dark fantasy, gothic fantasy, technofantasy, rationalized fantasy, revisionist fantasy, children's fantasy, military fantasy, fantasy of history, science fantasy, posthumous fantasy, urban fantasy, gaslight romance & steampunk, christian fantasy, supernatural fantasy, instanturation fantasy, millenial fantasy, gnostic fantasy, contemporary fantasy, absurdist fantasy, magical realism, dynastic fantasy, recursive fantasy, visionary fantasy, prehistoric fantasy, time fantasy, beast fable, planetary romance, scholarly fantasy, fantasy of manners, occult fantasy, dyning earth & far future, arabian fantasy.granted, these aren't mutually exclusive, and appear to describe different levels of particularity, and featuring various methods of identifying the subgenre (dying earth and urban fantasy focus on details of setting, say, whereas dark fantasy is a matter of tone & stylistics; sword & sorcery appeals to certain types of plotting & character; on the other hand, items like revisionist fantasy are more broadly descriptive of a text's place in the history of the genre and its intertextual effects). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spring Bass Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 I don't find the 'speculative fiction' label very useful either, since it lumps a lot of books I don't like in with those I do. That doesn't mean that it's not a useful label. Basically, that's what all the genres and subgenres of science fiction and fantasy are all about - speculation, "what if?", and so forth. I think that's a more accurate label than "science fantasy", for example. Certainly you can analyze things this way, but most people don't read them like this. For the reader, magic exists for magic's sake, not as a functionalist storytelling device. I meant that it's a plot device in the sense that it's a contrived capability/factor/whatever that would not otherwise exist in the real world, and is part of the overall storytelling process. I didn't speculate on -why- the author includes magic, and the audience appreciates it. And since 'similar' plot devices, at a sufficient level of abstraction, can be found in all kinds of literature, I'm not sure how useful that claim is anyway.The distinction is that the contrivances in Speculative Fiction generally are impossible by the Laws of Physics as we know them. Pride and Prejudice has plot devices, but none of them involve breaking the laws of physics. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Happy Ent Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 By the way, is there an example of arborisapient SF? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aimlessgun Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 the fantastic asserts that it is representing the real and uses the tropes and figures of realism to do so by popping the matter of the marvellous into that frame. "the narrator is no clearer than the protagonist about what is going on, nor about interpretations; the status of what is being seen and recorded as 'real' is constantly in question. This instability of narrative is at the centre of the fantastic as a mode."I don't get this. The fantastic asserts that it is representing the real, but the real is constantly in question? Seems a little contradictory. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Datepalm Posted January 25, 2011 Author Share Posted January 25, 2011  none of these attempts aforesaid to define fantasy or the fantastic  involve necessarily magickes, miracles, ghosts, or giant adenoids.I would take it to mean that there is no attempt - to the contrary, there is a deliberate point - to not imitate reality in any way (not to try to justify it with reality, like SF.) By the way, is there an example of arborisapient SF?Hm. Theres lots of interesting trees (The Integral Trees. Electrical Trees and Tree Ships in Hyperion. The giant virtual tree in Surface Detail.) but I can't off the top of my head think of any sentient ones. Zhaan in Farscape is a plant. And The Hitchhikers Guide has a monologue from a bowl of petunias, IIRC. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thelonious Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 There's these guys Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Foreverlad Posted January 25, 2011 Share Posted January 25, 2011 By the way, is there an example of arborisapient SF? Closest I can think of as representative would be the Forest of Cheem from Doctor Who's 2nd episode from 2005, though they're not exactly the basis of a novel or series of books. Google Image search will pull up a few pics, though they're all fairly small. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morrigan Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 I think fantasy can still be fantasy without magic. There isn't any magic that I saw in The Ten Thousand, but it's still a fantasy novel; set in an imaginary world, with mysterious artifacts (the black armours), and intelligent non-human races. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ser_not_appearing_yet Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 Depends how you define 'magic'. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seli Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 Or fewer. I'm more than happy to just bundle them all together into one big lump called SFF, and not worry to much about which particular part of that acronym is most applicable. Shame you can't organise libraries using Venn diagrams really.That is the advantage of digital catalogues, but I am convinced this will be a nice application for a holodeck: a infinitely malleable library that can be instantly re-organized in any way imaginable. By the way, is there an example of arborisapient SF?Perhaps Kevin Anderson, but I never had the stamina to finish the second book in his Saga of the Seven Suns, never mind the whole series. I believe David Brin had a species that at least looked like a tree (or maybe broccoli) in Sundiver and I'd swear there is a famous book with a cheese-powered spaceship carrying some young people into a galaxy wide conflict - of course with sentient trees involved - but I can never remember author or title. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bastard of Godsgrace Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 By the way, is there an example of arborisapient SF?http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlantAliensYeah, I know, it is tvtropes, so be warned. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doran Doran Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 By the way, is there an example of arborisapient SF?David Wingrove's _Chung Kuo_ series has some. And how.In fact...they kick humanity's sad posterior right off the planet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.