Lower Decks

I think one of the things that defines not only my genre experience but my life in general is a refusal to be skewered by any one interest. It’s a blessing and a curse, I’ll tell you. I’m not claiming to be a renaissance man, a jack of all trades sort of person, but as far as what amuses me, I may have a firm circle of long-term interests but I’m not dominated by any of them. For the past two years, I wrote a column exclusively devoted to comic books, and I’ve been hanging around this Lower Decks community for a decade, which stemmed from my Star Trek experience, and anyone sorry enough to have been reading my blog since 2002 will know the warning about professional wrestling is accurate. These are broad strokes, but you get the point. It’s common to everyone, I guess, but let me now talk about something a little more narrow: genre fiction.

The thing is, I don’t touch the stuff myself. I used to think I could, but it’s become such a crass mass audience whore there’s no way any of it can be any good. I can tell you why it happened: Star Wars. No, not the films, but the books, the phenomenon that began in earnest last decade, the kind that are written simply to appease readers interested in falling back into an experience from their memories. They don’t care about story. They just want the trappings. Yeah, Star Wars may have started it, but Harry Potter’s what made it popular. Harry Potter is what convinced everyone that it could revitalize reading. What Harry really did was convince writers they could have any series published and accepted by the public. What we got was a summer like 2008. Young readers – hey, genre always goes there first – were given Breaking Dawn, the fourth book in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, and Brisingr, the third in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance series. Twilight the first book is going to be a film this Christmas, while Eragon was one just a few years ago. Both series owe their appeal to the need for bookstores to replicate the Harry Potter phenomenon, which became the great literary hope of the new millennium by drawing in box office expectations for each of the last four books in its own seven book series. And these are all teenage-level books. You can find an endless series of series directed at even younger readers elsewhere, from Warriors to City of Ember, the latter of which is of course coming to theaters near you soon.

Harry didn’t invent the genre series. Tolkien and Lewis didn’t, either, but they’re our modern inspiration, the reason the Wheel of Time must revolve one more time under new management because its author died before getting around to completing an interminable series, Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance litter fantasy shelves, Pratchett refuses to leave Discworld, and why readers are increasingly stuck in the same ruts they fashioned years ago. You can blame Douglas Adams, too. Anytime someone has done something truly original, someone else latches on to try and steal as much of the same thunder as possible. They’ll have their own little passionate devotees (Robert Jordan fans are already fashioning hypothetical spears), but the truth is, they have a hard argument to make. Writers can become just as lazy as readers, as with any genre (mystery/thriller, romance fans, I’m looking at you), but it becomes seedier with sci-fi or fantasy enthusiasts, because they’ve managed to wall themselves in so tightly, they forget how to look around and see what else may be available. They’re the type who are truly interested in reading, but they’ve forgotten the reason why.

When all you want is more of what you’re familiar with, have grown comfortable reading (again, this shouldn’t be interpreted merely as a screed against this particular experience), I think it has a real chance of hurting you, without your even realizing it. I work at a bookstore. I have as much a problem with people who don’t know what they want as much as I do with people who think they know so much about their interests that it paralyzes them to try and find something new, as if their exhausted regular options have exhausted them as well. You ask them what they’ve been reading, and it all fits in a pattern. I’m not arguing about personal taste or following popular trends or what have you, but the simple ability to discover. That’s what reading is supposed to be about, right?

Back at the turn of the millennium, I was just starting out in college. It was a difficult time for me, in many ways a transition not only from living at home but for my ongoing interests as well. I quit reading comics for four years, Star Trek transformed from something I seemed to watch all the time to something I thought more about, and hey, there was Harry Potter, two books in, available at the local CVS. At this point, the Chronicles of Narnia were well off in my past, buried on a crowded bookshelf, hidden by a second row. I hadn’t read Tolkien yet, and even Adams was already a Hitchhiker’s experience concluded. USA Today had been buzzing about Harry since my last year in high school, but that was about it. No giant super global hype. Just the stories. So I read them. By the time I transferred for sophomore year, my parents gave me the third book as a birthday present, and it instantly became my favorite of the series, the one that truly brought home an orphan’s yearning for family as his godfather’s identity and story is begun.

