Why genre fiction?

Genre fiction authors are sometimes accused of having a chip on their shoulders: literary fiction gets all the academic attention, after…

Why genre fiction?

Genre fiction authors are sometimes accused of having a chip on their shoulders: literary fiction gets all the academic attention, after all. But, we ought to allow literary fiction authors their due, because they don’t know what we know: that genre fiction has the edge in artistic freedom, in potential for intellectual exploration, and in commercial success.

What makes a piece count as ‘genre fiction’? Being in a genre. And, being in a genre means engaging with genre tropes. Use of genre tropes constitutes a kind of insurance policy for readers: a fan of high fantasy will get more out of even a bad high-fantasy novel than a cyberpunk novel of equivalent quality, because that reader (for potentially totally irrational reasons) likes the idea of elves, or pseudo-medieval politics, or court intrigue. The bar is lowered in a way that is a win for both readers and authors: a minimum of enjoyment is promised (by the contract of genre), and that promise can be fulfilled whether or not the rest of the story lands.

On the one hand, this means plenty of bad books get published and bought because they have a rocket ship on the cover; on the other hand, this also means that lots of good (even ground-breaking) books that otherwise would not have gotten published got a new lease on life because they had an excuse to slap a rocket ship on the cover. Genre trappings subsidize experimentation.

Books like Dune, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, Camp Concentration, and the Cornelius Quartet could not have been published outside the context of an existing ecosystem of cult and pulp science fiction; films like God Told Me To, Phantom of the Paradise, and Evil Dead could not have been produced without the existing ecosystem of low-budget indie horror pioneered by the likes of William Castle and Roger Corman (and, in the case of Larry Cohen’s work, the blaxploitation portion of the exploitation genre, which Cohen partially pioneered); Neon Genesis Evangelion could not have existed without an existing audience for mecha shows, and Serial Experiments Lain could not have existed without the rush to cash in on Evangelion’s success throughout the latter half of the 1990s.

Where experiments in music have historically had enough cachet (at least in certain forms — serialism, minimalism) to get institutional support, genre is the purse of the avant-garde in narrative media. After all, a failed experiment in an experimental work just looks like bad media, and a successful experiment will look like bad media too, from the perspective of a critic who (for arbitrary reasons) doesn’t ‘get’ it.

The price we pay for subsidizing experimentation is the possibility of low-quality cash-ins. This is not a problem: pricing is based on the assumption that all genre fiction is a low-quality cash-in, and sometimes enduring avant-garde experimentation is in fact accidental.

Genre isn’t just about specific conventions, though.

Every genre’s conventions are a set of attributes that make a story more enjoyable for essentially irrational reasons — things that can reliably be put into stories even by people who are incapable of making those stories good. This is to say that to write in genre is to embrace irrational passions, and to avoid genre is to limit yourself to a duller pallette. A skilled craftsman can make even that dull pallette shine, but that same craftsman, working in genre, shines much brighter, since he knows how to manipulate powerful elements more subtly and nimbly. The bombast at the beginning of Beethoven’s fifth symphony could have been cheap in the hands of a lesser composer, but Beethoven makes the most of it, producing a work we appreciate all the way through: this is what happens when mastery meets genre appeal.

Genres can be mixed, or their elements subverted, so long as the core promises are fulfilled: tokusatsu fans want to watch guys in rubber suits fight on top of miniatures, spaghetti western fans want to watch grizzled men on horses murder each other, giallo fans want to see POV-shots of black-gloved killers over prog rock, and space opera fans want vast galactic empires warring. You could cram all of these things into a single property, and so long as you delivered on those promises, you’d get all those groups on board. In other words: genres aren’t a limitation on your creativity, but a minimum demonstration of your willingness to appease your audience.