The first question: “What’s the difference?” I would love to say there is no difference, but that would be a farce.

On the one hand, categorizing fiction make sense. There are simply different kinds of stories. Some stories are about solving a crime. Other stories are about ghouls and goblins. And other stories have to do with space travel. Why not clump similar stories together and give them a name? Additionally, most readers like certain kinds of stories, and most authors usually write those kinds of stories they grew up liking. I doubt at 25 an author would say, “Though I’ve never read a mystery before, I think I’m going to write mystery now.” A broad category helps both author and reader find the books like to write and read. And as long as we recognize a genre is, in a sense, self-defining, then the idea of genre, if not a healthy concept, is at least innocuous.

On the other hand, the notion of categorizing fiction is very dangerous. It boxes in both the author and the reader as well as creates unnecessary stereotypes. Stephen King, for example, is known as a horror author, though he has written several science fiction and fantasy novels. If a reader reads a particularly genre (say, SF) and discovers that he or she doesn’t like it, they are unlikely to return to that genre, believing, unfortunately, that SF stories are carbon copies. A person may never again read SF because, after reading Niven, they believe all SF is like Niven.

Enough for “genre.” What deems a story, novella, or novel “literature”? If we’re speaking of the kind of literature one reads in college, then we have at least the consensus of people and time. People throughout the ages have recognized that Homer, Shakespeare, and Dickens are worth reading. Just as it is unjust of a reader to read Niven and dismiss SF altogether, it is unjust to read George Elliot and dismiss “literature” altogether.

If we say that literature is a genre comparable to SF or mystery (It seems to me that this is what most people are saying when they speak of “literature”—it is another genre) we have a bigger problem on our hands. The word “literature,” for most people, connotes quality. A genre reader will often humbly admit that he or she hasn’t the intelligence to read or understand literature. (This is a sad sentiment, probably left over from high school English classes, taught by teachers that don’t understand the basics of storytelling.) And if “literature” connotes quality, a story doesn’t fall into this genre isn’t a quality story.

I find this conclusion to be reprehensible. The fact is that in every genre—even in the “genre” of literature—there are bad, good, and great authors. A bad author is an author who can’t write clear and lucid sentences, who can’t tell a coherent and meaningful story. We can find these kind of authors in every field, but most of them nowadays seems to reside in the “literature” genre. For whatever reason, the more obscure the writing is, it is deemed all the more intellectual. But this notion shouldn’t compel us to say that all contemporary literature is bad. Sophists, i.e., false intellectuals, have been around since the time of Socrates. We live in an age where false intellectuals can be found in every field of endeavor. The best thing to do is to ignore them, because the Common Reader is ignoring them as well. If they want to read and think about bad stories, let them waste their time.

A good writer is a writer who can write clear and lucid prose and can tell a coherent story. They story may lack emotional, spiritual, or intellectual depth. That doesn’t mean the story is bad. If it means anything, it means that the story is pure entertainment. That isn’t bad. Its fulfilling a purpose—namely, to help people escape from reality for a few hours and, as C.S. Lewis has noted, to bring mirth to people’s lives. If that’s not a good thing, I don’t know what is.

A great writer—or a great book—has several qualities. The writing is not only clear and lucid; it also elegant and graceful. It has emotion, spiritual, and intellectual depth. But all of these are, really, intangibles. What makes writing elegant and graceful? What is the requirement for emotion, spiritual, and intellectual depth? The question that has passed on this board—“What makes a book great?”—is, in a sense, an unanswerable question. On the objective level, a book is great if a number of people over a number of years find in a book emotional, spiritual, and intellectual depth. On the subjective level, a “great” book may do absolutely nothing for us; we may find it bland and unreadable. That doesn’t mean it’s not a great book; it’s just not a great book for us. This distinction is often overlooked, but it shouldn’t be. Reading is a highly subjective endeavor, and, if I’m a careful and thoughtful reader, who has the right to tell me what I should or should not like?

One of my points in all of this is that I disdain the modern-day sophists who dismiss a writer like Stephen King as a hack when, if the truth be told, they have probably never read a word he’s written. I also disdain “genre readers” (some of whom are members of Hatrack) who dismiss “literature” as pretentious drivel when, if the truth be told, they haven’t read a word those authors have written.

