Genre--a meditation or long rambling waffle

When I was young and arrogant and thought I knew better than anyone else in the whole world, I used to point out to people that fantasy and sf, far from being a small and unregarded subset of fiction, was in fact the huge and largely uncharted forest in which all the rest of fiction was one small and frankly overrated tree. The logic went like this: all fiction is by definition fantasy, since it's not true. "Mainstream" fiction (whatever that means these days) is just fantasy that hasn't got the nerve to be fantastic.

Obviously there are problems with this view. Fantasy and sf (which from now on I'll lump together as sf unless I'm being specific) make a pretence of being freewheeling and wide-ranging and taking no prisoners, but in essence they're still as bound by traditions and conventions and what they call tropes as any other kind of fiction, and speaking for my older and hopefully less arrogant self I'm mostly comfy with that. It's nice to see the conventions get pushed a bit, or even a lot, but they are useful landmarks in the forest. And I have come to accept that there are other reasons for writing a non-sf work of fiction than simple lack of nerve. If a story doesn't need to be sf, then it shouldn't have to be.

However. Reading the Temeraire books has reminded me of my youthful ambition, because while they are without question fantasy, they are written as historical novels, and I can't immediately see any difference in the historical parts (the setting, the language) between these books and the historical nauticalia (Hornblower and such: does anyone remember the Jim Bowles books by Andrew Wood?) that I used to dabble in before I found my true love. (I'm due to read some Patrick O'Brian, which will be a more reliable test.) One genre contains another, in just the way I described, and since a historical novel can't by definition contain fantasy (beyond the bare minimum necessary to make it fiction) it must be the other way around. Thus also, Firefly is sf that contains a Western and not the other way round. Asimov's Caves of Steel is sf that contains a detective story, though there the case is less clear because "detective story" as a genre is less grounded in setting than some others; on the other hand, the solution is dependent on the sf. M K Wren's "Lamb and Wolf" series is sf that contains a sprawling soapish family saga in the vein of "Dynasty." Could any of these stories be separated from their sf elements? I'd say no, not and still be the same story. I think, youthful excesses aside, there is a case to be made that sf is more than these other genres, perhaps more than a simple genre in itself.

But what about mainstream fiction? Can sf contain that? Well, I'd need to consult someone who can define what makes a story mainstream, apart from being set in the present time and on Earth and not having a plot ahem, I mean and being primarily concerned with the development of complex characters and their relationships with each other. Because if that is all there is to it, then I'd say job done and dusted. Sf has done that. Peter Beagle's "Folk of the Air" springs to mind as one example, as do many of Charles de Lint's books, and I'm sure there are examples from recent hard sf too.

As for the isolated outbreaks of sf trappings being incorporated into allegedly mainstream books, whose authors and reviewers then stoutly maintain that the books are not sf No Way No How, there's a simple test, one we've been applying over here for years. Could the stories have been written without the sfnal elements? If not, then they're sf: sorry. If they could, of course...but then, they weren't. The people who live in the shade of the Mainstream Tree have started gathering fruit from further out in the forest, because it tastes more interesting, and who are we to deny them? Now all they have to do is admit it.

Maybe you can be young and arrogant and not be entirely wrong after all.