Richard Dansky

A humble confession – I used to want to be an academic. I even published a couple of papers in accredited journals, back when I was still in hot pursuit of the magical sheepskin and tassel. It was long ago and in another athletic conference, and besides that ambition is dead, but bear with me here, and take a trip back. It’s sort of pertinent. I promise.

***

Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. It’s a beautiful fall day in 1992, and, like the swallows coming back to Capistrano or the boobirds to South Philadelphia, the freshly minted M.A. in Literature students have gathered for their initial briefing at Boston College. There’s one room, and in it, one massive, heavy wooden table. The students are packed in tightly around it, putatively to receive the first dollops of wisdom from the head of the program, but in reality there to start the frenzied, savage competition for favored status, teaching fellowships and letters of recommendation. Academia, red in tooth and claw, is being born anew, and each of the students at that long table has brought with them a weapon.

A book.

But it’s not just any book, mind you. It’s the first book, the one that will be forever associated with its bearer, the one that will help crystallize others’ opinions (hopefully favorable) of them and cement a place in the pecking order. A glance around the table goes from face to spine to face again, as everybody’s book is on the table in front of them. The cool, trendy, with-it types are toting Toni Morrison. The grinds and self-proclaimed serious types have Derrida and other manifestations of litcrit. Old-schoolers have yellow-bordered Penguin editions. The arms race is on, as each set of eyes flicks around the table assessing, checking for evidence that the book has actually been read, analyzing.

Down near the end, on the right side, there’s a guy whose apartment is nowhere near campus. Due to the vagaries of the Boston public transit system, he’s a good 45 minutes away, with a switchover at Downtown Crossing and another one at Government Center. On a bad day, he estimates, it will take him an hour and a half to get to school. The book he chose to bring with him was selected with this in mind, chosen for length and readability rather than status. It is the proverbial knife at the gunfight, a big, thick, meaty slab of prose with, in the reader’s humble opinion, some pretty rockin’ characterization, mood, and plotting, and who gives a hoot that it’s got no literary cachet. It’s for the damn train, isn’t it?

Also, it’s got a big honking skeleton on the cover. Instantly, irrevocably, he’s doomed, ‘cause nobody in that room knows what the hell to do with him.

***

A humble ellipsis.

Time passes. The guy reading Dan Simmons takes some slings and arrows. He gets his paper, with honors, and wanders off into the semi-real world. He writes a few things, gets some of them published, and falls into game writing. All the while, though, the memory of that day sticks with him, and so do the questions.

It wasn’t “That’s bad” that puzzled him (alright, me – are you happy now?), because there never was “That’s bad” or “Why are you reading that garbage” or even “Shouldn’t you be reading Proust instead?” The response to that, or to the Zelazny or Brin or Blackwood or whatever else I toted with me down the rickety Green Line tracks, was always confusion. Incomprehension. A question of why was I reading that stuff, and how could it be quantified, assessed, and critiqued.

It was outside the lines. Not in the way I’d thought, mind you, after the scrapping I’d done to defend my precious Lovecraft and write my thesis, but there clearly was a boundary of comprehension, and the stuff I was reading was on the other side of it.

More time passes.

A writer I know joins a writers’ workshop, taught by a well-regarded novelist. She brings to class a section of her novel-in-progress, an urban fantasy. The protagonist starts out competent, urbane, professional, and sharp, and through the introductory “stinger” sequence she demonstrates her competence even while stumbling onto the first inklings of a mystery that will require growth, change, family dynamics, and all that other good literary stuff, in addition to some kick-butt action.

The critique is…confused. There’s a little “Hey, this is just like Harry Potter” and some “Is housebrownie a racist term?” and a whole bunch of trying to cram the well-rounded scene into a hole that can only be described as extremely square. It’s as if there’s no context for the critique, no sense that there’s other work or tradition being drawn on here, no understanding of where the story might go outside the character’s feelings and inner life.

And a light bulb fourteen years dead flicks on.

***

A humble thought:

Literary fiction (at least in its modern, trade-paperbacked incarnation) is, in large part, about damaged people. Throughout the course of the narrative, the characters explore, express, and potentially rectify that damage to arrive at a state of functional integration. They may also affect and change their environment in the process, but the chief action – and the chief demonstrable result – is internal.

Speculative fiction (at least in its classic incarnation) is, in large part, about highly functional people dealing with damaged situations. Throughout the course of the narrative, the characters explore and potentially rectify that situation in order to arrive at a functional environment. The characters may grow and develop throughout the course of the narrative, but the chief action and the chief and ultimate demonstrable result is external.

This, then, is why there is such a collision of perspectives between those two worlds, particularly in the minds of A)reviewers and B)young writers. These folks, when attempting to critique or review speculative fiction, are stunned to learn that the characters they meet at the start of the action are where they expect characters to be at the end of the action – i.e. fully functional and no longer inclined to put a salmon down their pants to express their basic unhappiness. As such, that sort of reader can only wonder where the heck the story can possibly go, since the characters are already where they should end up.

This is not to say, of course, that all literary fiction is exclusively about damaged people undamaging themselves, that all speculative fiction is about Campbellian (John W., not Joseph) heroes sallying forth against a hostile universe, or that there is an intrinsic difference in quality between the two forms, based solely on whether the action is internal or external.

What I am picking at here, I think, is more the question of how speculative fiction – and really, all genre stuff, because detective fiction fits in there neatly with room for the proverbial caraway seeds and movie producer’s innards – gets approached by those who don’t read it, whether from a critica
l or a reading perspective. Because of the nature of speculative fiction – archetypal in the case of fantasy, paradigmatic for science fiction, or transformative in the case of horror, it’s almost imperative for there to be external action, a big screen upon which the bits of life that drive genre can be taken out and held up to the light. That makes it different, and my growing suspicion is that because it’s different, there are those who don’t know what the heck to do with it.

Now, before the angry emails fly, let me take a minute to re-iterate that this is not a case of waving the banner for poor, persecuted genre fiction, or of shaking my tiny fist at those heartless philosopher-kings in the mist-shrouded ivory towers of academe. Rather, it’s an attempt to provide an explanation for the sheer confusion that seems to reign when the partisans of literature run into genre fiction in a place it ought not to be, such as, say, a writing workshop, or a reading list, or in somebody’s hand at a Very Serious Orientation Meeting. Why? Because I don’t think they necessarily know what to do with it, or how to approach it or critique it or, God help us, discuss it on something like an even field.

Is this worth making a federal case over? Probably not, and even my fourteen-years-ago-self would probably agree. But I do think there’s some potential damage there, to readers who miss out on books that exist outside of their expectations and writers whose creations suffer well-meaning attempts to drag them into the charmed circle. For my part, I think competent-veering-toward-kickass is a perfectly sensible starting point for character development, but then again, what do I know? I read books with skeletons on the cover.