If we’re going to be honest readers, we have to forget that there are genres. The only legitimate category is fiction, and within this vast realm of fiction we can find quality authors who tell deep and meaningful stories who happen to write about vampires, or space ships, or crime, or family and social matters. We can also find hacks who imitate the great authors. And we can find good and solid entertainment that brings mirth, escape, and excitement to our otherwise ordinary lives.

I read fantasy and scifi all the time. This is a choice I make for myself. It is not that I feel no other form of fiction is any good, it is that I live in a real world with real problems. When I open a book I want more than just a story, I want something that will make me think, or see situations from a different perspective, and at the same time I want to be entertained.

I have read some standard fiction which did not give me the same enjoyment as fantasy/scifi does. So if I go to a book store and head strait for the fantasy/scifi section that is my choice. It makes it easier for me to find books that are my preferred type of reading. To me this far outweighs the negative aspects. I would hate to search 20 shelves of books to see what I might like to read when I can have four or five to go through.

While I do not disagree that classifying books can have bad points, it does have quite a few positive aspects for those of us that are looking for that style of writing. I have read hundreds of fantasy and scifi books over the years and I know that there are good and bad books out there. But that does not discourage me from going back.

I have watched many movie critics that would rip a good scifi movie to shreds while follow with a raving review of a drama movie which looks like it would only serve as a good sleeping aid. Different people have different views of what is "good" and what is enjoyable. If I only listened to the people who love drama I would probably give up movies all together.

I remember reading a note Lary Nivnen wrote in his one fantasy book. He specified that he had a problem writing fantasy because he had a hard time with the concept of magic. This makes lots of sense if you realize that people read what is most acceptable to them as an individual. For those of us that find the real world dull and boring we might turn to fantasy/scifi/horror to get a look at something other than normal. Most respected fiction tends to stick to reality regardless of its quality as a story I would still find it dull and boring. Give me the magic, and the space travel, the new worlds full of the unknown and different, that is what makes me happy.

So a "Genre" has a few negatives, it also has for me many positives.

I agree, but at the same time I have to say that it is a little naive to expect this to happen, for the very reasons that Lord Darkstorm pointed out.

A few people like books of all genres. More people like books of several different genres. But an awful lot of people are very limited in the scope of what they read. Most hard core scifi/fantasy readers I know won't touch "literature" or whatever you want to call it. (I'm just talking fiction categories, most scifi and particularly fantasy readers I know also like to read some nonfiction topics.) Heck, some of them won't cross from sci/fi over to fantasy!

The truth is that while a great writer is a great writer no matter what genre, if he (or she) is a sicence fiction writer my mother will never know about him. If I give her a book written by a great scifi author and force her to read it she still won't like it, even if she might see some strength in his writing style. Conversely, I can't stand Charles Dickens though many people regard him as a great writer.

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So if I go to a book store and head strait for the fantasy/scifi section that is my choice. It makes it easier for me to find books that are my preferred type of reading.

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If we’re going to be honest readers, we have to forget that there are genres. The only legitimate category is fiction, and within this vast realm of fiction we can find quality authors who tell deep and meaningful stories who happen to write about vampires, or space ships, or crime, or family and social matters. We can also find hacks who imitate the great authors. And we can find good and solid entertainment that brings mirth, escape, and excitement to our otherwise ordinary lives.

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Since we (as honest readers) have fogotten about genres, we must now wade through a lot of books we don't like in the search for those we do. If we enjoy books that involve a detective solving a crime, we have to read a lot of back covers that say things like "When he was banished by the corrupt Elven king, Grisselwort had no idea that he was starting a journey that would lead him to the Spatula of Ultimate Power..." or "When the handsome, mysterious man with an intriguing foreign accent and ice-blue eyes that seemed to pierce to the very heart of Heather's soul..." or "CIA analyst Mack Errol is the only one who believes the North Koreans are planning an attack on Pearl Harbor..." or "The old Gibson mansion had been abandoned for more than forty years before the Dusenberys bought it from the strangely pale real estate agent..." before finally getting to "Trailing another philandering spouse was all in a day's work for Dick Diamond, until the spouse ended up in the bay with two bullets in her head..."

First of all, there are what are actually called "marketing categories" and those are the groupings of kinds of books for publishing catalogs and for placement in bookstores and libraries (if the bookstore or library so chooses). Science fiction, mysteries, historicals, romances, westerns, and mainstream are all marketing categories.

