Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions by Hal Duncan

bullshit of bloodlines, many are proud of the traits inherited with the tartan—so proud of their clan name they’ve forgotten that family can be openly defined, that the in-laws with different names are still family if we accept them as such. For certain feuding factions indeed that very notion is anathema. The clan name is everything, and a pox on any cur who slights it. Any pure-bred work of Science Fiction (or as they will call it, science fiction ) is entirely unrelated, they’ll insist, to that damnable Fantasy (or as they will call it, fantasy ). There’s Campbells and MacDonalds, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Works in one cannot fit the other’s template, because the templates are mutually exclusive.
    But all we really have, an upstart contrarian might say, is a tartan of a ma rketing category with an empty definition. The presentation of this stuff as a Genre of Science Fiction is just bagpipes-and-haggis branding. In truth, it’s an open idiom, a genre of works which may be in various Genres , an extended family of fictions better described as Hard SF , Space Opera , Cyberpunk , Technothriller , and so on. Fantasy is in the same position, a tartan label slapped on a box containing the closely defined forms of Epic Fantasy , Swords & Sorcery , Urban Fantasy , Paranormal Romance , etc.
    These are not subgenres, but Genres in their own right, and the tartan labels that adorn these works are simply branding, their purpose to position a book in front of this audience or that. And you know, our upstart contrarian might continue, that latter brand was only schismed off from Science Fiction in the 1970s, when Ballantine established their Adult Fantasy line to target the growing market for Tolkien, his direct ancestors and descendants. Look at all the works branded as either which ignore the strictures of Genre altogether. Forget the clan names and tartan; forget the templates which often fit loosely at best; the only sensible way to talk about science fiction or fantasy is as aesthetic idioms. If genre is a matter of familial relationships, what we have here is not two distinct clans with a feud going back longer than living memory. Science fiction is not Clan Campbell, fantasy is not Clan MacDonald, and the ghetto of Genre is not the blood-stained battleground of Glen Coe. The feud begins in 1971; before then science fiction and fantasy were happily married and raising Bradburys together.
    And hell, someone else will say, when you look at them as idioms, science fiction is r eally just a branch on the family tree of fantasy.
    This is when the Great Debate inevitably kicks off.
     

A Shit Sandwich and a Diet Coke, Thanks
     
I write, not for children, but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.
    George MacDonald
     
    Across the city of New Sodom, there are a lot of cafés and bistros, each with its own menu but all serving sandwiches and soda. Downtown in the ghetto of Genre or uptown in the chi-chi neighbourhood known as Literature, there are joints where the food is bought in ready-made from the Shit Sandwich Co mpany, and behind the counter is a squirt-gun dispensing Coca-Cola, Fanta or Sprite. Dr Pepper? Irn Bru? Maybe, maybe not. But you can guarantee the most populist tastes are catered for in these joints, that the most generic product is on offer. And many are happy with that; all they want is their local greasy spoon with the jukebox they know off by heart, or the franchise with free wifi and coffee that’s the same in every outlet. The sign outside is the genre label, the promise of what you want, how you want it, every time, in the same way and in the same place—and for many that doesn’t mean a wholemeal bagel and a fruit smoothy or any such frou-frou crap; it means a Shit Sandwich and a Diet Coke, thanks.
    And yet…the SF Café has Shit Sandwiches and Diet Coke on tap like all the rest, but it also (again like all the rest) has its own menu of hamburgers and hot