I’ve felt listless in my reading for a while. It feels odd to admit this online—back when I was on Twitter I absorbed an ethic of only talking about books one is prepared to discuss enthusiastically. There’s some reason for that: when so much wonderful work goes unremarked, why spend time talking about work that doesn’t add to the fire of life? And books that don’t work for me may work for you… so to pass time talking about books that don’t work (for me) feels wasteful of bandwidth and limited leisure, and a bit mean. But to not speak of certain things means, in the end, to choose not-speaking, and that’s an at-best awkward choice for a writer.
For the last little while I’ve found myself picking up books that seem My Jam and feeling adrift. Everything’s there, or should be, you know: to speak generally, there are elves in spaceships and zombies and wizards and dragons and zombie wizard dragons fighting spaceship elves, or whatever. (Ok, need to go write the spaceship elf vs zombie wizard dragon book now.) And yet, joy is not sparked.
Now, am I overworked and overtired? Yes I am. I’ve been riding the hairy edge of burnout (you don’t even want to say that word, lest its baleful eye be drawn) for a minute now. Home life’s busy and tight, and while I’m not in a Hamlet way, I think a lot about the bit that goes“I have of late and wherefore I know not lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition…” So maybe that’s al that’s up. Except: my mirth’s pretty okay in most other respects, I’m loving my exercise, I’m watching birds and taking walks, I have a great family and a great life. I just keep bouncing off books I ‘should’ love.
But who’s to say I should? There is after all something peculiar about the way we talk about science fiction and fantasy. Our genres are—at the risk of repeating myself—the only categories of adult fiction not defined by the affective response they are supposed to evoke in the reader: romance, horror, thriller, suspense, mystery, and so on.
Science fiction and fantasy are instead defined for the most part by elements of setting. The saw—I’m about to misquote Elizabeth Bear—goes like this: if it has elves, it’s fantasy; if it has spaceships, it’s science fiction. There’s a sort of order of operations at play when the elements mix. Spaceships make anything feel science fictional (elves in space: just call them Vulcans!); dragons make anything feel a bit more like fantasy.1
I’ve heard these common setting elements occasionally described in writing groups as “genre furniture”: we know this is a fantasy because of the elves, the way we know this is the dining room because of the dinner table. But a book’s “genre furniture” bears a similar relationship to the reader’s experience that an inventory of home furnishings bears to the experience of being a guest at a particular party. There’s some relationship of course: beds are helpful for a sleepover. But a canvas tent with rugs on the floor can be the most hospitable and welcoming of homes, and a well-appointed mansion unfit for human existence, depending on the host, and of course on the nature of the event. Have we been invited to a how-to-host-a-murder shindig? A birthday party? Netflix and chill? An adventure race? A bachelor party, a wake, a funeral, a key swap, the evening before a marathon?
In SFF, it’s often hard to know. (Some baked-in genre-non-neurotypicality in that regard? The emotional element submerged compared to ‘objective’ external markers like “does it have Elves”… ) This is glorious in a way—it makes the genre a bag of every-flavor jelly beans, and I do mean ‘every flavor’, which many of our titans use to their advantage. I’m thinking here of the epee flexibility of Lois McMaster Bujold’s storytelling, dancing between thriller, spy novel, mystery, romance, and farce; of Zelazny’s hallmark interplay of hardboiled detective fiction, high adventure, poetry, formal experiment and humor, his deft hand at the mixing board; of the fabled bimodal distribution of Connie Willis novels between “fluffy Christmas sweater” and “open blender, insert heart.” But it also means that we can love science fiction and fantasy without knowing exactly what it is we love until we can’t find it for a while—until we keep showing up for a birthday party and folk music circle only to find ourselves at a rager or a study session.
There is a strength in such complexity: the genres embrace so many different storytelling types that they encourage experiment, and the development of new tastes. Like any complex organism, they can (within reason) reshape themselves to the demands of the moment. They do face as a result some challenges on the commercial, product-marketing level, for example when we try to explain to someone who’s never picked up an SFF book why they should start, or why they should pick up ours in particular—I wonder if one reason behind the growth of affective subgenre labels like “romantasy” or “cozy fantasy” is that they make the SFF shelves navigable to non-SFF-book nerds, rather than everyone just having to kind of know which books have 300 page noncon BDSM interludes, you think I’m joking, and which books are Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance or Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. But this affective illegibility can lead to personal challenges, too—periods occasioning reflection, when you drift through the neighborhood never quite sure which party you’re looking for, or where the one you wanted to attend has gone. Or who it was who invited you in the first place.
There is, though, something important about that feeling: when you’re lost long enough, you start to think real hard about where you’re going next.
Some news!
I can now share with you this Dead Country audiobook pre-order link! The audiobook will be released 6/25, with Wicked Problems to follow the next month.
Speaking of: Reactor just published this wonderful review of Wicked Problems.
Sunday Morning Transport, a magazine near and dear to my heart, is marching into its new year with a subscription drive. If you like the idea of a great piece of short science fiction or fantasy in your inbox every week (and who wouldn’t?) give them a glance, and your support at this link: https://www.sundaymorningtransport.com/MembershipDrive
And that’s what I’ve got for now. Take care of yourselves, all. Happy reading.
Samuel R Delaney has an incredibly smart alternative take about how science fiction is defined on a technical level by reading protocol and epistemology, of an intuition about the sort of questions one might ask about a fictive space. Reading The Book of the Long Sun, one may ask “what sort of place is this, where the sun is a long column running the length of the world, and other cities appear as constellations in the night sky?” and rely on one’s own intuition and scientific knowledge to guess the answer. In fantasy, maybe the gods just be like that. …Of course that’s sort of true in Gene Wolfe, too.
There have been a couple of times in the last few years where nothing I was reading felt like it stuck, despite having all the right ingredients. Before then, I could count the number of times I didn't finish a book I started on one hand. I've been able to come back to a lot of those books later and appreciate them when I was feeling differently. Not always better or more energized, just different. Sometimes the mind has simply had its fill of space elves (or plucky crews of misfits thrown together by fate, as it has felt to me lately) and I have to take some time away for it to be something that gives me joy or satisfaction.
Hoping you can enjoy these books sometime soon :)