Second, there is the division between popular fiction and literary or academic fiction (as if literary or academic fiction can't be popular, too, and vice versa).

Finally, there is genre, which has come to refer to either of the above groupings, but originally referred to types of writing--as in prose vs poetry, or short story vs novel, fiction vs nonfiction, or personal essay vs book review.

Any of these groupings can become positions (comfort zones, perhaps?) from which writers and readers have been known to sneer at those in some other group.

And yet, the distinctions all have worth and can be useful. I don't think Balthasar was suggesting that we get rid of the distinctions entirely. I really think he was urging people to consider leaving their own comfort zones and trying to learn from what is good about the writing in some other group.

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I really think he was urging people to consider leaving their own comfort zones and trying to learn from what is good about the writing in some other group.

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I did get this concept, but some of us (I am) are very stuborn in what we like. I got a good taste of the standard fiction in high school and the liturature clases in college. Quite honestly I found fantasy and scifi what I enjoy and what I prefer.

I think that the best thing would be to group works by authors, in chronological order. But that isn't the way that most bookstores find it easy to sell a lot of books. They find that people that read a lot of SF tend to pick up other SF books, and people that read Tanks/Weapons/Uniforms/etc. of the Third Reich tend to read other books about Nazi Germany. So they sell them that way.

I tend to read works by authors that I enjoy, regardless of genre (I even read a romance novel once, though it was more the comedic variety than torrid sort). I read several of the Aeul books before she finally turned me off (see torrid) and I found that most books in that catagory imitated only the elements that I found most annoying. Almost all the new writers that I learn to enjoy have written one or two outstanding SF books, which is how I usually first hear about them (this probably means that SF is the most competative genre in which to write, but I can't help it).

So, I'm glad there's an SF genre, and I'm glad that modern advances in indexing and so forth allow me to look up other books and works by an author I like.

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Yeah, but the people that control the best seller lists don't want to compare their "literary" stuff against "hack" SF and Fantasy (I don't like Fantasy as a genre myself).

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Actually I would think some of scifi/fantasy would actually fair well against the "literary" fiction. I know I have been eagerly awaiting Salvator's next book. Anne McCaffrey does quite well also. I am sure there are a few more which would give the standard fiction writers more competition.

But since a best seller list is almost an equivalent to free advertising I doubt it would ever happen.

I am not implying that the classification of stories in to genre is inherently bad. As I said:

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On the one hand, categorizing fiction make sense. There are simply different kinds of stories. Some stories are about solving a crime. Other stories are about ghouls and goblins. And other stories have to do with space travel. Why not clump similar stories together and give them a name? Additionally, most readers like certain kinds of stories, and most authors usually write those kinds of stories they grew up liking. I doubt at 25 an author would say, “Though I’ve never read a mystery before, I think I’m going to write mystery now.” A broad category helps both author and reader find the books like to write and read. And as long as we recognize a genre is, in a sense, self-defining, then the idea of genre, if not a healthy concept, is at least innocuous.

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On the other hand, the notion of categorizing fiction is very dangerous. It boxes in both the author and the reader as well as creates unnecessary stereotypes. Stephen King, for example, is known as a horror author, though he has written several science fiction and fantasy novels. If a reader reads a particular genre (say, SF) and discovers that he or she doesn’t like it, they are unlikely to return to that genre, believing, unfortunately, that SF stories are carbon copies. A person may never again read SF because, after reading Niven, they believe all SF is like Niven.

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One of my points—directed toward the Hatrack society—is that the same thing can happen in regard to literature. We get a bad taste for “literature-as-genre” because of high school or college English classes, or because someone like Jonathan Franzen likes to think that his work isn’t “mainstream,” but, rather, “highminded.” But that doesn’t mean that all “literature-as-genre” is bad, nor does it even mean that Franzen’s novel, The Corrections, is bad. Just because we’ve tried Hemingway and found that he doesn’t do anything for us, that doesn’t mean we should dismiss William Faulkner, James Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, William Gass, or any other 20th-century literary author.

Kathleen accurately summarized my point:

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I don't think Balthasar was suggesting that we get rid of the distinctions entirely. I really think he was urging people to consider leaving their own comfort zones and trying to learn from what is good about the writing in some other group.