It wasn’t until the fifth book that I attended a release party. Someone went as Moaning Myrtle, toilet seat and all. The sixth was the first one I read feverishly. The seventh I attended the rival bookstore’s party. I read that one probably within forty-eight hours, or as close as my work schedule would allow. I don’t read like that, and I didn’t read like that because everyone else was, famously, all those little kids in those articles published along with every release. I’ve written reviews for this site since the fifth book, every page and film experience. Still, this devotion has never meant that I sought out other wizarding or fantasy adventures, not because I thought they couldn’t compete, because I didn’t see the need. For me, Harry’s not about what he and his friends can do, but what they’ve done. For me, it’s always about the story.

Harry has become another element in my personal tapestry, but he no more dominates my interest than comics or Star Trek. For some, though, he’s just a pawn. It’s not just the bookstores but a feverish need for Breaking Dawn or Brisingr to fill a void that doesn’t exist, just another genre book to appease another presumably huge fan base. Dawn seems to be sticking, Brisingr not. I could tell you the reasons these outcomes are predictable, but they should already explain themselves. At least Meyer seemed to be telling a story even the uninitiated could follow, rather than simply a Paolini backstory. Truthfully, though, will either be around as treasured memories in fifty years?

I didn’t go looking for Harry Potter, and maybe that’s the key to something. I didn’t know I wanted to read something like J.K. Rowling’s variation on a struggle over evil until it seemed like I couldn’t avoid it. Of course, that seems to be the point of genre publishing, crowding the familiar to feed a built-in audience, but it’s the expectation that’s the problem. Harry was unexpected. The rest of the stuff on the shelf? It comes as an instant expectation, like the later Potters became, not for readers, but for “fans.” I’m just not interested in that. I’ll take my interests as I find them. The needle in the haystack is the object being looked for, not the hay, after all.

I think that’s why it’s rarer to find someone talking about books on the Internet, either as a matter of genre interest or otherwise, the reason why everyone thinks literature is a dying art. It’s not as easy as it looks, finding something like the Harry Potter series. Books aren’t like TV, film, or even music. They take time to appreciate, and the way people discover them makes them more personal, no matter their interest. They’re harder to sample, easier to reject. When something’s popular, you’ll know, but you won’t necessarily be able to relate.

I think I’ll be able to write about a number of things when it comes to books in later columns, but they’ll be more obscure. There are dozens of genre experiences I know I don’t share (never read a Frank Herbert Dune, or a Phillip K. Dick, just to name some obvious ones) with just the regular members of this community. But hey, that’s no reason to avoid the subject altogether, right? I may be wary of it, but it’s still worth exploring.

Okay, and yeah, Star Wars did not technically start it, but as far as my opinion goes, it might as well have. I think the final word for the column has to address the basic reason why there’s such a divide to be found here. For some people, genre books are about filling in the cracks of a life centered around a single devotion. Maybe the books themselves don’t matter after all. That’s not the way I read. I’m one of the nuts who’ve compiled a huge backlog of books that strike my fancy even when I won’t read them for several years at best. When I find them, I want to take hold. Because I’m always looking, and will eventually find the time for everything that finds me.

What I’ve tried to do with this particular column, rather than simply ridicule a certain predilection, as I know it may see at times, is discuss an issue that is rarely brought up but deserves to be studied. Literature is a funny thing. Everyone seems to agree that it’s important, and it’s often held to such lofty standards that the assumption is that it can’t be matched by other mediums for sheer meaningful contributions to thought and understanding. And in many ways, and not the least for the reason that I count myself as a participant in the arena, it’s a good argument. But on the other hand, you can’t take it so seriously to overlook the fact that for the majority of both writers and readers, what it ultimately means is something that’s maybe expected and as a result not to be held to those standards after all, which are too pretentious for their own good. That’s what books ultimately are, a struggle between these two extremes, and for genre books in particular, it must be understood that I don’t mean those that aim for particular purposes over those which are simply filling the form, the ones which identify what the form means versus those that follow in those footsteps. When I do read genre books, I tend toward the former, but when I think of genre books, I tend toward the latter. To me, the former might as well not even by genre books.

But hey, that’s just not how everyone thinks. I can only point out my own scars.