Genre Essentialism

Post on genre, where I once again get far too much fun out of the word's common etymology with "gender".

• It is bizarre, the number of people who claim the drift from the Sci Fi Channel to SyFy started, not when the network began showing wrestling and reality TV, but when it started showing fantasy, horror, and superhero shows. That's stupid. I watched that channel pretty much from the beginning—it was 22 on my cable in the 90s, 122 on my first satellite dish when I was in middle and high school, and it's 244 on the DirecTV dish I use now—and it always showed fantasy and horror, and the few superhero movies that had been made before Spider-Man. Sure, Superman is an alien, but I dare you to find a superhero, even Dr. Fate or Zatanna, that's not up to his neck in scifi gewgaws. As for fantasy, it's sold in the same aisle at the bookstore. Always has been. Because the same people write and read both. Tolkien is the only fantasy writer I can think of who did not, at some point, also write science fiction, and if philology is a science then Middle Earth had its genesis as science fiction, with the magic added later.
  
  No, the decay of the Sci Fi Channel begins later, I'd say around 2003, when they started showing Scare Tactics, which, as many have said, is just Candid Camera with a thin nerd veneer. From there, it is a quick jump to "anything that appeals to that young male demo", including wrestling, and then another quick jump to letting Ron Moore make a "science fiction" show where the fact they're in space is 100% irrelevant.
• It is interesting, I think, that 1984 isn't, really, science fiction, not even soft science fiction—with perhaps the one exception of Orwell's simplistic linguistic theories. On the other hand, Brave New World is science fiction. It is about in-vitro fertilization and artificial wombs, recreational drug use, and elaborate, expensive spectator sports—and the use a totalitarian state could make of these things, in keeping its population in line.
  
  Of course, Brave New World was by someone who actually knew something about the world—though, to be fair, Aldous might've just been writing about his brother. 1984, on the other hand, is by a bigoted little syphilitic provincial (or was he a provincial little syphilitic bigot?).
• I was thinking, Journey to the West is, in many ways, China's version of King Arthur—the Heart Sutra is their Holy Grail. I think Romance of the Three Kingdoms, then, would be their Matter of Rome (dealing with ancient times as it does).
  
  The fit between the Water Margin and the Matter of France is less exact, though both have heroes whose virtues are of a somewhat restricted scope. Also the adage "don't let your son read Water Margin, don't let your father read Romance of the Three Kingdoms" doesn't really carry over; old men can read of Great Rome and youths of Roncesvalles without being tempted to intrigues or delinquency, respectively.
• It is perhaps confusing that romance, as a genre, is actually (usually) novels, as a medium; while SF, fantasy, western, thriller, and mystery are (usually) romance, as a medium. I suppose most speakers of languages other than English are just annoyed that we think novel and romance are two different things (that they don't have a way to distinguish them is probably why most Continental science fiction has always been more "novelistic", since long before the New Wave).
  
  While I dislike novels both as a matter of taste and as a matter of objective quality—as Lewis says somewhere, any moderately educated person can churn out a novel without a thought, you actually have to work to write science fiction and fantasy—I dislike New Wave for two deeper reasons. The first is less important: they were trying to have their cake and eat it too, churning out mindless lit-fic while still keeping their speculative-fiction cred. New Wave is to science fiction as magic realism is to fantasy, the deracinated form of the genre, with all the heavy lifting removed, both for authors who no longer have to learn science (or make sure their magic makes sense and has believable effects on society)—or have interesting things happen—and for readers who no longer have to think outside their "bourgeoisie left" comfort-zones.
  
  And that's the second, more important objection to New Wave. It's no accident it was the brain-child of a bunch of British leftists. Fundamentally, the only thing it bothers about is "realism", not in the sense of scientific realism but in the sense of social realism. Or in other words, it is Socialist Realism. New Wave is the roping and branding of science fiction, breaking it in to be a fit steed for Marxist ideology. The same is true of magic realism, born of a bunch of Sandinista sympathizers in Latin America—you can have all the magic you want, so long as the drama is relevant to the class-struggle (hadn't you ever wondered why so much magic realism is about the petty hypocrisies of the upper middle class?).
• Which is not to say that there isn't political asininity in real science fiction and fantasy; the names "John Ringo, David Brin, Stephen Goodkind, China Mieville" are sufficient refutation of that assertion. But there at least the ideologue rantings are incidental; in New Wave and Magic Realism they are the genre. Nobody not convinced "social realism" was a high ideal to aspire to would write them in the first place.
• You would think that it'd be impossible for right-wingers to write Transhumanism or left-wingers to do military SF, but John Wright and John Scalzi, respectively, do it. Admittedly that's because they're Lectroids from the Eighth Dimension. Besides, Scalzi's military SF has laughably stupid worldbuilding, because of his ideology, and Wright, for all his Cargo Cult rationalist posturing—Vulcans and Houyhnhms are both emotionalist/fideist caricatures of rationalism—thinks it might be possible to evolve a "strong" AI (which, given Gödel Incompleteness, is roughly as likely as simply accelerating a spaceship to tachyonic velocity).