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I am glad there are literary snobs, because if there weren't any, I'd have to find someone else to sneer at.

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This does not mean that we won’t have likes and dislikes. There comes a time when we have to choose how we’re going to spend our reading time. If I’m handed a mystery and a piece of literature, chances are I’ll take the piece of literature. That not because I think mystery is a genre for hacks; it means that from my previous reading I found that I prefer literature over mystery. How many academics and literary critics will spend the time reading OSC or Stephen King as carefully as they do other writers? And how many people here on Hatract would give a piece of literature—say, Faulkner’s Light in August—serious attention?

I've read books from several different genres. I find that my problem is that I get into moods. I get into a mood for scifi that eliminates everything else including fantasy sometimes. But after a few months I get in the mood for a mystery or even (shameful secret) romance.

But your point is well taken. As writers in particular we should be familiar with what makes a good story cross genre. Especially since science fiction and fantasy often contains elements of other types of fiction. For example, a good mystery is a good mystery whether set in modern times or future times. Having seen very few good scifi mysteries, if I want to write one I will actually need to go to the mystery genre to learn. (And this is something I intend to do one day.)

Scifi and fantasy are somewhat bad at romance at the moment too. If you want to learn how to forge a bond between two people in your story it would be good to go look at some of the romance out there. Not the Harlequin stuff either, the good quality stuff. Believe it or not it exists.

Terry Brooks' last assignment to us when we left the retreat was to read a book from a genre we would never read. He said as writers we need to always expand our world and be looking for ideas. If you only read hard Science Fiction then your writing will be like all other writer's of hard Science Fiction. He said the best places he gets ideas for his books is in reading novels from genres outside of Fantasy fiction.

I believe that, as writers we always need to be willing to be stretched.

Also, I see novels by Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction writers on the Best Seller list all the time. These are the writers that are commercially successful. It doesn't mean it is a great book or that they are great writers. Best Sellers are just that...they sell.

I think the same type of folks that sneer at King to day will call him a great master of literature 20 or so years after he's dead.

I don't think it's anything to get worked up about. Steven King seems to be doing alright for himself, save for the van-hitting incident. (I wonder if anyone ever hit shakespeare with an ox-cart...)

I guess I'll just be happy to get my novels finished, published and read. The critics, elitists or whatever you want call them are welcome to call me a hack who doesn't write "true literature." Because if they're paying enough attention to insult me, I'll be doing alright.

If you have a person 10,000 years in the future, and he is solving a crime it is still a mystery. Does the fact it is not happening today in our current reality change what it is? Does the scifi lable wipe out the mystery lable? I do remember in the beginning of OSC's "Characters and Viewpoints" he points out the major story types. By his definitions the time and reality did not seem to be as important as what the writer is doing with the story.

It doesn't have squat to do with the quality of your story or the themes treated, but only with certain superficial aspects that even a marketing department can find in the text. Spaceships=SciFi, heaving bosoms(rather than breasts)=Romance, swords&magic=Fantasy, and so on and so forth.

"Literary" fiction is marketed to English departments and so forth, and is not supposed to be profitable, just as SF is marketed to techno-geeks and is not supposed to portray real relationships

If I choose to aim my story--no matter what the actual content of the text--solely at English departments, with notes describing the subtextual themes and so forth, and only accept publication in "literary" journals, then no matter how many spaceships I put in there it will be "literature". In fact, if you really want to look around the "literary" genre, there are plenty of stories where the spaceships/vampires/magic/elves/etc. are all symbolic, not because anything in the text necessarily makes that clear but because the publisher includes author's notes or a statement or something like that to make it clear that everything in the story is a symbol.

And there are plenty of SF stories full of deep questioning into the nature of the soul, and plenty of Romance that looks at the effect technology has on our lives, and plenty of Fantasy that really seems almost allegorical.

If there is a good reason for me to try the plain fiction then I would like to know. Other than it lacks what I prefer to read (the fantasy/scifi aspect) I doubt I will agree.

This is an unfortunate state for literature-as-genre. And I think because of it true and honest authors are not going to be part of this community. That’s sad. (If you want to read more about this, see John Gardner’s, On Moral Fiction.)

Now, let’s get to the question at hand:

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So for those of you who enjoy "literary" fiction, just what does it have as far as story writing that is not to some degree put into fantasy/scifi?

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This is a very difficult question to answer. On the one hand, you have clear-cut SF stories, such as Brave New World and 1984, that are going to be found in the literature-as-genre section. As far as I can tell, the placement of these books into the literature-as-genre category has to do with the fact that their authors are British, and somehow the British didn’t develop the snobbery towards literature as quickly as we did here in the states.

Another example—and this one isn’t SF—is Graham Greene. A lot of his stories are about crime, international intrigue, etc. But again, he’s British, and so you don’t find him next to Tom Clancy, but, rather, in the literature-as-genre section.

Now let’s take the case of an American author. Stephen King is a good one. He is known as a horror author, and rightly so: His few three books deal with a telepathic girl that destroys her school, vampires in a New England town, and a haunted hotel. But he has also written SF (The Stand, The Dead Zone, Firestarter, The Tommyknockers) and fantasy (Eyes of the Dragon, The Dark Tower series) as well as literature-as-genre (Shawshank Redemption, The Body/Stand By Me), but you’ll find every one of his works under horror. Once an author gets place somewhere, that’s where you’re going to find all of his or her works. This is why you have to look under literature-as-genre to find A Clockwork Orange, which is clearly a SF story.

Thus, any answer to this question must admit to a certain amount of ambiguity in circumscribing genres.

(Maybe one of the problems with contemporary literature-as-genre is that because they reject genre as the works of hacks, they aren’t really left much to work with, so they are, in essence, creating their own genre.)

At any rate, based on this discussion, I’m going to rephrase the question: Once you separate those works which, if they were first-time novels published today, would fall under a genre other than literature-as-genre, what is there about literature-as-genre stories that one finds enjoyable?

That’s something I’ve thought about, and I don’t know if I can give a good answer. The best answer I can give is this: Literature-as-genre stories are more concerned with the character than the event. In other words, it’s what happens to the character and how the character is affected throughout the story rather than the character finding himself in an exterior situation that he must resolve. I think OSC would call one a character-driven story and the other an event-driven story.

But this isn’t a hard and fast rule. The best event-driven stories are also character-driven stories. The Lord of the Rings or Ender’s Game are two examples. In fact, what separates The Lord of the Rings from most other heroic fantasy is that the characters are greatly changed by the events.

This difference with literature is that the Event is either totally absent or is put into the background. The difference between a John Grisham lawyer story and Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is that Grisham would have made Atticus the main character and the thrust of the story would have been the trial. But for Harper Lee, the trial plays a small role in the story. The main character is a little girl, and the story's about how she is dramatically changed by events in which she is indirectly involved. Grisham would have ended the story perhaps with the funereal of Tom Robinson and with some kind of overt reference to the evils of prejudice. Lee, however, ends the story with Scout Finch standing on the porch of Boo Bradley seeing her world from a totally different point of view. It’s a subtle and powerful ending because that scene itself symbolizes what the whole novel is about.

This leads to another aspect of literature-as-genre: Theme. I want to avoid getting into a discussion about what a theme is, and even if a story should have a theme. I think it should, and I agree with Damon Knight, Stephen King, and John Gardner (very different authors) on the fact that the theme of a work must evolve out of the work itself. A piece of fiction is not an illustration of a theme, but, rather, the theme is the recognition that the events in a story have a collective meaning.

Genre fiction, for whatever reason, is not very thematic. Perhaps genre writers shy away from the notion of theme. Perhaps genre writers lack the philosophical acumen to understand the meaning of their story. Perhaps genre writers don’t give a shit about theme. I don’t know—each genre writer is different.

What I do know is that literature-as-genre authors care about theme. They understand that fiction is a way to understand the world and to communicate the verities of life (to paraphrase Faulkner). They understand that fiction has a certain way of thinking about the world, and they are not afraid to allow their fiction to think. But this isn’t peculiar to literature-as-genre authors; any quality story is going to have this element to it. Unfortunately, this aspect of literature-as-genre has been taken to an extreme by the literary sophists of today.

There’s my take on it, for what it’s worth. Literature-as-genre is a character-driven genre and a heavily thematic genre. I don’t know how true this is, but that’s they way I am seeing it right now. Who knows, I may change my mind sooner or later.

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It has been suggested to cross to other shelves for my reading. I was hoping someone would have a reason that would convince me.

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If you aspire to be a writer, then you’re doing yourself a disservice by not reading outside your genre. You’re not going to have the resources to write good stories in any genre because all you know is that genre. You need that critical interaction.

If you’re not a writer, then the best reason I can think for reading outside your genre is to broaden your mind and your understanding of the world.

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As a writer, you can't let the marketing department push you around. And as a reader you have no excuse for doing so. Tell 'em to stick their little catagories up their collective inputs and claim the whole store for your own. Fight the power, rage against the machine, cross the aisle.

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I actually do not see the categories as a limitation to me. I rarely even pay attention to the hype of new books either. Since I usually have 4 or more books I want to read at any point in time I get books more at random than by any form of marketing. Friends who suggest books, new books by authors I have enjoyed for years. The impulsive stops at used book stores where I grab a handful of books mainly because they are dirt cheap keeps me reading books I would never planned to get. I never seem to run out.

OSC wrote Saints which I would not classify as either Scifi or fantasy. I still enjoyed the book and the characters. But I enjoy most of OSC's work. I am not stuck on a requirement of needing magic or space to keep my interest. I like off the wall, I like to see new perspectives and different viewpoints about more than just people. People are chaotic creatures in which I can believe them capable of almost any action.

Give me the humans dealing with aliens that don't think like us, or feel like us (or not feel at all). Show me those people dealing with problems that do not have a standard answer, requiring luck, skill, and thought to resolve or survive. In 18 or so years I have read over 500 scifi and fantasy books (never really kept count but I have more that that number on my bookshelves and I have read almost all of them), as well as a few standard fiction. Besides the book store grouping those books into one nice convenient section for me, the stories have been different, the plots have varied greatly. To sum it up I have read from simple to complex and enjoyed most of them.

Most of my close friends which I respect their opinion are probably worse than I am about their reading preferences. So to walk into a book store and roam the vast section of "fiction" and randomly select a book…I doubt I would enjoy it. If I did the same thing in the scifi/fantasy section (which I do too frequently) then I have a good chance I will enjoy it. Even some of the more poorly written books have been worth it for their sometimes unique perspectives.

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But common drama just is not enough for my free time. Will it hurt me as a writer? I'll let you know in sometime in the future.

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This comment has been bugging me since I read it. It's almost like saying, "Yeah, doctors tell me that being overweight can have serious effects on my health, but I'm just too damn stubborn to listen to them. Will it hurt my health? I'll let you know in the future."

I am NOT saying that I (or anyone else on this board, save perhaps Kathleen) are in the position to speak to aspiring writers from a place of authority. Yet, writers who have found the land of milk and honey, writers who are reaping the fruits of their labor -- these writers exhort that one MUST read outside one's genre if one wishes to become a good writer. These writers are telling us from on high that our writing will be negatively affected if we don't read outside our genre.

Why wouldn't you listen to them?

Are you specifially interested in trying literary fiction or a different genre, such as mystery, romance, or horror?

Suspense/Thriller: Thomas Harris, Silence of the Lambs
Mystery: Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express
Mystery: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (short stories)
Historical fiction: Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Ancient Greek: Homer, Iliad or Odyssey
Ancient Roman: Virgil, Aeneid
Medieval: Anon, Beowulf or Dante, The Divine Comedy or Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
19th-century British: Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
Early-20th-century British: W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
Mid-20th-century British: Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter or Brighton Rock
19th-century American: Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Early-20th-century American: William Faulkner, Light in August
Mid-20th-century American: Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird or Flannery O'Connor, Collected Short Stories
Contemporary-20th-century American: John Irving, Cider House Rules

The four "novels" Greene wrote are: The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair, and Brighton Rock.

You don't have to agree with Greene's assessment of what constitutes serious ficton. I don't. However, Greene's four "novels" would be classified under literature-as-genre as opposed to thriller.

So my only point is this one: I'm sure Our Man in Havana is as good as Jules says, but The Heart of the Matter is an excellent choice if you want to read literature-as-genre.

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Genre fiction, for whatever reason, is not very thematic. Perhaps genre writers shy away from the notion of theme. Perhaps genre writers lack the philosophical acumen to understand the meaning of their story. Perhaps genre writers don’t give a shit about theme. I don’t know—each genre writer is different.

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I have to state my disagreement with the idea that, in general, genre writers don't care about theme. I read a lot of science fiction, a lot of fantasy, some horror, and quite a few mysteries. And I have to say that I haven't run across many novels in any of these genres that don't in some way try to make sense of the world we live in and the lives we lead - even if they seem to be talking about creatures far different from us, living in places and circumstances far different from ours, they are still in the main talking about us, here, now (or whenever and wherever each author was writing).

Maybe I have just happened to pick up "quality" genre novels by "quality" genre writers. But I don't think so. I haven't agreed with the visions, the themes, of some of these books and writers, but I have seen them there. And I think that is part of the problem; sometimes we tend to see themes - in any kind of fiction - only when we agree with or identify with those themes.

I have only read a little mystery, but I have found them to be far less thematic. As for romance, if they have themes then I think the author's message is all wrong. (Love at first sight, easy romance, beauty over brains...)

The division of literature into various subgenres is a viscious cycle that has a fantastic benefit and a horrible cost. The benefit, of course, is that the existence of genres greatly increases the sales of books. Think about how many books you are presented with when you walk into a Barnes and Noble. Suppose those books were arbitrarily arranged, say, by authors last name. If you have one author that you really like, this is convenient, but odds are good that the books surrounding that author will not have much in common with each other. By arranging books by genre, when I go to the bookstore and am looking for a book by Card, I will find the books surrounding his work to be worth investigating.

The downside, of course, is that genres encourage repetition and imitation and make it difficult for real innovation to find a market. There is a great degree of creativity and flexibility within a genre--obviously "Enders Game" is a vastly different work from, say, "Dune" or "Ringworld"--but most SF books must share a fairly narrow category of settings--another planet, another time, or a here and now threatened by advanced technology (or, in the case of Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy, all of the above). Break the formula, and you will have a difficult time finding readers.

One thing that I've always admired about Card is that he is one of the few writers that doesn't seem content to write the same book again and again. Obviously, he does pay the bills with the Ender's series and the Alvin Maker series, but he's also willing to put out non genre books like Lost Boys and the book of Christmas stories he published last year.

On a completely different angle for the literary versus genre argument, I would say that the two major diffences dividing the world are that literary works place a primary goal on enlightening the world, while genre works are mainly interested in being entertaining. Both fail at their goals frequently, I admit.

"Literary" writers often make the mistake that for a work to have merit, it must be difficult, and start believing that obscurity and inpenatrability are, in and of themselves, the highest mark that a work has merit. They judge a book like "Finnegan's Wake" to be a great book because it is so difficult no one can read past the first page. They regard literature as a mystic cult whose secrets can only be revealed by initiated priests.

On the other hand, genre writers sometimes fall into a similar trap. They've read great works filled with new terms and words and strange names. And they come to think that the mark of great science fiction or fantasy is that it is filled with strange words and names. You'll pick up a book and find sentences like, "Griznak piloted the hopdan into G'nar D'nath to see a Zorkon about a dovnid." So you wind up with a similar preisthood. You can go to a literary conference and find people talking about the deconstructed paradigms of the manifest subconcsious, or you can go to a science fiction convention and find people speaking Klingon. Both groups take delight in excluding those who don't understand their secret language.

And, of course, both of these are the extremes of each group. I don't want to say that all writing in each category is crap. There's fantasitic work in each category.

Do I have a point? I don't know. I warned you at the start this was going to be disjointed ramblings.

I really shouldn't write before I have caffiene...

Definitely. SF, particularly, is heavily thematic. Possibly more so in terms of short stories than novels, but its still true of novels.

Many SF stories are actually intended as dramatic illustrations of some point that the author wants to put across. This might be considered a little too direct by some people. I have heard it said that theme shouldn't be put into a story, but should arise naturally out of it during the writing process. I don't know whether this is good advice or not...

I can understand that having one can be good, but not having a theme does not put the book in the catagory of worthless. If we look at why people read that might be of interest to this point. People read to learn, for entertainment, or possibly to see things from a different point of view. I have computer books to learn from, but rarely do they fall into anything close to entertainment. My sci-fi and fantasy fill the entertainment role, and if the story is good I could care less about a theme.

How many movies are produced that have absolutly no theme or meaning? Quite a few. People want to be entertained. If it requires some moral or intelectual reason to produce a show, there would not be a single sitcom. I can't stand most of the crap on tv since it fails to require anything other than watching. Most books do spark thought, and encourage the reader to think.

With or without a theme, a good story will do the job it was intended.

Lord D, almost all stories have a theme. It may not be overt, like the dreaded thesis statement of a term paper (did anyone else hate that thing? Anyway…), but every story choice the writer makes creates a certain world view within that story. In that world view, certain themes are present. Love stinks. Good triumphs over evil. Good kids doing bad things can be redeemed. Nancy Kress does a good treatment of this in Beginnings, Middles, and Ends, although she calls the theme a throughline.

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So let me take your sentence and twist it around to the point where it becomes, if not true, then closer to the truth. You said "A book without an inner lesson isn't worth writing except for the reader's pleasure." What I say is, "A book that gives a reader pleasure does so because the reader cares deeply about issues that the characters face in the tale."

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And a link to the rest

Out of curiosity, looking at whatever you're working now, is there a theme to it, and if so, did you plan it or did it just happen?

I tend to think Jules is right. SF, by nature, is strongly thematic. In what other genre can you take life wholly as it isn't and ask "What if?"

Intentional is a hard word to define when you talk about the deepest and most meaningful elements of a story. Did the author deliberately set the theme and choose the milieu and characters on that basis, or did the writer find certain aspects of his characters more interesting and concentrate on them, thus creating a recognizable theme?

If the writer is any good, we shouldn't be able to tell. The meaning of the story should speak to us as clearly as if the writer knew us personally and wrote the story with a lesson in mind for us, and it should be as naturally implicit in the story, developing out of the characters and the situations they encounter, as if he were totally unconscious of what he was preaching.

I would guess that there are few authors who would accept one interpretation of their works as well as the utterly opposed interpretation. Most would accept more than one, but they remain consciously aware of which ones they think are in their works and which ones they would argue are not in their works.

On the other hand, I doubt that most good authors plot out the exact wording of the commentary they want you to apphend as an analysis of the meaning of their works.

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We're just beating on you because you didn't want to read outside of the SF/Fantasy shop.

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That’s ok, most of you should know by now I enjoy a good disagreement, or would that be an opposing discussion?

Three very different authors -- Damon Knight, John Gardner, and Stephen King -- have all spoken of theme. They all agree (remember, Gardner was an English professor and wrote literary novels, including meta-fiction) that theme is highly overrated. Gardner says that one reason is that English professors are too dim-witted to talk about the merits of a finely crafted story, so they have to talk about theme. These three gentlemen all agree that a theme emerges from the story.

John Steinbeck is the only writer I know of who couldn't write a story until he could state his theme. I've talked to several knowledgeable people about this, and they all concur that this is what makes Steinbeck a "hack" in the literature-as-genre field. It's so obvious that he's trying to deliver a message that he has to manipulate his characters to get the message across.

I do believe that a story with a theme is better than a story without a theme because the essence of storytelling is to explore and communicate the verities of life and existence in a dramatic way, and a themeless story doesn't fulfill this primary function. I stand by my original statement that most genre authors don't give a flip about theme; or if they do the themes in their stories are either undeveloped or, if they are developed, they are overt as well as trite and banal.

One of the problems I have with OSC's comments on theme is that he seems to think a theme is the MESSAGE of a story, or that a story is an ILLUSTRATION of a theme. That's fine if he thinks that, so long as he'll accept my view that he is not only wrong on what theme is, but that he is one of the most thematic authors I've read -- an author who writes stories with deep meaning.

Is SF/F thematic by nature? I don't think it is. It's more prone to writing to a thesis, delivering a message, or being an illustration of a theme than other genres. Once the SF/F author starts thinking, "This alien is a symbol for...," then that author is on the precipice of failure. More than that, because SF/F is such an Event driven genre, it's quite easy for the theme, the deep-meaning of a story, to get forgotten in lieu of the Event.

The Event itself might have a meaning; each story is different. But what I've found is that the more action in a story, the less intelligent the story is. There is a remedy, however, and that's having an equal amount of contemplation within an Event-driven story. For every siege on the castle, you should have the characters sitting around the campfire talking about their lives, their hopes, and their dreams. This is one reason why The Lord of the Rings is such an incredible fantasy. There's enough contemplative time for us to get to know the characters and for the characters to discern the meaning of the Event; in the process, we both understand and experience the deep-meaning -- the theme -- of Tolkien's work.